Representations Of Otherness Research Articles

Europa Blues (L’Europe de l’Est des romans policiers scandinaves)

"The Scandinavian detective novel (or at least some of its authors) elaborates on local materials in an increasingly global or European context. From the perspective of its social relevance, the detective novel provides some of the most influential representations of Otherness. What interests us here is the place of Eastern Europe in the novels of certain Nordic Noir authors: Inger Wolf, Arne Dahl and Jo Nesbø. The dynamics between private and public, individual and collective, as well as the rich representation of different forms of mobility make it possible to build a wide variety of character identities, and to embrace both the local and the European/global."

Impact of societal and legal context on the blood supply of African-ancestry populations in Western countries: A review of practices and the French example.

In Western countries, blood supply agencies encounter impediments in providing blood groups defined as rare or of interest, notably for sub-Saharan African ancestry (SSAA) recipients. To establish warning levels and anticipate future blood needs, an estimate of the current carriers of rare blood groups, both potential patients or donors, is crucial but complex. Indeed, if the strict needs can be estimated in medical terms, the modalities of blood product collection must be considered from an interdisciplinary perspective, at the interface of biological data and social norms. Here, we aim to understand how legal choices and a set of representations of otherness may influence the supply of rare blood for SSAA populations. After examining these issues, considering different norms and limits that govern French society, we compare this data with those of four Western countries facing the same difficulties (United States, United Kingdom, Italy and the Netherlands). This work began as part as the reflections of Social Lab, an institutional programme created by the French Blood Establishment (EFS). How can we effectively improve the qualitative blood coverage for SSAA populations? There is no unique solution, but there are many more or less effective answers. Comparison across countries reveals a strong influence of the socio-political histories and ethical choices before technical and medical considerations. We consider that an institutional policy is required to resolve recruitment issues of SSAA donors sustainably. Lastly, we introduce a working group called the EFS Social Lab, which aims to set up a monitoring mechanism for donors and societal trends to make blood donation effective.

Emotion Mobilisation through the Imagery of People in Finnish-Language Right-Wing Alternative Media

Right-wing populists’ online communication relies heavily on images and their emotional appeal. In this article, we study how images of human actors are deployed to engender emotions in their viewers in an example of Finnish-language right-wing alternative media—MV-lehti. We focus on three news cases in the publication’s immigration coverage over 2015–2017. We understand emotions as part of a larger societal meaning-making process that is consciously, culturally and socially produced. Using methods of visual content analysis and critical close reading, we find that the most exclusionary emotions evident in the imagery of people are fear, disgust, hate and distrust. Through these negative emotions, each group of people is represented as a scapegoat for the “distress of ordinary people.” By excluding these groups from “us,” MV-lehti identifies them as representations of Otherness. This goes hand in hand with a distinctive populist style arguing that society is separated into two antagonistic groups—“the pure people” versus “the corrupt elite.”

What is It Like To Be a Bat in the Time of Covid-19, or How Many Pandemics Could We Have?

In these paired years (2020–2021), the whole world has been impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic, which has resulted in the emergence of different presumptions, alternative facts, and fake news. Among those, the most dominant news was about bats as the culprits of expansion of the virus and, indirectly, the Chinese diet as the root cause. However, there is no proof that the links in the triangle of bat-virus-human are valid; and the source of infection has not been identified. In addition to bats, these viruses can be found in other animals, such as camels, pangolins, and humans. Therefore, individual scientists are reversing the situation by presenting the possibility of transmitting the virus from humans to animals. Nevertheless, it has become ultimately ‘acceptable’ to demonise the bat. In this respect, various authors remind us of certain historical contexts of notions and perceptions of the bats, as well as the similarities and differences of those perceptions during the pandemic, referring to it mainly in the context of Croatia and the world. In the end, the article’s conclusion is that the story about the bats is, actually, a great indicator of the representations of Otherness and the strengthening of a binary and hierarchical division of ‘us’ and ‘them’.

Producing (Musical) Difference: Power, Practices and Inequalities in Diversity Initiatives in Germany’s Classical Music Sector

This article examines whether diversity debates in the Western cultural industries can contribute to the undoing of racialised representations of otherness or reproduce ‘race’-making logics. Based on a year-long ethnography of diversity efforts made at an opera house in Germany, I explore how difference is negotiated in the production of two opera pieces meant to bring together Western and Turkish musical practices. I specifically examine how power relations around ‘race’ and ethnicity play out in processes of commissioning, composing and rehearsal. Situating these creative practices within classical music’s institutional histories and wider discourses of citizenship and belonging in Germany, I examine to what extent racialised representations of difference are challenged or remade. I document how diversity initiatives in the cultural industries, even when aimed at institutional change, proceed within hierarchical parameters that can perpetuate the marginalisation of racialised others, their continued construction as otherness, and the persistence of institutional whiteness.

