Production Of Identity Research Articles

Digital fashion heritage: Understanding europeanafashion. eu and the Google Cultural Institute’s We Wear Culture

The digitalization of cultural heritage has become an increasingly common practice among museums and online organizations. Many heritage digitalization projects are driven by an approach called ‘sharing is caring’; that is, the purpose of digitalization is accessibility, making what is considered to be valuable cultural heritage an accessible resource for everyone, while stimulating identity production and sympathy for that heritage. The digitalization of fashion heritage can be seen as part of this movement. In recent years, Europeana Fashion (launched in 2015) and the Google Cultural Institute’s Google Arts and Culture project, We Wear Culture (launched in 2017), have become major online platforms for the distribution of fashion heritage. The aim of the present article is to explore and understand how fashion heritage is performed by these two online initiatives and what constitutes fashion heritage in this context. The article is based on an explorative analysis of the two digital sites, interviews with the managers of each initiative, as well as insights from existing studies of cultural heritage and digitalization.

‘Eco this and recycle that’: an ecolinguistic analysis of a popular digital simulation game

ABSTRACT This article presents an ecolinguistic analysis of a popular digital simulation game, Animal Crossing: New Leaf (2012). As the popularity and immersive capability of digital gaming continues to expand, there is need for investigations of how digital games may either perpetuate ecologically destructive ideologies, practices, and identities or promote and cultivate more ecologically sustainable options. The simulation game genre is of particular interest as these games are typically designed to reproduce and reflect real world activities in which gamers complete tasks for purposes such as education, training, and entertainment. Although elements of the Animal Crossing: New Leaf game may be viewed as promoting sustainable ecological action and fostering identities and practices supportive of ecological wellbeing and sustainability, game features and operations central to play within the constructed game world reflect, normalize, reproduce, and perpetuate the production and performance of identities and human-nature relationships at the root of the ecological crisis.

Farming in the Spanish Caribbean: Rural Identity, Culture, and Food Production in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Cuba

Food is not a trivial issue in the Caribbean. The islands of the Caribbean are usually characterized as densely populated and dependent on food imports as a result of their colonial history as producers of sugar in large plantations and under conditions of slavery. The story is largely true. Hundreds of years ago, on most of these islands, imported rice, beans, and salt cod became dietary staples; and the islands have remained dependent on food imports ever since. But this paper will argue that the Dominican Republic stands out in the Caribbean as a producer of food. To substantiate this claim, I will use primarily Food and Agriculture Organization data to compare the countries that make up the Greater Antilles – the four largest islands of the Caribbean – in terms of their ability to produce food and feed their citizens. Subsequently I will examine how the history of the Dominican Republic differed from that of Cuba and Haiti to result in a country that is proud to farm.

Gender and state-building conversations: the discursive production of gender identity in Kenya and Rwanda

ABSTRACT This article advances the conceptualisation of conversations on state-building by examining gendered discourses. By focusing on specific historical moments in Rwanda and Kenya, this article analyses how ‘respectable femininities’ and ‘wayward sexualities’ become the ‘sites’ where national and state politics are ritualised and where tensions resulting from non-hegemonic performances of both gender and sexuality are resolved. I argue that by examining sites of gendered cultural production, it is possible to trace how gendered tensions are enacted through localised practices and discursive mechanisms deployed to manage political differences and build solidarity within heterogeneous groups. The ritualisation and creation of ethno-national homogeneity as part of state-building conversations occurs at the expense of greater freedoms for women. Fundamentally this article posits that gendered cultural and traditional norms are essential sites from which to map state-building conversations and should not be cordoned off to the realm of social and therefore excluded from the political.

