Process Of Self-definition Research Articles

HIV/AIDS in Nigerian Fiction: Felix Ogoanah's The Return of Ameze and Ifeoma Theodore Jnr, E.'s Trapped in Oblivion

This article examines the representation of HIV/AIDS in Nigerian fiction. Despite the scourge of the disease in Nigeria, the most prominent fictional titles have tended to be silent on the subject. Depictions of the disease appear in fiction published and circulated chiefly within the confines of the country. This article focuses on Felix N. Ogoanah's The Return of Ameze (2007, Ibadan: Evans Brothers) and Ifeoma Theodore Jnr, E.'s Trapped in Oblivion (2014, Lagos: KEE). Reading the novels as young adult fiction, it argues that they partake in the figuration of HIV/AIDS as a disease that animates the binary of innocence and guilt. Going beyond the typical apportioning of blame across dichotomous gender lines, Ogoanah's and Theodore Jnr, E's works call attention to the culpability of adults in rendering adolescents vulnerable to the disease. HIV/AIDS appears as a variable in the increasingly complex world within which adolescents define themselves. This is a world where norms and values are in flux and, depending on how the transition to adulthood is negotiated, HIV/AIDS in the texts becomes a death sentence, a warning, or a life-altering interruption in an already chaotic process of self-definition.

Fleur rebelle, fleur royale: the friendship of Lady Oscar and Marie Antoinette in The Rose of Versailles

This article examines the friendship between Oscar Francois de Jarjayes and Queen Marie Antoinette in the anime version of Riyoko Ikeda’s the Rose of Versailles. Oscar is born female but is raised male and becomes Commander of the Queen’s Royal Guards. The intended shōjo (young girl) audience identifies with both characters. Current scholarship mainly focuses on Oscar’s character, but this study places equal emphasis on Marie Antoinette, since the anime humanizes her character and demonstrates how the Queen’s interactions with Oscar bring out the noble elements of her disposition. The characters grow together and then apart against the backdrop of the French Revolution, with the Revolution standing as a metaphor for the internal struggle Oscar faces when grappling with her gender identity. Marie Antoinette supports and validates Oscar, but the friendship ends when Oscar identifies with the Revolution and the Queen refuses any compromise to the power of the Crown. Oscar’s ultimate rejection of her class and her alliance with the Revolution corresponds directly to the questioning of her gender identity and her ultimate self-acceptance. By contrast, Marie Antoinette’s final self-affirmation comes not through rebellion but through staunch confirmation of royal authority. The process of self-definition is what leads to the downfall of both Oscar and Marie Antoinette, with the former meeting a noble death in the taking of the Bastille, and the latter dying at the guillotine in tragedy and disgrace but redeemed slightly by her friendship with, and memories of, Oscar.

The Encounter with the Identical Other: The Literary Double as a Manifestation of Failure in Self-Constitution

Literary pieces featuring the double depict an encounter between the protagonist and another person, who is her identical other. Therefore they face various difficulties related to a threat cast on their unique identity, and this encounter challenges their process of self-definition. Martin Buber sees the existence of the other as essential for the occurrence of self-constitution within an individual. He maintains that any person needs another person to obtain confirmation of what she is and is born equipped with the ability to confirm her fellow-person in the same way (1959). However, as the other encountered by a doppelgänger protagonist is not truly “other”, the latter might confront a difficulty in the different stages of Buber’s self-constitution process. This paper seeks to shed light on the inter- and intra-personal relationships depicted in literary pieces focusing on the theme of the double, such as The Double (Dostoyevsky [1846] 1997; Saramago 2002), Despair (1965), and Too Much Nina (Orbach 2011), emphasizing the limitations cast by the encounter with the identical other on the protagonist’s self-constitution, as put forward by Buber.

Reformations: The Early Modern World, 1450–1650. By Carlos M. N. Eire (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2016) 893 pp. $40.00

<i>Reformations: The Early Modern World, 1450–1650</i>. By Carlos M. N. Eire (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2016) 893 pp. $40.00

Free Labor: The Civil War and the Making of an American Working Class by Mark A. Lause