LITERATURE AS CULTURAL ECOLOGY: A CULTURAL ECOLOGICAL STUDY ON EMERSON AND WHITMAN

This article is intended to find out how a cultural ecological reading is possible for the selected poems of Emerson and Whitman who are considered as the leading figures of the nineteenth century American Renaissance, the artistic spirit which has flourished between the 1830s-1860s in the wake of the Romantic movement. Transcendentalism in America, as a projection of English Romanticism and Christian Unitarianism interprets the organic interaction in-between man, nature and god. Giving the earliest examples of Transcendentalist nature-writing, Emerson and Whitman are open for a cultural-ecological reading because cultural ecology as a new direction in ecocriticism, brings together ecology and aesthetics, nature and man, environment and literature, language and culture in other words human and non-human universes. As an inter-disciplinary theory developing in a dynamic way, cultural ecology, according to Zapf, “can be described as the interrelation of three major discursive functions such as the ‘culture-critical metadiscourse,’ ‘an imaginative counter-discourse,’ and a ‘reintegrative interdiscourse’” (Zapf 2016: 96). In the first model, the artistic work is analyzed to reveal the workings of an oppressive ideological structure and dogmatic values of the society whereas the second one points out the representations of otherness and marginalization within a text and finally last one tries to exemplify the co-evolution of both models in searching for the “transformative role of literature” within “eco-semiotic” discourse. In that sense, this article intends to find out how the poetic examples of Emerson and Whitman fit into the triadic model of cultural ecology. The argument proceeds through the illustration of Zapf’s triadic model in Emerson’s “Hamatreya,” and Whitman’s “The Splendid, Silent Sun.”

POLİSİYE KURGUDA ÖTEKİNİN (YANLIŞ) TEMSİLİ: KAYIP EL VAKASI ÖYKÜSÜNDE SUÇLU ÖTEKİ OLARAK GÖÇEBE ROMANLAR

This study seeks to examine (mis) representations of otherness in British detective fiction and focuses on the travelling gypsies as the criminal other in “The Case of the Missing Hand”, a story published in 1895 in Chronicles of Martin Hewitt by Arthur Morrison. In line with its objectives, the study firstly introduces characteristics of Victorian detective fiction and then provides a literary analysis of the crime story with a presumed murder victim, an exoticized crime setting, the detective figure and a foreign gypsy as the criminal other. In the article, it is argued that Morrison’s short story is a reflection of the strong stereotyping of the gypsies in Victorian society and depicts misrepresentation of the figure of the outsider gypsy as the criminal/villain in British community for endangering their sense of security and safety in the period. The use of primaeval superstitions as a motive for committing a crime further demonstrates estrangement of the gypsy community by distancing them both culturally and temporally through implications of primitiveness and savageness