The (un)promised land: queer identity and South Africa’s post-apartheid urban landscape

In this article, I explore the intersection of photography and contemporary urban topographies in the production of queer identity in post-apartheid South Africa. To do so I examine Thebeautifulonesarehere, a contemporary photo-collage portrait series by Kelebogile Ntladi, which attempts to queer representations of South African cityscapes to reveal the entrenched homophobia and the systematic rejection of queer subjects. Ntladi, inspired by their own experiences of counter-normativity and the omnipresent threat of violence they face as a result, took to the streets to walk through their home city of Johannesburg to photograph the urban and cultural landscape; these photographic prints were then used as the building blocks in the assembly and fabrication of imagined spaces in which they and their fellow queer citizens would be able to live without fear of violence, where they could move freely and without repercussion. Using the trope of the flâneur as a starting point, I draw on Walter Benjamin’s paradoxical experience of Paris: his writing of Paris as the ‘capital of the nineteenth century’ and ‘the promised land’ of the flâneur exists in stark juxtaposition with his own complex experience of anxiety, dislocation and impending doom while living in the city while in exile during World War II. Ntladi’s personal experience of post-1994 Johannesburg echoes the paradoxical experience.

Toward a transnational model of social media privacy: How young Saudi transnationals do privacy on Facebook

Previous models of cross-cultural differences fail to adequately account for transnational patterns of social media use, especially as it relates to notions of privacy. Based on our study of young transnational Saudis, we propose a new model, the rubber band model of transnational privacy, to account for the way social media users stretch their conceptualization of privacy as practiced in their societies of origin to include new norms and practices in their hosting society. We explore how this process unfolds through a series of ethnographic interviews conducted with young Saudis at different stages of their migratory journey from Saudi Arabia to the United States and back. Our findings hold important implications for viewing privacy as a dynamic concept related to the fluid production of identities in online spaces. The model of privacy we put forth seeks to inform the culturally sensitive development of information and communications technology (ICTs).

Black, LGBT and from the Favelas: an Ethnographic Account on Disidentificatory Performances of an Activist Group in Brazil

In this article, we address the processes of the production of places, identities, and cultures through analysing performances of activists from Aos Brados, in their political activities throughout Campinas, a 1 million inhabitants city located in the state of São Paulo, Brazil. Aos Brados is an activist group formed by Black LGBT people from the favelas whose main activities in the last ten years have been cultural activities. Focusing on the activities made by Aos Brados members in cultural centres and public spaces throughout Campinas, we discuss how, in such presentations, the group disputes meanings associated with the places and cultures that these places claim to represent. We sustain that it can be seen as a process of disidentification in which Aos Brados reshapes meanings associated with places and cultures, producing Black LGBT Culture from the favelas. The discussion results from shared questions in two different research concerning the effects of the intersections of race, gender, class, and sexuality on the political identity of Black LGBT activists and on the performances of young drag queens. The methodology employed congregated participant-observation and in-depth interviews.

Brazil's Black Christianity and the Counter-hegemonic Production of Knowledge in World Christianity

Brazil is home for the largest African diaspora. In spite of that, until the end of the twentieth century, Brazil's Africanness tended to be hidden under the Eurocentric construct of a colour-blind national identity and the myth of racial democracy. Since the 1990s, Brazil's negritude or blackness has emerged as an important source of culture, knowledge, identity and public policy. Such a reconfiguration of Brazilian identity and culture to privilege black agency challenges common assumptions in the study of the religions of Brazil, including Christianity. This article examines the impact of Afro-Brazilian spirituality and religions upon Brazilian Christianity, shedding new light on Afro-Brazilian contributions to the formation of Brazil's cultural and religious mosaic. It highlights the often-overlooked agency of Afro-Brazilians as social, religious and cultural actors who have not only resisted colonial and neocolonial efforts to whitewash Brazilian culture, but have also positively contributed to the production of culture, knowledge and identities through a dynamic relation with their African roots. Finally, focusing on Afro-Brazilian spirituality as an important shaper of Brazilian Christianity, this article advances a decolonial perspective that draws attention to the ways Brazil's black Christianity contributes to the production of counter-hegemonic forms of knowledge and knowing.

In visibilities: the Groupe du 6 novembre and the production of liberal lesbian identity in contemporary France

ABSTRACTThis article analyses the little-known contributions of a Paris-based activist group of self-identified lesbians of colour, the Groupe du 6 novembre, which formed in 1999. Their self-published anthology, entitled Warriors/Guerrières, contests the racism of French feminist and LGBT community and culture and examines sexual minority visibility through an intersectional lens. This anthology was unfortunately contested and all but censored by organisations that purportedly sought to promote lesbian culture and self-expression. The Groupe du 6 novembre’s erasure is symptomatic of the ways in which the seemingly laudable aim of combating lesbian invisibility—within both scholarship and activism—can actually serve to marginalise racialised lesbians. Through close readings of the Groupe’s poetry and prose and documentation of their history, this article will argue that dominant conceptions of lesbian sexual identity are imbued with liberal racism and Republican universalism. At a time of increasing concern that certain forms of feminist and LGBT politics are being co-opted by the State to racist ends, the Groupe du 6 novembre constitutes an essential chapter in French feminist history and literature.