Reviewed by: Free Labor: The Civil War and the Making of an American Working Class by Mark A. Lause Joanne Pope Melish (bio) Civil War, Labor, Working class, Strikes, Unions Free Labor: The Civil War and the Making of an American Working Class. By Mark A. Lause. (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2015. Pp. 296. Cloth, $95.00; Paper $28.00.) A curious gap lies at the intersection of labor history and Civil War history. Except for its role in the New York City Draft Riots, labor activism during the war years has received relatively little attention from Civil War historians; while in labor histories, workers have tended to morph into soldiers for the duration of the war, bracketed by their antebellum and post-war labor struggles. Of course, a labor issue—slavery—lies at the heart of the Civil War, but it is treated as such mostly in terms of the labor shortage incurred by slave owners when their slaves decided to become rebels, fugitives, "contrabands," or Union recruits; few have looked at slaves' actions themselves as labor activism. Mark A. Lause has stepped into this breach with a labor history of the Civil War—a detailed examination of the experiences of working people as they resisted, negotiated, exploited, and survived (or not) the war. He attempts to pay careful attention to all categories of workers—North and South, male and female, black and white, native-born and immigrant, free and freeing themselves. His goal is to show how their collective wartime experiences forged a post-war American working class in the Thompsonian sense—"as a process of self-definition through which workers come to see themselves as playing a distinct role in society" (x). Most transformative was the emancipation of four million slaves in the course of the war; what Steven Hahn has called the greatest slave rebellion in American history, Lause characterizes as its biggest and most consequential strike. The book is organized into four main parts with three chapters in each, along with a prologue and an epilogue. The prologue introduces the various categories of American working people and gives an overview of their efforts to assert their interests, ranging from advocacy of land and labor reform and trade unionism on the part of skilled workers to ad hoc job actions and resistance on the part of slaves. Lause emphasizes the stratification of the workforce, with its great inequalities of working conditions depending on race, gender, and status (as native-born versus immigrant, and free versus enslaved), that made a shared class sensibility impossible at the outset of the war. The twelve main chapters trace an astonishing crescendo of ever more [End Page 396] militant strikes, riots, and other job actions in both the old crafts and new industrial trades that accompanied worsening economic conditions in both the northern states and the Confederacy as the war went on. Male workers in one occupational category after another organized and struck for higher wages and shorter hours; slaves walked off their jobs in a "rolling strike" (58). A few groups of working women, too, struck over wages, working conditions, and competition brought on by the war; more frequently, however, working women's causes were championed by middle-class advocates stressing workers' essential roles as wives and mothers. While some workers were exempted from military service and others successfully evaded it, many labor activists served, and some died. Lause has painstakingly tracked many of them into and through their enlistments. Lause argues that the war brought about many changes for working people. First, it taught them to embrace the power of the government to effect fundamental social change, and thus to channel their earlier cooperative impulse through politics. "To a great extent," he suggests, "American socialism grew directly from the experience of the Civil War" (173). But hopes for the triumph of an egalitarian notion of free labor were disappointed. The organizing efforts of women during the war did not transform paternalism. While the war emancipated human beings from enslavement, it also "emancipated race from slavery, making it an issue in itself" for labor as in all other aspects of American life (163). So, then, did the great upsurge...

Self, Body, and Relation: a Study of FTM Transgender in Jakarta

The existence of Male to Female (MTF) or in Indonesian word known as Waria is more popular than Female to Male (FTM). Existence of FTM or someone biologically born as woman but identified herself as man is not well-researched and well-documented. That is why this group is difficult to be identified in the public discourse. Jakarta was chosen in this research as this city represented FTM from other areas around Indonesia. This study found that someone that biologically woman is not otomatically identified herself as woman. The process of self-definition is fluid. In the process of finding the self, FTM faced violences from states, society, work-place, and family.

Memorialization and representation of immigrants in contemporary Italy: The case of Mimmo Paladino’s monument ‘Gateway to Lampedusa/Gateway to Europe’

Abstract This article is a critical reading of Mimmo Paladino’s ‘Gateway to Lampedusa/Gateway to Europe’, a memorial built in Lampedusa to honour the lives of thousands of immigrants who died trying to reach Italian shores. It considers how the monument’s ambiguous representation of migrants reveals the deeply contradictory position of Italy towards the mass immigration it has experienced in recent years, and it contextualizes the creation of the memorial in 2008, the year Berlusconi’s third government began. The close analysis of Paladino’s bas-reliefs illustrates the iconographic reification of old colonial stereotypes that essentialize and dehumanize the immigrants in order to separate them from the supposedly superior Italians. Ultimately, the article argues that the Gateway to Lampedusa reflects an ideal vision of Italy that is rhetorically crafted to support a culturally and racially pure image of the country. Thus the representation of immigrants is intrinsically tied to Italy’s process of self-definition that both accepts and rejects aspects of the historical past in order to maintain a self-image grounded in cultural and social heterogeneity.

