Process Of Cultural Transformation Research Articles

Gender Violence and Work in the United States and South Africa: The Parallel Processes of Legal and Cultural Change

This article takes on the parallel processes of law reform and cultural transformation by comparing gender violence reform projects in the United States with those in South Africa. It does so by focusing on one strand of advocacy, that focusing on the economics of abuse. Since economic independence is central to women’s ability to navigate abuse, women’s ability to work in its aftermath is critical. This article compares each country’s current and potential reform projects to address the ways gender violence impacts survivors’ ability to get and keep their jobs. Despite the stark contrasts between the countries’ respective legal and economic contexts, the challenges faced by advocates are different in degree rather than in kind. This article reviews the prevalence of gender violence in each country and the extent and nature of women’s workplace participation. It places reforms addressing the impact of abuse on employment in the broader context of each country’s domestic and sexual violence reform movements and describes employment-related projects, with a focus on those in South Africa. The similarities and differences in economics, culture and law underscore several lessons about the possibility of achieving transformational change. The article identifies several theories under which South Africa’s progressive legal frameworks could afford recourse to survivors whose employment is adversely affected as a result of abuse. Nevertheless, the comparison highlights the inherent similarities of law reform projects that seek to transform historic biases and cultural norms. It underscores the importance of enforcement and implementation, of centering anti-subordination initiatives in the context of equality, and of maintaining the difficult and ongoing project of challenging bias in its many forms, in order to create both legal change and cultural transformation.

Uncoiling the Snakes of Ireland in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: From the Souls in Hell to Laocoön

Uncoiling the Snakes of Ireland in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:From the Souls in Hell to Laocoön John Paul Riquelme (bio) snakes in clover, picked and scotched, and a vaticanned viper catcher's visa for Patsy Presbys Finnegans Wake I.8, 210.26-27 According to legend, while standing on the top of the hill now called Croagh Patrick, County Mayo, with a bell and a wooden staff, St. Patrick, that vaticanned viper catcher, banished poisonous reptiles from Ireland. Ancient representations of St. Patrick frequently show him trampling on a serpent, as in the medieval carving of him in stone at Patrickswell, County Limerick.1 The legend has frequently been understood as a parable about his efforts to drive out pagan beliefs and establish Christianity, that is, Roman Catholicism. Despite the pervasive presence of the Catholic Church in Ireland centuries later, for Stephen Dedalus, there are still snakes in the shamrocks associated with religion, the body, and the character of art. The depth of these connections becomes evident when we consider visual aspects of Stephen's experience and imagination in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. During Stephen's adolescence, the Church that ministers to his soul encourages him to imagine both the origin of sin and its consequences as viperous. Later, having been sensitized by the reptilian associations to what may be an allergic extent, Stephen's imagination and intellect reject the argument about the character of art in Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's famous treatise Laocoön, or The Limits of Poetry and Painting, which depends on an image of reptilian power.2 Stephen's thoughts on Lessing and aestheticism are a part of his turn away from religion to art. Dissatisfied with Lessing's evocation of vipers in the poisonous, living chains of the Laocoön, Stephen sets his own direction. The vicious, chain-like snakes of the Church and the sculpture group are versions of what Stephen calls the "nets flung at [every Irish soul] to hold it back from flight" (P 203). He sets himself to try to fly by those nets, that is, to escape them but to do so by means of the apparently constraining bonds. The Laocoön and Lessing's treatise [End Page 133] provide Stephen with an opportunity that the Church's more static images of serpents do not. They enable him to engage in a dynamic process of cultural transformation, one in which Joyce's writing itself participates. Snakes and serpents are mentioned primarily in part three, though in part five, when Stephen is talking to the dean of studies, he wonders what kind of Protestant sect the English convert had belonged to or encountered, including "seed and snake baptists" (P 189). In part four, when Stephen sees his friends bathing, he feels "a swordlike pain" in response to their "repellent . . . pitiable nakedness" when he looks on them without their usual protective coverings, including Ennis's "scarlet belt with the snaky clasp" (P 168). He associates the pain with the dread he feels about his own body.3 Snake, sword, body, and dread have all combined earlier in Stephen's life, in his experiences with religion, to make an indelible impression. During the retreat, unsurprisingly, Stephen hears that the "devil" came to Adam and Eve in the garden "in the shape of a serpent, the subtlest of all the beasts of the field" (P 118). The aftermath is the driving out not of the snake by people but of Adam and Eve by Michael with a sword. Later in the retreat, the priest compares the torments of the damned to the practice of punishing a parricide by throwing him into the sea in a sack with "a cock, a monkey and a serpent. . . . hateful and hurtful beasts" (P 122). He repeatedly refers to stings, including the "most cruel sting of the worm of conscience" and "the threefold sting of conscience, the viper which gnaws the very heart's core of the wretches in hell" (P 129, 130). The most memorable verbal evocation of the snake occurs when Stephen identifies his phallus and his lust with the serpent after he experiences "[t...