The urban creative factory-creative ecosystems and (im)material design practices

Post-Fordism, with its evolution towards immaterial production in the areas of information, knowledge and affective, creative commerce, foregrounds design as a central, enabling activity. If this enablement finds particular application in cities of the Global North, it testifies to a shift in the geopolitical distribution of productive agency and application of international labour, one that sees industrial activities ‘reassigned’ to the Global South, leaving cities of the variably de-industrialised countries to develop cultural, symbolic, and creative economies.
 This paper examines the nature of urban place and the work regimes practised there consequent to these economies. It argues firstly for ‘cityness’ in these context to be understood as a creative urban factory – a place where older managerial and organisational techniques applied to factory environments in the service of high productivity are recalibrated and diffused across the entirety of urban territories. Secondly, the paper links the productivity of the creative urban factory with a biopolitical makeover of cities themselves, seeing in an optimisation of productive capacity a situation where the entirety of living labour is taken up and commoditised via the production of ever-customised lifestyles and identities. A raft of new identifying subject and worker categories emerge that exceed or elude the older class identifications, and with it, a certain potential to collectively counter the exploitation inherent post-Fordist work. While exploring the possibility of new identifying collectives – what Hardt and Negri have referred to as the multitude – the paper makes an argument for design itself to be a key medium for rethinking and re-enacting collective agency.
 As the harbinger of new forms of user participation and co-operative processes that are, by way of emerging technological tools, open, evolving, ad hoc, reflexive and customisable, design practice increasingly must contend and adapt to forms of de-professionalisation. Rather than seeing in this adaption a demise in profession position, the new possibilities appearing in design point to a low-tech, yet digitally-driven enabled, re-politicisation of design and creativity, one better able to contend with the strictures of the urban creative factory.

Contested language use in ethnic media: a case study of New Zealand’s Pacific media

ABSTRACTNew Zealand’s Pacific communities face significant generational language loss and their media are increasingly produced in English, raising questions about the centrality of language for ethnic media and their audiences. By drawing on semi-structured interviews with 23 media producers, this study finds tensions within and between Pacific-language and English-language media over the use of Pacific languages. It suggests that language is a strategic resource of identity in Pacific media that is shaped by a dialectic of internal and external identification. Rather than viewing ethnic media language practices as simply about language preservation or translating information for migrants, this paper suggests we examine language as a way that media producers intentionally perform their identity and legitimate Pacific media production.

Coming to act with tables: Tracing the laminated trajectories of an engineer-in-the-making

Using theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches that situate the ontogenesis of practices and persons in histories of reuse across heterogeneous times, places, and representational media, this article examines the development of one undergraduate's ability to act with inscriptions in ways valued by engineers. Based on semi-structured and text-based interviews, ethnographic observations, and collection of texts and artifacts conducted over 3 academic years and that also reach back to her early childhood, the analysis traces the co-researcher's laminated history of acting with tables across a number of engagements, including undergraduate engineering courses, scheduling daily activities, inventing and arranging fan-fiction novels, and solving puzzles for fun. In addition to illuminating the rich history of textual activities that come to shape her use of tables as an engineer-in-the-making, the analysis also makes visible the crucial role emergent “laminated trajectories” (Roozen, Woodard, Kline, & Prior, 2015) play in the ongoing production of literate practices and identities. Ultimately, the article argues for increased theoretical and methodological attention to the ways people's participation with seemingly discrete, autonomous discursive engagements shape the pace and path of their historical becoming across the assumed boundaries of everyday, disciplinary, and professional worlds.