The Novel and the New Ethics by Dorothy J. Hale

Reviewed by: The Novel and the New Ethics by Dorothy J. Hale Frederick W. Feldman Hale, Dorothy J. 2020. The Novel and the New Ethics. Post*45. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. $90.00 hc. $30.00 sc. xxii + 330 pp. Ethics has been steadily taking center stage in literary studies, and Dorothy J. Hale’s new monograph pushes it to the fore of the conversation. Perennial concerns about the novel’s commodification, domination, and representations of otherness and subalternity all bespeak ethical consternation. At the same time, defenses of the humanities often appeal to literary reading’s promotion of empathy or justice. This concern with ethics and human rights is not restricted to the academy, as even a brief look at the last few decades of Pulitzer Prize-winning novels shows. Hale has recognized this renewed focus on ethics and argues that it grows directly out of the tradition of Henry James. Thus, The Novel and the New Ethics makes ethics definitional to the Anglo-American novel. In Hale’s theory of the novel, the genre is protean but not formless. Rather, “the novelistic aesthetics of alterity” (xi) is driven by the particular ethical demands posed by a given novel’s program of characterological autonomy. With that said, Hale refuses to endorse a particular ethical theory or argue that the novel qua novel actually has ethical import—this is a formal theory of the novel within a specific (though extensive) Jamesian Anglo-American tradition. As such, the book is first and foremost a literary history. Chapter 1 is where Hale works out the feature claim of the book, focusing on contemporary novels. While Hale identifies novelistic ideas of characterological autonomy in the work and craft-talk of earlier [End Page 790] authors, James is the writer who “most inspires and authorizes” this tradition of novelistic ethics; he is the “fountainhead for the aesthetics of alterity” (25). To draw this Jamesian genealogy, Hale summons a variety of textual support to write a sometimes surprising literary history. Whereas modernism is generally understood as a “break” from the explicit ethical concerns characterizing the periods that both precede and follow it (and recent work on the novel of human rights has reiterated this view), Hale provocatively argues that modernism is where the idea that narrative necessarily implies an ethics solidifies. Particular attention is given to the novelists’ own comments on their work, and Hale excels at this sort of close reading. Taking passages from Gish Jen’s lectures and reading them against Virginia Woolf’s essays, for example, Hale draws out surprising commonalities and material differences between the ethical attitudes expressed and metaphors employed, yet always finds something that points back to James. An impressive amount of contemporary novelists are touched on in a dense and persuasive chapter. The survey in the first chapter also serves to show the degree to which the new ethical turn in novel-writing has made the author’s ethical attitudes part of the conversation. This scrutiny, however, is not all that new. In Chapter 2, Hale turns to the source with a reading of What Maisie Knew. Her project is as much about how the inheritors of James’s tradition have received and responded to his stated goals and how they evaluate whether Maisie lives up to them as it is about how the ethics of otherness are felt in the novel itself. Hale begins the chapter not with James but with Toni Morrison mentioning James, continuing the book’s project of showing his contemporary influence. The dual approach of both examining James’s aesthetics of alterity in Maisie while also tracing its reception among other authors and critics makes this chapter a particularly effective close reading. Chapters 3 and 4 are close readings of novels by Zadie Smith and J. M. Coetzee. In Chapter 3, Hale examines On Beauty in light of Smith’s stated ethical goals and modernist influences—taken from interviews, essays, and allusions to other works—and, importantly, argues for how the novel itself, its aesthetics driven by its particular ethical problems, differs from those other genres. An unexpected but intriguing comparative reading of William Faulkner investigates style’s ethical implications. Hale ends...

Resistance and Representation: The Making of Chinese Identity in the Art of The Yiyanhui and the Equator Art Society in 1950s Singapore

This paper examines the social realist paintings of the art groups Yiyanhui and the Equator Art Society which emerged during the 1950s in Malaya and Singapore. Their works centred on the social functions of art and its subject matters featured the working class, the Japanese occupation and anti-British colonial sentiment. Their artworks are viewed here as cultural productions shaped by the negotiation between dominant-subordinate relationships within a postcolonial framework. It is argued that the artistic productions examined here may be viewed not only for its overarching “social realist” endeavours but, also as a struggle to rewrite the narrative of the Chinese in Malaya against of the prevailing static representations forwarded by the colonial campaign. The first part of the paper illustrates how colonial discourse in the local press propagated an image of the Chinese as inherently susceptible to communism, untrustworthy, and opportunistic. The second part of the paper shows how the artists resisted this essentialist image of Chinese identity and offered a more complex picture of a Chinese-Malayan identity. Through a combination of interviews, written artist’s statements, formal and contextual considerations of the artworks, as well as a cultural studies framework, I demonstrate how a different narrative is being offered by these artists through two related processes in identity construction: qualifications for authenticity and belonging, the articulation of ambivalence. Resistance thus, is explored as encompassing a network of strategies employed by these artists as a way to reject colonialist representations of otherness and gain authorial agency against the intellectual and ideological dominance of colonial discourse.

Alteridade sem voz:

Este trabalho analisa as mediações jornalísticas construídas acerca da operação realizada por agentes das polícias Civil e Militar de São Paulo, em maio de 2017, na região central da cidade conhecida como “Cracolândia”. O episódio resultou em ampla cobertura por veículos de imprensa, que cederam espaço às falas do prefeito e de autoridades policiais, enfatizando o problema de segurança pública e supostos prejuízos econômicos decorrentes da existência da Cracolândia. Focalizamos as coberturas construídas pelos jornais Folha de S. Paulo e O Estado de S. Paulo, considerando suas edições impressas publicadas em 22 de maio de 2017. A partir desses recortes, interessa-nos analisar, discursivamente, as representações de alteridade construídas pelas mídias jornalísticas em foco, discutindo as (in)visibilidades conferidas ao Outro.

