Questions Of Social Identity Research Articles

American Claimants: The Transatlantic Romance, c. 1820–1920, by Sarah Meer

Reviewed by: American Claimants: The Transatlantic Romance, c. 1820–1920 by Sarah Meer Kristen Renzi (bio) American Claimants: The Transatlantic Romance, c. 1820–1920, by Sarah Meer; pp. x + 265. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2020, $85.00. Sarah Meer's wide-ranging study American Claimants: The Transatlantic Romance, c. 1820–1920 makes a compelling case for the need to conceptualize claimants across national boundaries, whether as plot devices, as authorial claims to authenticity/inheritance, or as modes of articulating a work's lineage. Indeed, Meer argues upfront that the internationality of the claimant has obscured its visibility as an influential trope within existing critical traditions: "Claimant texts do not fit critical traditions organized by nation," she writes, and "the American claimant appears more influential" when seen through international prisms that imagine an "encounter, or cultural conflict, or social exchange" (3). In the book's eight chapters and epilogue, Meer repeatedly signals the transatlantic conversations at work between Victorian Britain and nineteenth-century America, while also extending her analysis to claimants within African history and literature. In so doing, she gives an account of the period that is sensitive to colonial contexts while using the claimant as a unifying thread across disparate sources, texts, authors, and history. Meer successfully argues that the claimant is an understudied narrative trope worthy of critical attention. Her American claimant is, at its most concrete, a feature within a lost-heir narrative in which an American, separated from British familial ties, stakes a claim to a British estate or title. Though this plot is no nineteenth-century invention, she argues for its particular relevance within the Victorian era as it indexes other key period concerns: questions of social identity (particularly involving class and race); mass migration and travel; social mobility; and historical lineage and tradition. Fictional claimant narratives also drew on their real-life counterparts for both source material and popularity—most notably, the famous nineteenth-century Tichborne case. In American and British claimant narratives, Meer finds these ideas most likely to engage questions of [End Page 135] national caricature (the Yankee yokel or savage, the British dandy or snob), racial and class mobility (as demarcated by servant or slave status), and the contested category of the gentleman; she also notes their relation to, yet distinction from, the American period staple of the confidence man. Due in part to the theatrical representation of the claimant on the nineteenth-century stage, and also in part to the performative, aesthetic dimensions of staking an identity claim, Meer also charts sartorial signals throughout the text as another means of marking, and finding, claimant connections. In the book's early chapters, Meer focuses most explicitly on plot-centric studies. These are the book's most persuasive chapters, as they demonstrate in detail the means by which claimant narratives engage the above topics alongside the significance of this engagement. For instance, in her discussions of Tom Taylor's play Our American Cousin (1858) (chapter 2) and Frances Hodgson Burnett's novel Little Lord Fauntleroy (1885) (chapter 3), Meer articulates the ways in which these two texts narrate the trope to render claimants—and the cross-cultural clashes regarding class and race that they highlight—benign. And in chapters 4 and 5, perhaps the strongest chapters in the book, Meer's attention to transatlantic periodical cultural exchange leads to a fascinating look at the import of connections (both explicit and implicit) between the interest paid to claimants and their narratives by Frederick Douglass and Charles Dickens. Meer's opening question in chapter 5 is simple: "Why did Douglass [without authorization] reprint Bleak House?" in the periodical he edited, printed, and published in Rochester, New York from 1851–60, Frederick Douglass' Paper (99). From this question, Meer generates a complicated, nuanced answer that uses a blend of imaginative close readings, literary historicization, and Douglass's political publishing and writing to demonstrate how "context can unearth hidden claimants" (98). The concrete and abstract ways of figuring claimants are most successfully merged and realized in these pages, and the transatlantic claimant's significance is clear here. In this instance, the claimant provides a way to reaffiliate, through print culture, Douglass's Black...

The Search for ‘Real’ Farmers- Questions of Social Identity in Farmer- Based Organizations

This paper studies the social identity of farmers in the small and medium scale agricultural networks of Zambia. It particularly explores the impact of the social identity of ‘real’ farmers on individual and collective perceptions of and attitudes towards farming, on trust behaviours displayed in engaging with farmer-based organizations and on knowledge flows. The focus on farmer identity emerges as a result of research data collected that indicate that farmer identity is a core determinant of knowledge flows. The study is qualitative in nature, employing grounded approaches to arrive at an understanding of how farmer identities are shaped. Agriculture is the main economic activity of developing nations and yet is among the sectors that suffers a dearth of adequate attention in management studies. This attention ought to be focused on the management of knowledge, knowledge being the driving force behind the successful management of agricultural businesses. The transfer of knowledge in the agricultural business sector largely occurs among government organizations, non-governmental organizations, private sector enterprises, farmers and farmer-based organizations. At the heart of the transfer of knowledge is the farmer to whom knowledge must be transferred and from whom a feedback loop ought to be established.