Fatalism and Dissidence in Dukuduku, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa: Ongoing Contestations Over Land, Resources and Identities

This article explores the use of identity politics in conflicts that pertain to land, land restitution and traditional authority in northern KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, and more specifically the Dukuduku area. Under the influence of past geographic displacements, ongoing neoliberal transformations and the transition to democracy under the post-apartheid government, not least including contested traditional authority, the land and the people in Dukuduku have undergone significant changes. What is apparent today is that the people of Dukuduku – some of whom can claim to have ancestral connection to the land – do not have a coherent identity in relation to each other or to the land itself. We argue, drawing on Douglas’ cultural theory, that this situation largely pertains to the persistence of dissenting and fatalistic voices within the community and the ongoing (re)production of local identities. Since narratives of identity are being reproduced through local cultural ecotourism ventures while relying on fatalistic and dissenting tendencies, these tendencies should not be seen to cohere in a realm outside processes of dominant entrepreneurial development in contemporary South Africa. We conclude that, given the durability of fatalism and dissidence, there is a need for anybody with an interest in the area to take them continually into consideration.

In/out of Nigeria: transnational research and the politics of identity and knowledge production

This article explores the murkiness of fieldwork and writing that often comes with simultaneous positioning as insider/outsider. I engage with two key themes: First, identity, legitimacy and representation and, second, the gray spaces between theory and reality. The first theme examines the contradictions of being perceived as both an insider and outsider; the complexities of identity and language while at ‘home’ in the field, and the challenges of performing the native informant role while back ‘home’ in Canada. The second theme explores the uncomfortable dilemma of engaging with the ‘Rush to Theory’ from the global south. I will examine how the theories are sophisticated and provocative, yet prove unsatisfactory in terms of having practical applications. I conclude the article by positing that, despite the challenges of doing transnational work, transnational subjects invariably contribute to the creation of a new politics of knowledge production and to the attainment of social justice.

Women as Icons in Post-Trauma Societies: “Disappearing” Women in Argentine National Cinema

ABSTRACTIn Argentina, the use of women as symbols of the nation provided a necessary anchor for debates over national identity in the aftermath of state terrorism and neoliberal reforms. Discourses of nation relied on the symbolic status of women as bearers of the nation and “disappeared” them as subjects from the public sphere, reproducing preexisting gender hierarchies. Adopting an interdisciplinary Discourse Historical Approach perspective, this manuscript examines one site of production of national identity, national cinema, through the comparative analysis of two films: The Official Story and The Headless Woman. These films rely on their female protagonists’ iconic status, the Good Mother and the Femme Fatale, respectively, to critically engage with authoritarianism, race and class in discourses of nation. Yet doing so prevents them from simultaneously addressing women’s grievances. Unmasking these exclusionary discourses is critical to understanding why Argentine women continue to be denied some of their fundamental rights.

Imitation Nation: Red, White, and Blackface in Early and Antebellum US Literature by Jason Richards