Mutual recognition: A dialogue between Italian and Russian perspectives

The knowledge and understanding of kaleidoscopic and hypermodern societies rely heavily on the term “recognition.” This term carried a great deal of significance in the Russian philosophical tradition, but attracts less attention now. The main purpose of this paper is to offer a contribution to the discussion on this topic, by considering both the Russian and the European philosophical traditions, with specific reference to the Italian perspective. The methodological focus is concerned with the two essential aspects of recognition: that of the interpersonal and that of the group. Our philosophical analysis of recognition endeavors to take into account first and foremost the problematic field of Otherness. The process of recognition of the Other is thus considered according to three stages of approval: cognitive, moral and social. Cognitive approval includes the identification of the Other as opposite to the group as well as to each individual. The moral stage contemplates concretization of social objectives and accepting the Other as a whole that should above all be respected and accepted. At the stage of social approval, the individual is being recognized within the social context of a group (closed social group) as recognition or rejection. Specifying the recognition leads to a reduction in the number of conflicts, the clarification of borders, and the acceptance of Otherness as an element of individuality. The contribution to the theory of recognition here outlined is new to the Russian scientific context, and may prove challenging in the context of Russian-Italian dialogue. It also constitutes an attempt to compare the common representations of Otherness with current theoretical developments. The theory is illustrated by analysis of closed social groups functioning as a promising series of case studies, in order to open up a renewed interest in research into social reality theories in both Russian and Italian contexts.

Whose tweets? The rhetorical functions of social media use in developing the Black Lives Matter movement.

Research on collective action frequently characterizes social media as a tool for mobilization. However, social media activity can fulfil a variety of different functions for social change. In particular, the rhetorical functions of social media use by social movements are not well understood. We address this shortfall by analysing the rhetorical functions of Twitter use during an early stage of the Black Lives Matter social movement. We examine how activists used Twitter to balance competing aims for social change, such as growing the movement beyond disadvantaged-group members, while preventing appropriation or dilution of their message by advantaged-group 'allies'. We find that although Twitter users promote different, and often competing, definitions of the issues that the movement represents, rhetorical strategies are used to advance inclusive definitions that focus on racism. When activists address alternative definitions of movement actors and issues, representations of Otherness are used to characterize the proponents of these definitions as in opposition to the movement. Finally, we find that one way of resolving the tension between growing the movement and promoting disadvantaged-group control is by using identity and technology resources to explicitly define (1) how different groups can be movement advocates, and (2) action strategies for social change.

Alteridad, migraciones y racismo en redes sociales virtuales: un estudio de caso en Facebook

Resumen El objeto teórico de estudio de este trabajo son las representaciones de alteridad sobre las migraciones y las nuevas lógicas de funcionamiento del racismo en Facebook, a través de un estudio de caso concreto. La pregunta de investigación es si presentan características particulares dichas representaciones y lógicas de funcionamiento del racismo, en el contexto estudiado, al ser vehiculadas a través de redes sociales virtuales. Para ello se ha procedido a través un diseño metodológico basado en el análisis de contenido. Los resultados apuntan a un recrudecimiento de los discursos racistas a través de estos medios sociales, en comparación con los discursos que podemos encontrar en los medios de comunicación de masas tradicionales.

Counter-memory and representations of otherness: Three documentaries by Fred Kudjo Kuwornu

Abstract This study analyses how the documentary films of Italian-Ghanaian activist and director Fred Kuwornu attempt to correct inaccurate historical interpretations that have delineated the space of blacks in cultural memory as a space of absence. These films interrogate discourses of otherness in different contexts: Inside Buffalo (Kuwornu and Jeffrey, 2010) about African American soldiers in the Second World War; 18 Ius soli: il diritto di essere italiani (18 Ius soli: The Right to Be Italian) (Kuwornu and Jeffrey, 2012) decrying the denial of citizenship to children of migrants in Italy; and Blaxploitalian: 100 anni di afrostorie nel cinema italiano (Blaxploitalian: One Hundred Years of Blackness in Italian Cinema) (Kuwornu and Jeffrey, 2016) tracing the screen presence of black actors in Italy. The study argues that the intertexuality in these films exposes repressed cultural memory and counter-memory that are critical for deconstructing racist formulations of national identity in Italy and the United States. Furthermore, the article seeks to investigate the claim to objectivity that documentary makes by examining the autobiographical elements that the filmmaker has inserted into his works.