ASOBI IN ACTION

In the past 30 years, play (asobi) has become the subject of a heated ideological debate in urban Japan, reflecting processes of cultural transformation. During these years, a late consumer culture characterized by an incessant pursuit of playlike hedonistic pleasures has reached its apotheosis within a conservative social context that maintains high levels of conformity and prioritizes production. It is against the background of these sociocultural dynamics that the cultural conceptualization and appreciation of play have been negotiated between play as a subsidiary activity complementary to work life, confined within boundaries, and play as a phenomenon of greatest personal significance, hardly constrained by time or space. These dialectics have influenced collective imaginaries, transforming play into a symbolic activity through which people can experience and reproduce cultural rhetoric about social distinctions, values and priorities.

Compressed Scaling of Abstract Numerosity Representations in Adult Humans and Monkeys

There is general agreement that nonverbal animals and humans endowed with language possess an evolutionary precursor system for representing and comparing numerical values. However, whether nonverbal numerical representations in human and nonhuman primates are quantitatively similar and whether linear or logarithmic coding underlies such magnitude judgments in both species remain elusive. To resolve these issues, we tested the numerical discrimination performance of human subjects and two rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) in an identical delayed match-to-numerosity task for a broad range of numerosities from 1 to 30. The results demonstrate a noisy nonverbal estimation system obeying Weber's Law in both species. With average Weber fractions in the range of 0.51 and 0.60, nonverbal numerosity discriminations in humans and monkeys showed similar precision. Moreover, the detailed analysis of the performance distributions exhibited nonlinearly compressed numerosity representations in both primate species. However, the difference between linear and logarithmic scaling was less pronounced in humans. This may indicate a gradual transformation of a logarithmic to linear magnitude scale in human adults as the result of a cultural transformation process during the course of mathematical education.

The Jolt of the Grotesque: Aesthetics as Ethics in The Satanic Verses

Now I challenge anyone to explain the diabolic and diverting farrago of Brueghel the Droll otherwise than by a kind of special, Satanic grace. For the words “special grace” substitute, if you wish, the words “madness” or “hallucination;” but the mystery will remain almost as dark. -- Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life Amplifying a tendency in Salman Rushdie’s novels since Midnight’s Children, his The Satanic Verses engages the grotesque to pose various ethical questions. He relates these questions with textual problems that engage literary invention, authorship, normalization, urban tensions, and the migration of both individuals and their stories. Rushdie has been celebrated for his alertness to processes of cultural transfer and transformation, even as he has been accused of an uncritical celebration of mixture. The performance and diagnosis of such transfer in The Satanic Verses combines the dynamics listed above with humor and irony. One of the novel’s recurring strategies is to combine discordant, supposedly heteronomous attributes, thereby blurring identities, geographical specificity, and chronology, as well as breaking linguistic strictures, as its dissonant, frivolous tones define moments of pathos, violence, and doubt. However, its “inappropriateness” allows The Satanic Verses to produce sophisticated acts of introspection and criticism. These incongruities give the text an elusiveness that multiplies the challenges of reading it and of forming an ethical response to its peculiarity. Even as it explores cultural and personal combinations and collisions, it performs verbal combinations, mutations, and collisions. That is to say, its very form evokes qualities and arguments that resist the ironies and asymmetries of orthodox assumptions. It is through such aesthetic strategies that it jolts its reader into ethical questions, its moves resonating strongly with Derek Attridge’s discussion of the singular and the other in The Singularity of Literature. Attridge’s emphasis is on singularity with relation. For him, the singularity of the other is not premised on an inviolable or absolute distinction. For Attridge, “Otherness…is produced in an active or event-like relation—we might prefer to call it a relating” (29; italics Attridge’s). A singularity cannot be different or “other” in a void—it can only be “other than” something to which it is placed in a comparative relation. The grotesque in The Satanic

Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World (review)

Reviewed by: Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World Lillie Johnson Edwards Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World. By Jon F. Sensbach. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005. The title of Sensbach’s book denotes that he has written a biography of a Caribbean woman, Rebecca Protten who, he asserts, was probably “the first black woman ordained in western Christianity.” (7) Rebecca led a quite remarkable and extraordinary life as a free woman of color, household servant, teacher, and evangelist on St. Thomas, as a Moravian Church leader in Germany, and as a Moravian missionary on Africa’s Gold Coast. Sensbach tackles a far more ambitious agenda that transcends, but includes, Rebecca’s life story. He explores her singular evolution as a woman who encountered distinct, yet overlapping religious, cultural and political worlds. He also examines how African-American consciousness emerged out of the spiritual revolution of their conversion to evangelical Christianity and women’s ascendancy as transmitters and interpreters of this consciousness. Sensbach demonstrates how Rebecca embodied that process of spiritual, cultural and political transformation and how she served as the leader and conduit through which much of that transformation occurred from the 1730s to the 1760s. In doing so, Sensbach adroitly poses an essential question that scholars have pondered for several decades. What role did Christianity play in creating a space for African humanity to survive, thrive and assertively challenge established political, social, cultural, economic and gendered hierarchies? Sensbach answers this question in this history of the African and Creole Moravians on St. Thomas Island who emulated the New Testament martyrs and in doing so, asserted African-American religious authority. Furthermore, he concludes, “St. Thomas proved to be the model for the spread of evangelical religion through New World slave communities.” (240) Sensbach weaves an intricate tale that spans four continents (the Americas, Africa and Europe) and ultimately transforms our understanding of the entire Atlantic world of the early eighteenth century. He relates the horrific history of slavery on St. Thomas and the Moravian mission to the island’s black population—slave, free and Creole. Sensbach analyzes how evangelical Christianity transformed the black population and how they transformed and translated Christianity, in general, and Moravian beliefs, in particular, into their own empowering spiritual revolution. As one of the most effective and ardent Moravian evangelists whose obstinate resilience led to her imprisonment, near martyrdom and intermittent exile, Rebecca embodied the major social, political and cultural shifts in the Afro-Atlantic world. Sensbach also explicates her role as a catalyst that shapes this evolving world. Sensbach manages to capture the complex nuances of this religious and cultural transformation by illuminating rather than ignoring its inherent contradictions. Christianity undermined and disassembled notions of white supremacy and black subordination, just as much as it supported these ideas and the infrastructures that sustained them. Rebecca embodied the fluid nature of these changes as a woman who experienced many worlds: slavery and mutable definitions of freedom; European and African cultures that morphed in the new context of St. Thomas; and competing even hostile interpretations of Christianity, including evangelical Protestant sects, the Moravians being only one of several. Rather than drowning in the chaotic ebb and flow of an amorphous universe, Rebecca understood and embraced this political, cultural and “spiritual triangular trade” (242) of mutable worlds. None could exclusively claim her because she belonged to all of them. Sensbach successfully demonstrates the complex convergence of the multiple and mutable social, cultural and political contexts from which Rebecca chose who she wanted to be and what she wanted to become. Her vision—like that of all pioneers who seize transformative opportunities—presumed a mission greater than herself and therefore, greater than her own time and place. Sensbach provides compelling and convincing evidence that Rebecca’s vision evolved into a legacy of African-American evangelical Protestantism more powerful than she could have realized. This is a book everyone can enjoy. Sensbach translates superbly expansive and meticulous research into eloquent prose. His detailed descriptions of people and places provide powerful sensory images that stimulate readers’ emotions and intellect. At times his literary license compromises the historical evidence as he goes too far...

