Transnational Encounters Research Articles

Developing Cosmopolitan Communicative Competence Through Online Transnational Encounters

This article reports on a study examining the extent to which pedagogical activities can affect students’ cosmopolitan communicative competence (CCC) through online transnational encounters. A total of 58 students from a Hong Kong university and 25 students from an American university were divided into 25 transnational groups. They communicated with each other through Google Docs, sharing culturally rich texts, exchanging views on these texts, and discussing rhetorical and cultural preferences/differences. After analyzing 90,000-word communication transcripts, we found that most of the students demonstrated and developed their cosmopolitan dispositions, skills, and knowledge. Based on these findings, we discuss how the activity contributed to the students’ CCC by addressing four dialectical relations: historicity–modernity, text–context, self–other, and universality–particularity. The participants were challenged to make seemingly culturally irrelevant texts relevant to the transnational peers by moving the (ancient) texts across time scales and sociocultural contexts. The online communication based on the culturally (ir)relevant texts was a valuable site for the learners to enhance understanding about self and other, and examine the intricacies between universal and particular norms, values, and beliefs. The four dialectical relations can function as a set of heuristics for practitioners and researchers to reframe digital English Language Teaching (ELT) practices from the perspective of cosmopolitanism.
 Cet article est un compte rendu d’une étude menée pour permettre de jeter un regard sur la mesure dans laquelle les activités pédagogiques peuvent affecter la compétence de communication cosmopolite (CCC) des étudiantes et étudiants grâce à des rencontres internationales en ligne. Un groupe d’étudiantes et étudiants dont 58 provenaient d’une université hongkongaise et 25, d’une université américaine, a été subdivisé en 25 groupes transnationaux. Ceux-ci ont communiqué entre eux dans Google Docs pour partager des textes à forte teneur culturelle, échanger des vues sur leurs textes et discuter de préférences/différences en matière de contenu stylistique et de culture. Après avoir analysé des transcriptions d’une longueur globale de 90 000 mots, nous avons été à même de constater que la majorité des étudiantes et étudiants possédaient et développaient des dispositions, des compétences et des connaissances cosmopolites. Sur la base de ces constatations, nous avons cherché à voir ce que l’activité avait apporté à la CCC des étudiantes et étudiants en appliquant quatre relations dialectiques : historicité–modernité, texte–contexte, soi–autre et universalité–particularité. Les participantes et participants ont été mis au défi de prendre des textes en apparence dépourvus de pertinence culturelle et de les rendre pertinents à des pairs transnationaux en transposant les textes (anciens) sur des échelles temporelles et à travers divers contextes socioculturels. La communication en ligne basée sur des textes (non)pertinents a procuré un point de rencontre important pour permettre aux apprenantes et apprenants d’approfondir leur compréhension de soi et de l’autre et de se sensibiliser à la subtilité des rapports qui existent entre les normes, les valeurs et les croyances universelles et particulières. Les quatre relations dialectiques peuvent fonctionner comme un jeu d’heuristiques au niveau de l’enseignement et des recherches en permettant de recadrer les pratiques numériques d’enseignement de l’anglais (ELT) sous l’angle du cosmopolitisme.

Western Interactions and Influences

Based on archival research and interviews, this study examines the history of Chinese photography's interaction and engagement with the West between 1978 and 1988, and argues that these transnational encounters provided inspiration to Chinese photographers in their resistance to isolation and propaganda, two legacies from the Mao era. If in the artistic realm, the media's intensive introduction of Western works diversified the genres and styles of Chinese photography, in the journalistic field, Western exhibitions and training propelled Chinese news photographers to reconsider their professional role and social responsibility.

Chosen Brotherhood in Abdellah Taïa’s Celui qui est digne d’être aimé

This article analyzes the final letter in Abdellah Taïa’s epistolary novel, Celui qui est digne d’être aimé (2017). First, I examine the relationship of chosen brotherhood between two queer characters, Ahmed and Lahbib, as well as Lahbib’s explicit definition of the brotherly bond between them. Subsequently, I turn to Lahbib’s account of his transnational sexual exploitation, in which he nuances his initial definition of chosen brotherhood to include a protective element. I then show how the transnational sexual encounter, which reveals the residue of the colonial era, causes the boys to look after one another differently. When readers learn that Lahbib will take his own life, the epistolary nature of the text changes and a reading in which the text serves as a cautionary tale emerges. To conclude, I focus on the concept of worth, present in the letter and the novel’s title to argue that chosen brotherhood both serves as a refuge from exploitation and provides the foundational discourse necessary to establish worth among the queer marginalized.

Tourism and the dynamics of transnational mnemonic encounters

The turn towards transnational memory has largely focused on particular sites and modes of remembering, focusing on the creation of memories between and beyond nation-states in institutional politics, the media, migration and to a lesser degree social movements. Despite its significance for encountering other people’s past, international tourism remains under-examined in the scholarship due to a focus on macro-developments, a polarisation along a binary of cosmopolitan versus conflictive memories and a discounting of memories shaped by commercialised logics. Drawing on a case study of Russian tourism in Tallinn, Estonia, this article makes the case for a closer examination of tourist encounters as part of research on transnational memory. It examines how tourism works as an arena for the production and circulation of memories through direct transnational encounters, refracting and modifying macro-political memories within a commercialised service environment. We analyse the role of tour guides as mnemonic intermediaries and show how in their work with Russian tourists they navigate pasts that form the subject of on-going memory conflicts at the level of international politics. Their representational strategies deemphasise contested pasts and avoid conflicts through neutrality and compromise. At the same time, tourist encounters can also be used to create spaces for dialogue and the formation of positive relations. Overall, the article demonstrates both the productivity and frictions of tourist settings for transnational remembering and makes the case for considering more ambiguous cases in transnational memory research.