Reflections On Feminism, Immaterial Labour And The Post-Fordist Regime

1. OPERAISMO AND THE SUCCESSES OF CLASS STRUGGLE? In the many articles and books written in recent years on the topics of precarious labour, immaterial and affective labour, all of which are understood within the over-arching frame of post-Fordist regimes of production, there is a failure to foreground gender, or indeed to knit gender and ethnicity into prevailing concerns with class and class struggle. I seek to rectify this by interrogating some of the influential work in this terrain. I will also draw attention to those accounts which have reflected on gender and on changes in how feminists and sociologists nowadays think about the question of women and employment. (It is almost unnecessary to indicate that the critical paradigm underlying the shift in feminist debate is performativity theory and the radical de-naturalising of gender therein.) I ask the question, how integral is the participation of 'women' to the rise of post-Fordist production, and later in this article I ask what kind of role do women, especially young women (dispensing from now on with the need for the commas that query the category) play in the urban-based new culture industries? By prioritising gender I am also critiquing its invisibility in this current field of new radical political discourse associated with writers like Hardt and Virno, and Hardt and Negri. (1) I propose that the transition to precarious work or immaterial labour which is now so profoundly felt by vast numbers of young people, especially young women, (2) across Europe and under the age of 40, is inadequately understood without recourse to a critical interface that develops from the late 1970s onwards, between the wider impact of the women's movement (going well beyond the confines of self-declared feminists), and the modes of counter-response which capital, the state and consumer culture develop to constrain and re-shape, by means of a range of biopolitical strategies, the whole terrain of gender and sexuality. I challenge writers like those associated with the Italian Operaismo School for their insistence on class, as the defining meta-concept for understanding contemporary work and for imagining a radical political future. Fundamentally this is a 'labour-society' model where the 'decline of labour' and the shift of the centre of gravity to the non-work sphere, is blamed for a wide range of contemporary pathologies including the 'opacity of groups' and the 'ruin of the self'. (3) Counter to this I would argue that the way in which class now needs to be retained, (in its always-existing entanglement with gender and ethnicity) is, paradoxically, in its decline, something which has been displaced as a primary or foundational concept. This is not quite the same as Beck's idea of the zombie concept, more a governmentally-directed shift which fades out the social and political salience of class permitting at the same time a coming forward of gender as a source of self-validation. An understanding of this as a political strategy does not negate the place of class, but it does require a different kind of thinking about class, one which focuses on this twilight status. The sustained attempts within contemporary governmentality to 'de-classify' society in the name of a gendered modernity (the New Labour strategy in the UK) have, I would suggest, had tangible effects. This is partly due to the successes of 'make-over' lifestyle television programmes, and to the growth of aspirational media and popular culture. (4) This is not to say that class is irrelevant. But does it have, and can it have, quite the fundamental analytical purchase writers like Hardt, Lazzarato, Negri and Virno claim? If we agree that class is neither a sociological descriptor, nor a question of social identity, but primarily, though by no means exclusively, a set of antagonistic relations formed in the struggle between capital and labour, or between the state and subordinated social groupings whose subjugation entails a distinctive relation to labour, (for instance the unemployed), are these class antagonisms today such primary structuring mechanisms when labour comprises of subjects now much less engaged as 'workers'? …

:Leadership in Medieval English Nunneries

The position of an abbess or prioress in the middle ages was one of great responsibility, with care for both the spiritual and economic welfare of her convent. This book considers the power wielded by and available to such women. It addresses leadership models, questions of social identity and the varying perceptions of the role and performance of the abbess or prioress via a close examination of the records of sixteen female houses in the period from 1280 to 1540; the large range of documentary evidence used includes selections from episcopal registers, account rolls, plea rolls, Chancery documents, letters, petitions, medieval literature and comparative material from additional nunneries. The theme of conflict recurs throughout, as religious women are revealed steering their communities between the directives of the church and the demands of their budgets or their secular neighbours. The Dissolution and its effects on the morale and behaviour of the last superiors conclude the study.

Family, Networks and Academics

The history of anthropology is a growing field of study within the discipline itself. Our series ‘Key Informants on the History of Anthropology’ is offered as a contribution to the discussion of how anthropology, as it is understood and practised today, evolved and took shape. In this invited article, Larissa Adler Lomnitz reflects on how a cosmopolitan background aroused an interest in her in questions of social identity. Her studies of social networks in urban situations in Latin America are renowned in anthropology. Here she relates how they unfolded—and how they have been intimately connected to her family life.

