Reinvention Of Identity Research Articles

Considering Societal, Psychological and Geographical Borders in Dayton & Faris’s 2006 film Little Miss Sunshine

When considering borders and boundaries, our initial interpretation often responds with a recognition of the geographical borders which divide and organize our world. However, often overlooked are the psychological and societal borders experienced by individuals and the ways in which these kinds of boundaries define our lives. Borders and boundaries of all forms are encountered in the 2006 road movie Little Miss Sunshine, directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris. As Ann Brigham notes, “Road stories themselves are plotted around unsettling processes: the crossing of borders, the courting and conquering of distance, the reinvention of identity, and the access, negotiation, and disruption of spaces” (8). This essay will consider the complex borders navigated by the Hoover family as they journey from Albuquerque, New Mexico to Redondo Bay, California in search of the Little Miss Sunshine beauty pageant. As a road narrative, the film covers extensive geographical distance, emblemized by the yellow VW campervan the Hoover family travels in. But the Hoovers are a family of misfits, all experiencing their own psychological barriers and suffering under the societal boundaries of social class hierarchy and patriarchy. Thus, as a film embedded in mobility, this essay will also consider the ways in which boundaries are transgressed as well as responding to the resilience exhibited by individuals when faced with challenging circumstances.

Enemy love and the reinvention of identity

This article investigates the reception of Jesus’ command to ‘turn the other cheek’ and ‘love your enemies’, as found in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5:38–48, among Christian Palestinians. With the help of basic tools from the postcolonial discourse, structures of power, identity and subjectivity of these commands are examined. Although seeming to advocate a quiet acceptance of violence, the commands are interpreted as empowering calls to contribute to the transformation of the self, the other and the society. A person’s dignity is seen to be restored and the transition from reactivity to agency is made possible. At the same time as the commandment of love ensures the uncompromising work for mutual respect and affirmation of both parties’ humanness and creation in the image of God. Walter Wink helps to understand the logic of nonviolent resistance that the pericope is leading to in the eyes of the interviewees. In the last section, both the Bible text and the insights gained by the examination of its reception are condensed and further expanded by a theory of love inspired by Dorothee Sölle. This theory of love argues that love is not only a general approach to life, rather than a sentimental feeling, but the basic principle of life, the courage to continue to love where no reason or hope is left, just the will to remain and love into the void. This is interpreted to be the strongest kind of love and a tremendous empowerment in the reinvention of identity.Contribution: This article contributes to the examination of identity processes within the field of theology and Bible interpretation as liberation and empowerment. The ethical and political relevancy of Scripture is here actualised in the example of the Palestinian context where questions of identity, justice and agency are more important than ever.

“Amazing Stories Hidden Within”: The Reinvention of Identity in Genetic Ancestry Advertisements

“Amazing Stories Hidden Within”: The Reinvention of Identity in Genetic Ancestry Advertisements

Poro on Trial: The 1913 Special Commission Court case ofRex v. Fino, Bofio and Kalfalla

Abstract:In 1913, a Special Commission Court in Sierra Leone saw a series of trials concerning members of the Human Leopard Society, and conflated this society with the regional Poro Society. This article examines one of those trials and unearths motivations for murder and questions of bias. With the reinvention of identity in the shadow of slavery, a nuanced and complicated picture emerges of the situation. Though more questions than answers are offered by the details of the case, this article problematizes Sierra Leone under British authority, and shows a nuanced snapshot of power struggles playing out in a murder trial.

Transfer of Economic Power in Corporate Calcutta, 1950–1970

Between 1950 and 1970, the ownership of some of the largest business conglomerates in India changed from British to Indian hands. Almost without exception, the firms formerly under the management of British conglomerates saw bankruptcy, nationalization, relative decline in corporate ranking, and on rare occasions, reinvention of identity. In Indian business history scholarship, this episode is underresearched, even though hypotheses on the transfer-cum-decline exist. Combining a new source, legal documents, with conventional ones, this article revisits the episode and suggests revisions to current hypotheses.

“After You, Baroness!”: Ernest Hemingway and Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen)

Ernest Hemingway and Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen) never met, though they both coveted the Nobel Prize in 1954, the year Hemingway deservedly won it. But they had read each other, and both had been touched by Africa, where they moved in the same circles. The landscape and its people stamped itself on their literary imaginations, imbued with painterly visions indebted to Cezanne. The African continent provided both authors with a space for activities, relationships, and inspiration that allowed for reinvention of identities away from family histories, conventional sexuality, bourgeois restrictions, and cultural boundaries.