Reviewed by: Imitation Nation: Red, White, and Blackface in Early and Antebellum US Literature by Jason Richards Jonathan Daigle (bio) Imitation Nation: Red, White, and Blackface in Early and Antebellum US Literature jason richards Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017 256 pp. For decades, scholars have been expanding the geographic and temporal lenses through which they study "American" identities, cultures, and texts. The logic of this reconsideration is simple and sound: the notion of an autochthonous, independent US literature and culture is inaccurate and, at bottom, in bad faith. What this project lacks in freshness, it makes up for in continued relevance. Decades after the transnational shift began, American exceptionalism and its tangle of assumptions persist. Indeed, the remapping of identities and relationships is a vast imaginative effort, one of several generations, in the very least. This long revaluation requires textured analysis and new conceptual frameworks. In Imitation Nation: Red, White, and Blackface in Early and Antebellum US Literature, Jason Richards offers both. Triangulating modes of inquiry, Richards studies hiding-in-plain-sight relationships among white Americans, African Americans, Native Americans, and white Europeans. For example, Richards combines insights from scholarship on blackface minstrelsy with those gleaned from settler postcolonial theory to bring Natty Bumppo's native and African American mimesis into sharp focus. This approach to James Fenimore Cooper's The Pioneers (1823) reveals the dependence of American whiteness on Native American, African American, and British Anglo-Saxon identities. Exploring new relationships among established schools of thought, Richards provides a model for redressing the insularity that has long shaped conceptions of US history, literature, and culture. Richards borrows from nineteenth-century social theorist Gabriel Tarde, who viewed imitation, not essence, as the basis of identity. Tarde's [End Page 537] notion that identity is contingent on one's response to others is particularly suggestive in the early American and antebellum contexts. As Richards notes, the theater's rapid growth in the early Republic reflected a longing for national culture keyed to an implicit understanding that Americanness would be achieved through imitation, specifically, through embodying and absorbing Native American, African American, and European identities. Engaging the work of Philip J. Deloria, Eric Lott, and Robert S. Levine, Richards delineates mutually constitutive relationships among diverse acts of cross-racial, cross-Atlantic mimesis. Imitation Nation makes an important contribution to the scholarship of blackface minstrelsy. But because mimesis took place offstage, too, Richards conceptualizes redface and blackface broadly to cover a range of cross-racial imitations. While mimesis occurs wherever contact happens, it assumed particularly robust form in a new republic defined by remarkable diversity and dominated by descendants of white Europe who faced the unusual problem of defining themselves as, at once, white and not European. A unique postcolonial settler society, the early United States sought the temporal depth and legitimacy associated with aboriginal Indian identity, but it also imitated Britain's imperial dominance over nonwhite groups. Imitation Nation makes a compelling case that American identity emerged in the complex interplay of western and Atlantic frontiers. Literature helped shape national identity in this push-pull fashion: European models distinguished the white United States from its Native American and African American inhabitants, and these Others helped distinguish American literature and identity from European antecedents. This dynamic set at odds preoccupations with racial purity and American distinctiveness. That is, a distinctive white national identity required absorbing and excluding racial and cultural Others at the same time. Citing Homi K. Bhabha's idea of mimicry from The Location of Culture, Richards opens a space for nonwhite agency in the production of national identity. Through mimicry, the disenfranchised, colonized, and enslaved exploit the slippage between the identities hegemonic regimes enforce and those same identities as performed by the oppressed. Mimicry and cross-cultural imitation, more broadly, energize what Richards calls "hybridity, the inevitable offspring of mimesis" (31). Imitation Nation sets the reality of hybridity against the fiction of white purity, as Richards argues: "If the colonial apparatus stabilized itself through a fiction of racial [End Page 538] purity, the fact of hybridity cut through the homogenous myth, opening the door to a more democratic postcolonial future" (31). A robust conception of hybridity leads Richards to...

Facebook and cultural identity: Discourses on mediation among international students

Abstract Digital mediation is implicated in the production of cultural identity in multiple ways. The representations produced and circulated on social media platforms, along with the ubiquitous nature of these platforms, become part and parcel of the production and performance of cultural identity. This paper investigates discourses of Facebook mediation and cultural identity among a sample of international undergraduates in media and communication at a major Dutch university. The analysis of 43 written student essays reveals four discourses: Facebook as a mirror of cultural identity, as a cultural mosaic, as a site of cultural difference and as an opportunity for critical reflection on the idea of cultural identity. Interestingly, these discourses are permeated by a recurrent vision of individual control of both mediation and cultural identity. This article discusses the ideological work entailed in these discourses, calling for more awareness raising on the ways in which social media actively construct social reality.

Ṣedaqa and Torah in Postexilic Discourse ed. by Susanne Gillmayr-Bucher and Maria Häusl