RELIGION AND RITUAL IN THE WESTERN PROVINCES

IntroductionThe search for a more powerful entity to provide some form of order to the chaotic nature of human existence is a phenomenon that can be seen throughout much of human history. For a Roman, the gods were everywhere, as powerful forces with an interest in all aspects of daily life. Religion formed part of the broad-based homogeneity of the western provinces following the process of cultural transformation after conquest. Inscriptions, sculpture, and temple architecture all point to a similar material culture, and, although there is an apparent continuity in the names of the deities being worshipped from the pre-Roman to the Roman periods, their association with the traditional gods of Rome through syncretism negates the idea of direct continuity. However, religious changes are often overlooked in accounts of the Romanization of the western provinces, and we are left with the rather uncritical concept of ‘Romano-Celtic’ religion as a hybrid phenomenon. There is a danger of using the archaeological evidence of temples and inscriptions as diagnostic of change, rather than undertaking a more rigorous analysis in order to understand how religion and ritual formed part of this broad-based homogeneity, and the way in which the people of the provinces made sense of how to act and behave within a new social and political world.

Not playing around: global capitalism, modern sport and consumer culture

Abstract The development of modern sport is bound up with processes of economic and cultural transformation associated with the global diffusion of capitalist forms of consumption. In this article I draw attention to aspects of the globalization of modern sport that were becoming apparent towards the close of the nineteenth century and then move on to consider the factors that contributed to sport becoming a truly global phenomenon in the course of the twentieth century. Consideration is given to the development of international sport and sports goods companies, the growth in media interest and the increasing significance of sponsorship, consumer culture and sporting celebrities. The global diffusion of modern sport that gathered momentum in the course of the twentieth century involved a number of networked elements, including transnational communications media and commercial corporations for which sport, especially through the iconic figure of the transnational celebrity sport star, constitutes a universally appealing globally networked cultural form. Association with sport events and sporting figures through global broadcasting, sponsorship and endorsement arrangements offers commercial corporations unique access to global consumer culture.

Antropologia visual, práticas antigas e novas perspectivas de investigação

A antropologia visual nasceu em meados do século XIX com a "era da reprodutibilidade técnica" e da expansão industrial. Como se reformula hoje, na era da globalização e da transformação digital, essa disciplina ou convergência disciplinar? Voltada inicialmente para a documentação e preservação de práticas culturais ameaçadas, a antropologia de urgência, como se transformou ao longo do tempo em formas narrativas visuais, sonoras, audiovisuais e, mais recentemente, digitais? Orientada em primeiros passos para alimentar e enriquecer as coleções dos museus, como passa hoje por meio de múltiplas formas e suportes para o espaço público à procura de novos espectadores/atores (ou públicos)? Inicialmente instrumentação que pareceria garantir a objetividade, atribuindo-se-lhe o estatuto de tecnologia de pesquisa ou mesmo de auxiliar de pesquisa, como se confrontou com novos paradigmas epistemológicos ou se antecipou a eles? Voltada sobretudo para o registo das técnicas materiais e rituais e depois para as palavras e as sonoridades, como se orienta hoje no âmbito de novos objetos de estudo como a antropologia da arte, a antropologia do design, a cultura visual em contextos de processos acelerados de transformação social e cultural? Acrescentamos ainda mais duas perguntas às inquietações que nos fazem refletir sobre essa temática: como se repensa atualmente a antropologia visual no âmbito da antropologia? O que fazer com a antropologia visual hoje? Procuraremos traçar algumas formas de práticas antigas que adquirem nova e maior pertinência na era atual (trabalho com os arquivos, a memória, a relação entre o passado e o projeto, os objetos, a cultura material) e perspectivar novas oportunidades, novas práticas, novos objetos de estudo.