Gender in the Fiction of George Sand by Françoise Massardier-Kenney, George Sand’s ‘Nouvelles’: Reflections, Perceptions and the Self by Lisa M. Blair (review)

206 Reviews Gender in theFiction of George Sand. By Francoise Massardier-Kenney. Amster? dam: Rodopi. 1999. 197 pp. ?22; $44. ISBN 90-420-0707-9. George Sand's Nouvelles': Reflections,Perceptions and the Self. By Lisa M. Blair. New York: Lang. 1999. $42.95. ISBN 0-8204-4095-7. As curious as it may seem, there has been no full-scale study of gender identity in relation to George Sand's life or her ceuvre. Francoise Massardier-Kenney's work provides a useful departure point with an investigation of Sand's deconstruction of gender oppositions in a select number of her novels. At the core of MassardierKenney 's argument is the claim that Sand articulates a modern conception of gender as social construct, and that her novels repeatedly undermine and invert the surface valorizations of masculinity and femininity that they appear to present. In order to tackleher subject, Massardier-Kenney exposes three areas of narrative strategy which seek to debunk social impositions of gender: 'valorization of women characters as individuals , destabilization of male narrative authority, and deconstruction of female internalization of Romantic male definitionsof women and love' (p. 11). The opening chapter exposes the gender ambiguities in the presentationof protagonists in two key novels, Indiana and Jacques. Here, inconsistent shifts in narration vis-d-vis gender, such as Ralph's transformation from victimizing misogynist to Indiana's ideal male lover at the end ofthe novel, and Jacques's contradictory attitudes to gender relations, where he rejects patriarchal ideology but repeatedly fails back into it, can be read as deliberate narrative devices deployed to expose the limitations of binary gender oppo? sitions. The subsequent chapters concentrate on representations of women in Sand's fictions and the way in which these challenge negative definitions of femininity and an over-valorization of men and masculinity. It is in the final chapter that MassardierKenney turns all too briefly towards Sand's utopia of gender, through a reading of the performative 'blurring' of gender in Nanon (which is mistakenly described as Sand's last full novel). Nanon emerges as Sand's ultimate refusal ofthe essentializing constraints of cultural process, the incarnation of Sand's belief that 'there is only one sex and one class' (p. 179). It is a pity that Massardier-Kenney only refers to Nanon in this final, utopian section of her study, as the concept of one sex is surely one of the most important aspects of Sand's difference and one which is the most important in terms of her contribution to current gender debates. This said, the original and close readings make an important contribution to Sand studies; certainly the chapters offerinteresting new perspectives on several lesser-known Sand novels, such as La Derniere Aldini, Valvedre, Mlle la Quintinie, and Gabriel. Only the tendency to make claims that certain gender details in the novels reflect Sand's own views, without al? ways providing evidence or integration into the theoretical argument, might jar with the reader. The work also suffers from some editorial lapses (pages 118-19 contain several differentways of page referencing; Isabelle Naginski's major work on Sand loses part of its title; the footnote on page 70 appears to be free-floating,to name but a few), but none the less, the work provides a convincing discussion of an aspect of Sand's writing that clearly could sustain repeated investigation. The question of social identity is also the focus of Lisa Blair's work, although here the emphasis lies with perceptions and images of self-identity in five of Sand's nouvelles : La Marquise, Lavinia, Metella, Mattea, and Pauline. The focus of Blair's study is on Sand's reflective technique and the fragmentation of the self that occurs in the psychological evolution of her characters. In a conceptually lightweight introduction, Blair suggests that the characters in these particular short stories can be read as fragments of Sand herself, and promises that after an in-depth investigation, 'the reader will notice how the somewhat flat,two-dimensional characters will develop into "real" people' (p. 4). Herein lies the difricultywith Blair's study, where an interesting pre? miss is let down by the style ofthe literarycriticism. Each ofthe chapters...

Community development for health and identity politics

Community development for health (CD4H) is defined as the mobilization of communities actually or potentially suffering from a health problem to eliminate its causes or alleviate its consequences. This paper links this with questions of social identity, focusing on issues of ethnicity and ‘race’, in health promotion. When combined with notions of ethnicity and ‘race’. CD4H is frequently a reaction to inequalities which are communally experienced and believed to increase risk of ill‐health for the group. This paper theorizes the link between communal experience and activity to promote health, by drawing on sociological theory linking structure and agency. It examines how discourses of belonging and exclusion are enacted in struggles for health. Via examples from the Caribbean and the UK, instances of ‘identity politics’ in CD4H are identified, viewed as the use of essentialist, binary notions of self and other in the attempt to gain an advantage over the other. It is argued that such instances should not be considered in isolation, but should be viewed as responses to experience, particularly, in the UK context, the experience of racism in the Health Service.

Memórias globalizadas e a construção dos futuros possíveis

A questão da identidade social, principalmente em sua relação com a questão das novas tecnologias, ocupa um lugar central nas sociedades contemporâneas globalizadas. Neste contexto, apresentei minhas reflexões acerca da questão da memória – objeto de disputa de uma rede de agentes e agências sociais na Baixada Fluminense -, em uma perspectiva relacional com a questão da identidade social e cultural e, principalmente, com a utilização das novas tecnologias em rede.