New Directions in Travel Writing Studies eds. by Julia Kuehn and Paul Smethurst

Reviewed by: New Directions in Travel Writing Studies eds. by Julia Kuehn and Paul Smethurst Leilei Chen (bio) Julia Kuehn and Paul Smethurst, editors. New Directions in Travel Writing Studies. Palgrave, 2015. Pp. xiii, 325. US $109.99. Travel literature studies gained scholarly interest after the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism in 1978 and has since witnessed various critical approaches, including postcolonialist readings that critique the genre's imperialist ideology; attention to region-, time-, and author-specific narratives; and focuses on tourism, gender, and postmodern travel. The eighteen essays in New Directions in Travel Writing Studies, edited by Julie Kuehn and Paul Smethurst, represent the major critical methodologies applied to the genre and aim to "augmen[t] and complemen[t]" what is already available in the field (Kuehn and Smethurst 2). The book develops travel writing studies within the emerging field of geo-humanities through its "particular focus on the spatio-linguistic properties" of the genre (3). Part I, "Textuality," contains three essays that examine "the semiotics of travel"—the language travel writers employ (5). One essay compares the original and revised versions of the same text; one analyzes the often underestimated importance of language in tourists' cross-cultural accounts; and the third investigates the paratexts—titles, prefaces, footnotes, images, and epigraphs—of travel books to lay bare the complexity and instability of the genre. Michael Cronin's study of travel, language, and translation would be a valuable addition here because translation is at stake in cross-cultural contacts: he proposes to examine the traces of intralingual, interlingual, and intersemiotic translation in travel writing (Cronin 3). Part II, "Topology," explores the concept of the "geocritical imagination" and includes three essays that place geographical environments at the centre of reading travel literature (Kuehn and Smethurst 6). This approach showcases the contradictions that can exist between a traveller's original sense of a place and his/her response to it while travelling there and questions the truthfulness of travel writing, seen in such scholarship as Nicholas Clifford's "A Truthful Impression of the Country." Charles Forsdick's essay in Part III, "Mobility," is particularly strong. It questions travel writing's excessive dependence on the visual and attends instead to texts produced by visually impaired travellers. This approach to the travel genre builds on David Spurr's critique of the excessive reliance on visibility articulated in The Rhetoric of Empire. Part IV, "Mapping," contains essays that examine the political, ideological, and commercial implications of either scientifically or imaginatively constructed maps and forms another dimension of the book's geohumanities focus. [End Page 284] Part V, "Alterity," examines representations of otherness in travel literature. Wendy Bracewell's essay focuses on texts produced by "travellees," or writers from within the countries that European travel writers visit. She admits that the term "travellees"—borrowed from Mary Louise Pratt—is "slightly awkward," yet Bracewell's approach does not reinforce the self/other binary that the term seems to suggest (Kuehn and Smethurst 216). I find it intriguing that her approach stages a cross-cultural dialogue and gives voice to the subject of the traveller. This voice is meaningful not only because it questions the authority of the traveller's report on the foreign country but also because it materializes his or her moments of critical self-reflection. For example, the eighteenth-century French travel writer Fleuriot de Langle's depictions of Spain are understood by the Spaniards as "sarcastic," "flippant," and inaccurate (221); the Spanish man-of-letters Antonio Ponz acknowledges that, although erroneous, foreign travellers' accounts of the country in the 1780s set a "most efficacious alarm to make us take account" (qtd. in Kuehn and Smethurst 221). He values the self-reflections elicited by the cross-cultural narratives. Bracewell suggests that putting the individual and the collective "I" in brackets and taking the others' perspectives into account make travel conceptually productive. The volume ends with "Globality," a critical perspective that investigates the utopian dimension of travel writing and studies the forms of cosmopolitanism represented in the genre. In addition to the geohumanities approaches to travel writing, the essays included in this volume pertain to Japan, China, Mexico, Hong Kong, the Pacific, and Africa, and...