Reviewed by: Ṣedaqa and Torah in Postexilic Discourse ed. by Susanne Gillmayr-Bucher and Maria Häusl Stephen A. Long susanne gillmayr-bucher and maria häusl (eds.), Ṣedaqa and Torah in Postexilic Discourse (LHBOTS 640; London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2017). Pp. xiii + 178. $114. This collection of essays examines the use of and in "postexilic identity discourse" (p. 8), concentrating primarily on the Hebrew Bible (seven essays) with a glance toward NT and rabbinic literature as well (one essay each). An introduction provided by Maria Häusl sketches the concepts of and , outlines attempts to understand their possible interrelation, and summarizes both the essays and the results thought to have been obtained. The essays are divided into two sections. The first, entitled "Ṣedaqa and Torah in the Pentateuch, the Books of Ezra and Nehemiah and the Book of Isaiah," contains five essays. Kåre Berge ("Ṣedaqa and the Community of the Scribes in Postexilic Deuteronomy: A Didactical Perspective") notes that the Book of Deuteronomy sometimes explicitly links and (e.g., Deut 4:1-8 and 6:20-25). Berge interprets this as pointing to a utopian program of "Torah-didacticism"—a social vision of a postexilic Yehud constituted by "a society of scribes that ponders over the word of Torah and the teaching of their families about it" (p. 19). Jeremiah Cataldo ("How Torah, Ṣedaqa and Prejudice Mapped the Contours of Biblical Restoration") finds that postexilic was "constructive" rather than "descriptive" law. As such, " provides the framework for the production of collective identity, the expression of which may be designated as , or a type of moral behaviour centred upon a creative and judging God" (p. 54). Maria Häusl ("Searching for Forces of Group Cohesion in the Books of Nehemiah and Isaiah") probes four passages—Neh 5:1-13; Nehemiah 9–10; Isa 58:1-12; and Isa 65:16b-25—in order to discern the strategies deployed in each for the creation of a commonly shared ethos and an individual sense for the common good. In "The Role and Function of Ṣedaqa and Torah in the Introduction to the Book of Isaiah (1.1–2.5)," Alphonso Groenewald argues that the word in Isa 1:10 and 2:3 is a device intended by the postexilic redactor to link Isaiah's prophetic message with the Torah of Moses. Finally, in "'Keep Justice!' (Isaiah 56.1): Thoughts Regarding the Concept and Redaction History of a Universal Understanding of Ṣedaqa," Judith Gärtner advances the twin claims that the realization of justice and righteousness in Isa 56:1-8 is linked to Sabbath and covenant observance, and that they are "established by means of [a] theology of creation and thereby open to all humankind" (p. 87). The second section of the book, titled "Ṣedaqa and Torah Linked with Other Concepts: Holiness, Purity/Impurity and Faith," contains four essays. Marianne Grohmann ("Purity/Impurity: Identity Marker and Boundary Maintenance in Postexilic Discourse") surveys texts about purity/impurity from Leviticus, Ezekiel, and Lamentations and "considers their contribution to the shaping of identity in exilic and postexilic Judah" (p. 104). Dolores Kamrada ("Ideas of the Holy: Ṣedaqa and Torah within a Cultic/Religious System") seeks to relate and within a cultic system characterized by binary logic. According to Kamrada, the "instruction" () obtained by priestly divination likely yielded simple yes or no answers—and this binary structuring is still visible, claims Kamrada, in Psalm 1's association of with the (as opposed to association with the latter's binary opposite, the ). According to K., "one may conclude that the notion of seems to have evolved from a cultic system that reflects a binary logic and can be understood as the manifestation of the divine cosmic order" (p. 131). Christina Tuor-Kurth ("How Is Justice Referred to in [End Page 745] Faith? Some Reflections on the Hellenistic Jewish Tradition of the Reciprocal Relationship between Obedience to Torah and Righteousness and Their Reception in the New Testament with Special Focus on the Letter to the Romans") argues for a basic continuity between Paul and Hellenistic Judaism in that for both "righteousness in relation to humans, namely , means exemplary moral behaviour based on the Torah" (p. 146...

Among Ghost Dances: Sarah Winnemucca and the Production of Tribal Identity

Among Ghost Dances: Sarah Winnemucca and the Production of Tribal Identity

Manolis Manoledakis (ed.). The Black Sea in the Light of New Archaeological Data and Theoretical Approaches. Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on the Black Sea in Antiquity held in Thessaloniki, 18–20 September 2015.

That Black Sea studies have become a dynamic field over the last few years is demonstrated by this new volume, edited by Manolis Manoledakis. The book results from a workshop, organised in Thessaloniki in 2015. The title clearly states the book’s ambition: collect more data and shed a critical light on them. While the book successfully achieves the first ambition of collecting new data, the second aim – introducing new theoretical frameworks – has only been achieved to a moderate extent throughout the volume. Most of the contributions remain firmly within the established interpretative boundaries and contribute little to ongoing discussions of, for example, globalisation processes in the Ancient World, to name just one omission. Only a few papers adopt more challenging perspectives on (ethnic) identity or economic production.