"Will you to my discourse vouchsafe an eare?" : women dramatists' negotiation of gender and genre on the public stage around 1700

Despite the growing influence of women in the theatrical world during the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century, women dramatists working for the public stage were accused of lascivious behaviour, as a result of the public setting of the playhouse in which their self-expression could be heard. In their tragedies The Royal Mischief (1696), The Fatal Friendship (1698) and Antiochus the Great; or, The Final Relapse (1701) the female dramatists Mary Delarivier Manley, Catherine Trotter and Jane Wiseman negotiated female utterance in several ways. Moreover, these women dramatists' legitimisation of woman's public voice and their own public theatrical voices was accompanied by their revision of tragic generic conventions concerning error, closure, transgression and transcendence. In these respects these women playwrights contributed to processes of cultural transformation with regard to gender and genre.

Cultural transmission, language, and basketry traditions amongst the California Indians

Much recent debate has focussed on the relative significance of phylogenetic (branching) versus ethnogenetic (culture contact induced) processes of cultural transformation. In this paper we employ a long-term and regional framework to analyse the transmission of languages and craft traditions amongst Californian Indian groups. Initial results suggest that basketry assemblages exhibit a significant ethnogenetic signal, arising from the horizontal transmission of cultural attributes across sharply defined linguistic boundaries. These findings converge with those from other regions, where geographic propinquity rather than linguistic affinity has been shown to have a slightly greater—but not exclusive—influence on the composition of material culture assemblages. However, the results presented here also indicate that despite these broader similarities local basketry traditions remain relatively distinct, and therefore cannot be explained through ethnogenesis alone. It remains a possibility that differential rates of cumulative innovation in language and craft traditions may have been present, leading to the erosion of phylogenetic signals for shared descent and the rapid emergence of distinct local basketry traditions. These issues require further research at a sub-regional scale.

The ADA on the Road: Disability Rights in Germany

This paper examines the impact of a “disability rights model” on the emerging disability rights movement in Germany. Traditional German disability politics and activism are based on the expansion of welfare and special needs provisions rather than on equal rights and integration. Inspired by the 1990 Americans with Disability Act, German activists adopted a disability rights model and successfully worked toward the passage of a constitutional equality amendment in 1994 and ant-discrimination legislation in 2002. Using the literature on rights mobilization, this paper argues that German disability activists use rights talk to both support and contest culturally specific approaches to disability rights, equal treatment, and the role of the state in guaranteeing welfare rights. The globalization of disability rights should not be viewed as an imposition of American norms but as a more complex process of adaptation and cultural transformation that involves constructing locally legitimate approaches to disability rights with an American import.

Veblen and the New Growth Theory: Community as the Source of Capital's Productivity

A century ago Thorstein Veblen argued that knowledge, which is produced and possessed by the community as a whole, is the foundation on which the productivity of "capital" rests. Orthodox economists chose to ignore Veblen and instead accepted John Bates Clark's definition of capital and the marginal productivity theory that goes with it. Recently, however, mainstream economists working on the "New Growth Theory" have rejected Clark's approach and have redefined capital so as to emphasize the importance of knowledge as well as its social character. Nevertheless, they still have an important lesson to learn from Veblen about growth, namely that technological development is nothing less than a process of cultural transformation.