An exploratory look at the representations of identity and otherness in blogs written by women of the Portuguese diaspora in the United Kingdom

Abstract With this article we explore the effects of new technologies in dispersed communities, focusing on the identity construction process and the representation of otherness in the female blogosphere of Portuguese diaspora in the United Kingdom. The theoretical framework interlinks reflections on diaspora and migration issues, the concept of nation, imagined communities, national imaginary and fictional traditions, identity representations and otherness. The methodological approach includes quantitative and qualitative methods of analysis (WebCA) of blogs from the Portuguese diasporic community in England and takes as reference the research by Manuel Cunha (2009). I attempted to identify the marks of Portugueseness, otherness and identity peculiarities and have reached diametrically opposite conclusions compared with Cunha’s study. I did not find an excessive display of classic symbolic resources of Portuguese identity in the blogs of migrants or the idealization of Portugal; on the contrary, I found an open wound, strong critics about society, economic problems, unemployment and corruption of the Portuguese government. If in Cunha’s study Portugal appears to be the ‘promised land’, here the host land takes that place. The United Kingdom is mainly described as a haven of economic, cultural and social opportunities that were denied to the migrants in their country of origin. Although the fascination for the host land is dominant, I also detected speeches that reveal loneliness, non-identification and misunderstanding of some practices in the English society, and otherness towards the English, and other migrants. This study also reveals signs of hybridization between the host culture and the culture of origin in the migrant’s daily life and changes in the consumption of ethnic media. In addition, this work shows how blogging practices enable a true interaction between current and future migrants that goes beyond the cyberspace, turning into relations of friendship, altruism and support.

Race and ethnicity in the construction of the nation in Spain: the case of the Maragatos

ABSTRACTNationalism and its counterpart, modernism, are projects that involve the attempt to homogenize and incorporate the masses through the creation of a majority identity that usually leads to the classification of certain deviant groups as ‘others’. In Spain, civic and ethnic nationalisms driven by the state have historically drawn on cultural and biological notions of ethnicity and race to construct a representation of the Maragatos as ‘cursed peoples’, while at the same time homogenizing and incorporating them into the nation in practice. By tracing a genealogy of the origins and evolution of the representations of Maragato otherness created during the Enlightenment era, the Franco dictatorship and the current super-modern period, this paper argues that representations of otherness significantly influence current research agendas and understandings of identity well beyond the disappearance of the actual subjects described as others.

Discursive constructions of otherness in populist radical right political blogs

AbstractThis article provides a comparative study of the discursive construction and use of Otherness among anti‐immigration populist radical right politicians in Sweden and Finland. Based on rhetorical and critical discursive psychology, our analyses of discourse within nine political blogs identified three distinct representations of Otherness. These representations of a deviant group of people, of a threatening ideology and of inner enemies are highly familiar from previous research on radical right discourse. However, what seems to characterize populist radical right discourse in the Nordic context is the strong reliance on the rhetorical juxtaposition between the welfare system and immigration. Our study furthermore highlights how populist radical right politicians exploit the digital discursive tools provided by political blogging. These tools, first, create a sense of connectedness and mutual understanding between blogger and reader and, second, allow the blogger to convey messages that are hostile towards immigrants and ethnic minorities without expressing an explicit personal opinion. In combination, the features provided by political blogging and the discursive and rhetorical strategies that deny racism make discourse within a populist radical right political blog especially powerful and convincing. We conclude that research must be sensitive to this ‘digital discourse’, as it reaches a public far beyond the sphere of a political blog through its potential to spread and influence mainstream media.

Review essay: Shuttered experiences and revolution; A. Agathangelou and N. Soguk, (eds), Arab Revolutions and World Transformations

<p>This review essay involves a critical presentation and reflection of the volume edited by Anna Agathangelou and Nerzat Soguk entitled <em>Arab Revolutions and World Transformations</em> (London: Routledge, 2013). This volume contributes to the enrichment of the problematic regarding the Arab uprisings and opens up a discussion on three basic issues: firstly, revolution within the framework of postcolonial critique; secondly, the encounters between the local and the global; and lastly on the impact of social poetics and aesthetics of people as agents, beyond dominant orientalised discourses and representations of otherness. Under the lens of political anthropology and philosophy, this review essay introduces to these critical approaches an additional focus, that of the concept of “dignity”. Its ethical dimension should remind us of the importance of affect on the building of the universally posed political questions concerning democracy, revolution, social movements, citizenship and civic virtue.</p><p> </p>

The Vampire Film: Undead Cinema ( Jeffrey Weinstock)

<i>The Vampire Film: Undead Cinema</i> ( Jeffrey Weinstock)