Globalization and Change in India: The Rise of an "Indian Dream" in Miss New India: An Interview with Bharati Mukherjee

In this interview, Bharati Mukherjee, the American author of Indo-Bengali origins, gives an overview of the ideas that triggered the writing of her latest novel, Miss New India (2011). She discusses the way that her novel sheds light on the changes brought by the process of globalization in India. The discussion focuses on the influence of Western ideals on the young Indian generation and the rise of a transnational worldview. The clash between tradition and modernity is the central issue in Mukherjee’s answers. She explains how the transformation of social and cultural structures initiated by the process of globalization in India caught her attention. The notion of change is set as the key term to understand both Miss New India and contemporary India. Along with this notion, she expands on some of the themes found in her earlier works, such as the process of “unhousement” and “rehousement,” the reinvention of identities, and the awakening of female migrant characters to self-empowerment. Mukherjee also emphasizes the changes occurring in the American literary canon due to the mass migration of writers in a globalized and transnational era through the introduction of a new literary category, “The Literature of New Arrival,” which adds a multi-ethnic aesthetic aspect to contemporary and transnational American literature.

Arab-American Autobiography and the Reinvention of Identity: Two Egyptian Negotiations

This article examines two Anglophone autobiographies by Egyptian immigrants in the United States, Ihab Hassan's Out of Egypt: Scenes and Arguments of an Autobiography (1986) and Leila Ahmed's A Border Passage: From Cairo to America--A Woman's Journey (1999). The two texts are read as Egyptian negotiations of Arab-American identity in the U.S., in the context of modern Egyptian history and Western perceptions of Arabs, Islam, and Middle Eastern politics. The two texts display radically different strategies of negotiating identity that reflect divergent currents in American cultural politics in the second half of the twentieth century. ********** My story began in Egypt, continues in America. But how tell that story of disjunction, self-exile? In fragments, I think, in slips of memory, scraps of thought. In scenes and arguments of a life time, re-membered like the scattered bones of Osiris. Ihab Hassan And I am now at the end point of the story I set out to tell here. For thereafter my life becomes part of other stories, American stories. It becomes part of the story of feminism in America, the story of women in America, the story of women of color in America, the story of Arabs in America, the story of Muslims in America, and part of the story of America itself and of American lives in a world of dissolving boundaries and vanishing borders. Leila Ahmed The question of autobiography as a genre with an ambivalent relationship to historical fact and narrative convention has preoccupied U.S. and French theorists since the early 1960s, when autobiography began to command the attention of literary scholars as a legitimate genre. (1) There are at least two reasons for the canonization, in postmodern culture, of autobiography, which had previously (especially in the reign of New Criticism) been regarded as inferior to enshrined literary genres (Morgan 3-4). One reason is the generally perceived autobiographical turn in the literature [of the 1970s and 1980s], both in Europe and the United States ... particularly ... among those contemporary novelists who appear to be playful practitioners of fictional games or who--from the perspective of their ethnic or marginal backgrounds seem to be in search of their ethnic identity within a dominant white culture (Hornung and Ruhe 9). Another related reason is the development of feminist and minority criticism, which have questioned the traditional literary canon and brought to the attention of scholars women's and minority writing, especially previously unknown or uncanonical texts, many of which are autobiographical, such as women's letters, fiction, and diaries, and African-American slave narratives. Thus, at a time when postmodern thinkers like Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault pronounced the death of the Author--as part of the poststructuralist critique of the transcendental subject of the Enlightenment--not only avant-garde white male novelists, but also those marginalized by gender, race, and/or ethnicity have shown their vital signs through autobiographical writing (Morgan 11-12, Hornung and Ruhe 9). I propose to examine two Angolphone autobiographies by Egyptians who have emigrated to the United States, Ihab Hassan's Out of Egypt: Scenes and Arguments of an Autobiography (1986) and Leila Ahmed's A Border Passage. From Cairo to America--A Woman's Journey (1999). They are narratives of permanent immigration, of transitioning into a U.S. minority. Rather than engaging in debates over the definition, demarcation, and policing of the borders of autobiography as a genre, (2) or even attempting to define a poetics of Arab immigrant autobiography, the more urgent question concerns the kinds of cultural, historical, and discursive intervention that such autobiography makes in the United States. That is, I read these two texts not so much as variations on a literary tradition or canon of autobiography, or as test cases for particular theories and definitions of a genre, but as Egyptian negotiations of Arab-American identity in the U. …