La transizione in crisi: difficoltà occupazionali e precarietà esistenziale

New generations are more and more exposed to economical fluctuations, as long-term positions in the labour market are gradually being replaced by atypical contracts. During these times of crisis young people experience more difficulty in entering in the labour market, and are offered precarious or temporary positions which do not easily lead to greater stability. It is then useful to address the different factors of segmentation and discontinuity in young people occupational careers, such as different motivations, different representations that underlie different strategies for facing instability-related risks, and different ways to cope with the transitions to adulthood. Unfortunately after the interruption of iard scheme of repeated surveys this information is no longer coherent and systematic, therefore the real impact of job insecurity on daily life, on existential aspiration and on the processes of self-definition are largely to be investigated.

How the Ethiopian Changed His Skin

Aksumite elites electively identified themselves as “black” in relation to the paler integument of other Mediterranean peoples. Prior to the fourth century CE, the proper noun Aithiopía referred to the area of northern Sudan. Aksum, however, deliberately appropriated the Greek term for its own geopolitical purposes, partly as a way to write itself both into the grand narratives of Graeco-Roman history, where “Ethiopians” recurrently figure as morally “blameless,” as well as—with their conversion to Christianity—into Old and New Testamental eschatologies that consistently position “Ethiopians” as first in the sight of God. This process of self-definition—achieved under the formative gaze of Hellenic, Roman, and Levantine Others—ultimately allowed ‘Ityȯpyā to become a key, if nonetheless still liminal and rogue, player in the post-Constantinian politico-religious arena, in such a way that both economic and cultural capital accrued to the benefit of Aksum.

The reflexive turn in French and German-speaking geography in comparison

Abstract. The papers presented by Bernard Debarbieux and Ute Wardenga at the symposium on "Les fabriques des `Géographies' – making Geographies in Europe'' and published in this thematic issue both take a historiographical perspective, which at a first glance seems evident. In order to understand how geography is thought about and practiced, the best is to look back on how these thoughts and practices have been respectively established and have evolved in the different national contexts. But at second glance, this historiographical perspective seems revealing regarding the status and the position of geography as an academic discipline. One can hardly imagine a symposium on the "making philosophy'' or "making physics'' in Europe privileging such a historiographical stance in order to illustrate and understand the differences and commonalities of a discipline in different countries today. Other disciplines might have favoured a dialogue on how a theory or a prominent author is received in order to excavate the differences or commonalities in a particular discipline of different countries. Such dialogues have been organized for example in Sociology with the exchange of approaches on Bourdieu published by Catherine Colliot-Thélène, Étienne François and Gunter Gebauer (2005). Another example and a reference of such dialogues is the famous debate on hermeneutics between Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jacques Derrida in the early 1980s. The emphasis on the history (Debarbieux) and the way to write the history of geography (Wardenga) points out the difficulty of our discipline to position itself in academia, and reveals the crisis to which Wardenga refers to in her paper. As Ute Wardenga pointed out by quoting Jörn Rüsen, "genetical narratives'' are part of identity formation processes by "mediating permanence and change to a process of self-definition'' (Rüsen, 1987, cited by Wardenga, this issue). Both presented papers expose in different but complementary ways this identity formation of geography as a distinct discipline on the national scale in France (B. Debarbieux) and on a more international scale (U. Wardenga). The first analyses the conceptualization of space, the nation and the national territory by French geographers, while the second reflects upon the internationalization of the historiography of our discipline, meaning the way history is written and not the history itself. The underlying question here is the specificity of geography in Germany or in France and what their relationships are with other geographies, i.e. in how far they are influenced by or reject ideas and methodologies especially (but not exclusively) from Anglophone geographers.

Shot and Counter-shot: Presence, Obscurity, and the Breakdown of Discourse in Godard’s Notre Musique

"Notre Musique includes a lengthy sequence that involves a presentation by Godard on the relationship between text and image. The occasion of the lecture is a conference in Sarajevo titled European Literary Encounters, an annual event first organized in 2000. Godard gave his lecture in 2002 and the long middle-section of the film offers a "lightly fictionalized restaging" of his address and of other encounters surrounding the conference. The narrative setting of the majority of this film, then, is a space of discourse (a conference and a lecture), but I suggest that the film is conceptually sited more generally and abstractly in the "space" or “frame” of discourse itself. Because it ponders various parameters—spatial, historical, conceptual—that allow or disallow discursive connection, I regard Notre Musique as an extended meditation on the possibilities for and barriers to discourse. By siting the film in Sarajevo, Godard is clearly highlighting a frame for this meditation—a frame that includes a history of violence and reconciliation. The conference is decidedly international and takes place in a city with a rich cosmopolitan and multi-ethnic history, even as it bears the scars of violence and ethnic division. Sarajevo, moreover, is a city with a complex relationship to the state—having been a nucleus to various formations of state and empire in the last century. In its history and in the present, Sarajevo is a site of discourse and discord; of the union and clash of influences (be they religious, political, or ethnic). Hence, Sarajevo’s relevance to the film is not merely one of documentary fidelity (because it was the host city for the conference). It is a perfect site for Godard to pursue a line of reflection on discourse and its breakdown in the frame of changing formations of power. Sarjevo as a site also calls attention to how the parties or constituencies for discourse remain in states of flux—either through processes of self-definition from within or misrecognition (or nonrecognition) from without..."