Fronteiras Culturais: impactos e contatos na descoberta e colonização do Brasil

O texto analisa como ocorreu na América atlântica, a partir da conquista e da colonização, um complexo processo de transformações culturais quando dos contatos entre a sociedade ibérica e os grupos indígenas americanos. A cultura da sociedade dominante ibérica conquistou as culturas das sociedades locais, além de receber importantes influências destas, em unta síntese cultural ibero-indígena. Os contatos culturais se relacionam à nova sociedade colonial americana, sensivelmente diferente daquelas que lhes tinha dado origem.

Human Rights and Islamic Identity in France and Uzbekistan: Mediation of the Local and Global

This discussion of current expressions of Islamic identity in Western Europe and Central Asia is part of my wider and continuing concern with issues of cultural transformation in Islamic societies and communities. The relevance [End Page 906] and implications of a human rights paradigm for these issues in apparently different parts of the world are explored herein. This choice is explained below. The theoretical position I will argue is that the application of a human rights paradigm to the processes of cultural transformation draws on the interdependence of culturalist notions of contingency and global mutual influence, on the one hand, and positivist ideas of rights and their institutional expression, on the other. In the last section, I suggest that the human rights paradigm can play this role only to the extent that it both includes different perspectives and is capable of mitigating the negative consequences of differentials in power relations in the processes of globalization.

Cultural Literacy, Cultural Practices, Cultural Studies, and the Curriculum in Foreign

CULTURAL LITERACY, CULTURAL PRACTICES, CULTURAL STUDIES, AND THE CURRICULUM IN FOREIGN RICHARD YOUNG University ofAlberta Cultural studies, for good or ill, is everywhere. Its worldwide popularity marks out a deeper realignment in the constellation ofdisciplines and scholarly interests (Paul Gilroy) The impact ofcultural studies on the curriculum offoreign language and literature programs in North American universities during the last two decades or so is wide and varied and has been felt at the same time as cultural studies itselfhas taken shape and acquired a more commanding presence on the academic scene.1 Few foreign language and literature programs can have remained totally unaffected , although in many, perhaps most, the impact may well have been as much the product of accident as a design, a point I will explain in due course. It also seems safe to assume that were a survey taken on how the implications ofcultural studies have found their way into teaching and learning in foreign languages the results would show not only that no single paradigm stands out immediately as the one most frequently adopted, but that responses to cultural studies have been irregular and are more likely to have been dictated by local circumstances than by a universal model or what has transpired in disciplines at large. Having said as much, in the commentary that follows I am not about to propose a model or formula for the missing paradigm. Moreover, this paper is not the product ofany sounding of opinions or research into the status of language and literature programs in North American universities.2 Nor does it have any particular theoretical value, but has more the character ofruminations prompted by a particular Canadian context and the experience ofworking in programs in Spanish and LatinAmerican Studies in a department that, by styling itselfas a Department ofModern Languages and Cultural Studies, appears to combine the two pursuits in question in its activities. Even so, my comments on this experience might perhaps be read may more as a desideratum rather than an account of an actual state of affairs, or perhaps as a condition from which it is possible to extrapolate some conclusions about© 2000-2001 NUEVO TEXTO CRITICO Vol. XIII-XIV No. 25/28 256_______________________________________________RICHARD YOUNG the relation of foreign languages and literatures to cultural studies in general. Before discussing the circumstances ofthis particular case, however, it is appropriate first to establish the terrain on which the discussion might take place, to set its limits, and identify the issues at stake. What exactly does it mean to speak of cultural studies in relation to the study offoreign languages and literatures? Although a reply to this question might lead immediately to an analysis ofcultural studiesper se, its objectives, objects of study, and methods, I propose a different route. This is not to deny the importance of those whose work, whether in foreign languages or other disciplines, has led them to theorize cultural studies in relation to their teaching and research.3 Their work is all the more significant in light ofthe origins ofcultural studies itself in a predominantly English-speaking environment and the risk that it could be colonially applied to other language environments. For the purposes of this commentary , however, I wish initially to take cultural studies as a given in order to focus on its general impact in critical practice. Rather than critique perceived virtues or shortcomings, I wish to highlight the consequences of its existence and development in Academia. From this point ofview, foreign languages and literatures have felt the influence of cultural studies in two broad aspects: the contexts in which language and literature are studied and the objects of study. Reduced to its basics, cultural studies might be considered simplistically as the study of culture as a social phenomenon or product. Ifculture is a product, then "our knowledge of it," to borrow a comment from Henri Lefebvre about social space, "must be expected to reproduce and expound the process of production ."4 Seen from this perspective, cultural studies might be viewed as the study of how culture is formed within a social context, embracing notjust the processes of cultural production and transformation, but also how culture is consumed or practiced . Although it...

The Social Demand for a Medicine Focused on the Person: The Contribution of CAM to Healthcare and Healthgenesis

The Non Conventional Medicines have a greater social impact and the demand for such treatments of more than 10 million Italian citizens (male and female) of all ages and social classes and of thousands of Italian families reveals an interest proving that there is a trend reversal, involving also other sectors of the medical and scientific world, which shifts the focus from the symptom to an idea of more general and comprehensive well-being of the person. Over the last few years the scientific debate on Non Conventional Medicines and their integration with the academic or dominant medicine in our western society has favored and legitimated an increase in the demand and has activated a cultural transformation process involving the life styles. The focus is therefore shifted to the self-healing capacities, to the reawakening of the individual potentialities, which support and amplify the benefits of the treatments and the citizens start pretending to be accurately informed in order to choose freely their own health program.

Honorons Le Temps Dans Sa Voracité: Weathering the Exotic in the Work of Victor Segalen

Throughout his travels, Victor Segalen remained an observer of the effects of the weather, but his writings on this subject are far from cohesive and reflect the radical shifts in his thought. As soon as he arrived in Polynesia, Segalen came into contact with a cyclone in the Tuamotu archipelago. His accounts of this explore the processes of cultural transformation in colonial Polynesia. The tension between natural and cultural processes are seen as emblematic of wider processes of levelling of diversity. It is in China that the effects of the weather — and specifically erosion — become a central element of Segalen's aesthetics of diversity. The Chinese statuary on which he focuses is an integral, almost organic part of the landscape. The erosion of stone statues becomes a key to the processes of Segalen's Chinese exoticism. This weathering, however, reveals an inevitable tension between an exploration of Chinese understandings of impermanence and the steady erosion of a pre-Revolutionary China. The result is a new poetics of ruins which rejects preservation and focuses on the processes of flux. Weathering is therefore the focus of the problems of intercultural contact and homogenization, and of issues of permanence and flux, fixity, and mobility.

Homosexuality and the Repression of Intellectuals in Fresa y chocolate and Máscaras

The aim of this article is to examine and compare how the repression of homosexuals and intellectuals is portrayed in two recent Cuban fictional narratives: the film, Fresa y chocolate (Strawberry and Chocolate) (Gutiérrez Alea et al., 1993) and the detective novel, Máscaras (Masks) (Padura Fuentes Máscaras, Tusquets, Barcelona, 1997). It discusses how these narratives document the history of both these phenomena and evaluates how they might contribute to a better understanding of the process of fundamental social and cultural transformation which the Revolution is experiencing following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Homosexuality and the Repression of Intellectuals in Fresa y chocolate and Máscaras

Abstract The aim of this article is to examine and compare how the repression of homosexuals and intellectuals is portrayed in two recent Cuban fictional narratives: the film, Fresa y chocolate (Strawberry and Chocolate) (Gutierrez Alea et al., 1993) and the detective novel, Mascaras (Masks) (Padura Fuentes Mascaras, Tusquets, Barcelona, 1997). It discusses how these narratives document the history of both these phenomena and evaluates how they might contribute to a better understanding of the process of fundamental social and cultural transformation which the Revolution is experiencing following the collapse of the Soviet Union.