Her Body Knows (review)

Her Body Knows, by David Grossman. Two novellas translated from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005. 264 pp. $25.00. In this garland of two novellas, Frenzy and the title fiction, Her Body Knows, David Grossman, the distinguished, prize-winning Israeli novelist, has set himself the difficult task of rendering inner speech. The novellas, like everyday life, are full of talk, but here focused on the speech habits of the protagonists. These monologues are in the apparent tradition of Beckett and Faulkner: they start out as realistic conversations but change our fictional expectations as they turn into fantastic voyages. We enter into the unconscious life of the speakers. While these novellas sketch the audience to whom their main characters ostensibly address their remarks, what we the readers soon discover, however, is that these fictions dramatize the acts of speaking: we experience not monologues but soliloquies, overheard as they are in a play. The fictional narrative of events and actions of everyday life becomes a fateful account of the drama of self-definition. Tell me, how is it possible, he says-the thought always strikes him in the same way, from the same exact angle and always for the first time-how is it possible to grasp that this woman, my wife, my one and only true love, has not missed a single meeting with the man for the last ten years? Except maybe once or twice a year on her sick days or when there was a family event, a war here and there, trips abroad or out of town-days when she absolutely couldn't go out and maintain her life with him. Musing thus aloud about the actions of his wife, the protagonist of Frenzy reveals that he is dominated by jealousy. His fantasy life obsesses him. Like Othello who, once doubting his wife's fidelity, sees in every event and action nothing but evidence for his obsession, this novel's main character is turned inward. He has lost his purchase on objective reality. He broods on his inner rage, confusion, ambivalence, sexual fascination. As the novella unfolds we discover he devotes his energy to stalking his wife and her supposed lover. Yet there is never any objective evidence against which to measure his obsession: we begin to wonder if this process of self-definition is actually an exercise in self-delusion. Esti, his sister-in-law, is driving Shaul, who has broken his leg the day before and is now in a cast up to his groin, in the continuing pursuit of the lovers. But it is not clear what Shaul wants to do should he discover them. The drive from a suburb of Jerusalem south towards Beersheba, as we discover at the end of the novella, also functions as a mutual meditation between the two -or is it a form of psychoanalytic therapy with the patient lying in the back seat unable to glimpse his driver in the dark. Shaul muses: After all, they are a normal man and woman, he snickers, and as he speaks those last words, a flame is ignited wichin him, and for the first time he directs its blaze at another person, and Esti feels it and rushes to protect herself from the sudden violent gust, the likes of which she has never known, as it lunges at her from the fluttering man behind her. She knows she must save herself, but does not know exactly from what, and is not even sure she really wants to be saved and banished this soon from the private master class. The lesson in obsession will also turn out to be hers. Shaul will teach her by example what it means to brood on such matters. The reader, identifying with Esti, who has been drawn in to the role of Shaul's driver since her husband, his brother, is out of town, becomes complicit like her in this speaking process. She fears that if she does not pull herself together at once, she may not have the strength later on to withstand the strange assault which now attacks her in waves with a kind of impersonal insistence, almost inhuman, or perhaps insufferably human. …

‘Exile, Secrecy, and Cunning’: Cultural Translation and Hybridity in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior

This article discusses the construction of Chinese-American identity in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior. Kingston’s book reveals the role of storytelling in the construction of ethnic (and gendered) identity as the author narrates her personal experiences through the reconstruction of myths, legends, and ‘talk stories’ she inherited from her mother. The method Kingston uses to make sense of these stories is that of translation. Translation refers to a performance of ethnic and gendered identity in Kingston’s narrative. Here the complex identity known as Chinese-American is not an accumulation of discrete, distinct cultures, ‘Chinese and American’. As a result of translating between these different positions, Chinese-American in Kingston’s The Woman Warrior designates a new identity, one that exposes the fictions of any closed categories, either Chinese or American. This process of self-definition is represented in terms of Kingston’s rewriting of stories of her ethnic culture in an attempt to reclaim them as her own and to make their meaning relevant to her American context. This Chinese-American identity as a product of discursive practice transcends the monolithic conception of Chinese and American cultures. It is in Kingston’s struggle to find her own voice that she tentatively combines the two cultures and reconciles herself with her mother.

Globalisation and InsecurityThe Direct and Indirect Effects of Small Arms Availability

Summaries There is a growing awareness across many sectors that small arms represent a serious risk to human and global security. Partly as a result of the growing awareness of the problem, the analytical appraisal of their effects has diversified. But the field is undergoing a process of self-definition. This article attempts to trace the broadening contours of the debate and highlight the need for a multidisciplinary and integrated approach to disarmament. It recognises that small arms constitute a challenge, both in terms of demand and supply. The article demonstrates that small arms diffusion takes place at the interface of the global and local arenas, in situations of underdevelopment and insecurity, posing intricate challenges to national, regional and international actors. Relief and development actors, including donors and governments, have only now started to acknowledge that armed violence, perpetrated with small arms and light weapons, are a serious impediment to population health and criminality, as well as social and economic development.

The Persistence of the Family Farm and the Economy of Affection: The Cameroonian Case

This case study attempts to account for the persistence of the economy of affection in Cameroon in light of the persistence of the family farm debate. The study demonstrates, like previous studies, that the economy of affection persists because of subjective values such as the farmers' desire to be independent; the farmers' view of agriculture as a way of life; and farmers' purpose and satisfaction in life derived from bonds and relations formed in the production process. In addition, the study clearly documents the importance of: 1) a sacred component to agriculture; 2) agricultural rituals which provide for social bonding and co operation; and 3) a process of self-definition, self-determination, and self -actualization associated with food production. Journal of Social Development in Africa Vol 15 No 1 2000, pp. 93-108

The Sexual Revolution among Catholic Clergy

Even though the data are unpersuasive on "the sexual revolution" in the general population, there is strong evidence that there has been a dramatic change in attitudes toward birth control and divorce among Roman Catholic clergy. The correlates of sexual "liberalism" among Catholic priests are age, "inner-direction," and modern religious values, explaining almost three-fifths of the variance among Catholic priests in sexual attitudes. It would appear that there are only very small differences between the clergy and the laity on these matters, but substantial differences between the clergy and the hierarchy. Writers in a wide variety of disciplines have commented on the intimate relation between religion and sexuality. Eliade (1959), speaking for the tradition of research in the "history of religion," sees primitive religion as essentially a fertility ritual. Campbell (1959) suggests that the earliest known human works of art were simultaneously sexual and religious, and Ann Parsons (1969) has argued persuasively that children growing up in the southern Italian milieu acquired both their sexual identity and their religious world-view as part of the same intimate process of self-definition. McCready (1972) has demonstrated the intimate relationship between the early family triad and adult religious behavior. Luckmann (1967) argues that the interpretive scheme is derived in the process of individuation which begins in the early interactions among male parent, female parent, and child. Under such circumstances, one could readily expect that the relationship between religion and sexuality might undergo important changes at the time of a sexual revolution. The literature on this alleged revolution is rich though not altogether persuasive. It can be found in both serious journals and the popular press. Writers like Reiss (1967), Kinsey (1953), and his colleagues, and Simon and Gagnon (1969) have argued that there have been considerable changes in sexual attitudes and behavior in the last

Words or Presence

Training does not teach how to act, how to be clever, does not prepare one for creation. Training is a process of self-definition, a process of self-discipline which manifests itself indissolubly through physical reactions. It is not the exercise in itself that counts—for example, bending or somersaults—but the individual's justification for his own work, a justification which although perhaps banal or difficult to explain through words, is physiologically perceptible, evident to the observer. This approach, this personal justification decides the meaning of the training, the surpassing of the particular exercises which, in reality, are stereotyped gymnastic movements.This inner necessity determines the quality of the energy which allows work without a pause, without noticing tiredness, continuing even when exhausted and at that very moment going forward without surrendering.

Paradise Regained: Moral Dialectic and the Pattern of ReJection

"Heroic rejection" and "heroic knowledge" are, in fact, complementary concepts rather than mutually exclusive alternatives. In Paradise Regained, rejection is grounded in knowledge, and knowledge in turn is perfected through rejection; the "process of self-definition" is accomplished by and through the "series of refusals." Christ rejects his Adversary's offers precisely because he knows their relative value in comparison with the Kingdom of Heaven. In the "dialectical drama" of the Second Temptation, rejection and knowledge are actually inseparable; and to dismiss the rejection-motif simply because it is Satan who sums it up (IV, 156, 368-71, 467, 536-7) is to ignore the fact that Christ also summarizes his ordeal in terms of refusal (IV, 496).