Tropical Travels: Brazilian Popular Performance, Transnational Encounters, and the Construction of Race ‐ by Shaw, Lisa

Tropical Travels: Brazilian Popular Performance, Transnational Encounters, and the Construction of Race ‐ by Shaw, Lisa

Dancing Africa in Diaspora: Music, Conundrums and Transnational Encounter

Dancing Africa in Diaspora: Music, Conundrums and Transnational Encounter

Tropical Travels: Brazilian Popular Performance, Transnational Encounters, and the Construction of Race by Lisa Shaw

Tropical Travels: Brazilian Popular Performance, Transnational Encounters, and the Construction of Race by Lisa Shaw

“Creative Control: Navigating Foreign Presence in Contemporary Dominican and Cuban Narrative and Film”

This article participates in debates surrounding the ethics of international travel through analysis of contemporary short fiction by Dominican writer Aurora Arias, and Cubans Alberto Guerra Naranjo and Mylene Fernández Pintado. Through characters who are local and foreign writers and scholars, these works highlight the ethics and politics of mobility existing in transnational encounters, and the ramifications for the creative process of Caribbean cultural workers. I examine what these works communicate about the struggle of Caribbean cultural workers to be recognized and heard by their counterparts based in North America and Europe, as well as a broader readership. Arias and Guerra employ metafictional elements to critique and challenge feelings of illegitimacy, while all three writers use humor to turn the tables on power relations and inspire reflection on the possibility of ethical encounters, and even collaboration, between local and foreign intellectuals.

The Neoliberal Production of a “Culture of Poverty” in a Korean Migrant Enclave in Northeast China

Research Article| August 01 2018 The Neoliberal Production of a “Culture of Poverty” in a Korean Migrant Enclave in Northeast China Mun Young Cho Mun Young Cho Mun Young Cho is an associate professor in the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Yonsei University, South Korea. Her research focuses on poverty, labor, activism, development, and youth in China and South Korea. She is the author of the book The Specter of “the People”: Urban Poverty in Northeast China (2013). Her current research focuses on changing landscapes of “the social” in China and South Korea. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google positions (2018) 26 (3): 516–546. https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-6868267 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter Email Permissions Search Site Citation Mun Young Cho; The Neoliberal Production of a “Culture of Poverty” in a Korean Migrant Enclave in Northeast China. positions 1 August 2018; 26 (3): 516–546. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-6868267 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll Journalspositions Search Advanced Search How do recent transnational encounters in East Asia help us explore the condition of poverty amidst increasingly unpredictable global and national political economy? Against a backdrop of East Asian “postmiracle” times, this article sheds light on the precarity of South Korean migrants in Northeast China, whose labor is no longer demanded in Korea’s neoliberal restructuring processes and who try their luck in China’s uncertain but fast-growing economy.In Seotap, a Korean migrant enclave in Shenyang, South Korean sojourners, who mostly engage in the unstable service sector, have undergone the fluctuations of life in response to shifting relationships to Korean Chinese dwellers as well as to political economic transformations across their homeland and the receiving country. The author examines how these migrants experience and respond to endemic fear of becoming a “loser,” a stigmatic marker of poverty, with an eye to the neoliberal production of a “culture of poverty.”The author argues that a “culture of poverty,” which is invoked in Seotap, is neither a subculture that is passed down from generation to generation among a particular group of the poor, nor a disposition that is allegedly found among those who rely on governmental welfare schemes. The neoliberal production of a “culture of poverty” indicates contingent processes in which many ordinary people, who experience life insecurity and downward mobility under neoliberal economic transformations, invoke and (re)produce arbitrary cultural markers of poverty to secure their normalcy and distance themselves from other “losers.” Despite staying outside a nation’s governmental scheme based on the measured distinction between the poor and the nonpoor, transnational sojourners whom the author met in Seotap summon the arbitrary markers of poverty, which have been coined and widely narrated along with the very scheme. Importantly, however, their action does not just end up with a makeshift delineation of the other poor but also marks the embodiment of what they blame. The author’s ethnography brings to light how precarious migrants, who are caught up in erratic political, economic shifts in both China and South Korea, are often inescapably embroiled in cultural and moral constructions of poverty as they are pushed into a series of informal, illicit practices for survival. This statement does not signal psychological features of poverty but suggests the grievous entanglement of structural, political economic violence and affective burden on the daily web of individual lives. poverty, culture of poverty, neoliberal, migration, loser, normalcy, South Korean migrants, Joseonjok (Korean Chinese), political economy The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2018 Duke University Press2018 You do not currently have access to this content.

Choreographing “ChinAfrica” through Transnational Encounter

A dance film made by two Belgian directors collaborating with Guangdong Modern Dance Company, An African Walk in the Land of China (2015) attempts to explore the encounter of an African woman with Chinese workers in urban China in the age of “ChinAfrica.” In this work, the co-directors create a “duet” between an ensemble of Chinese dancers portrayed as blue-collar workers and a black female dancer depicted as a woman from an unspecified country in Africa. In my analysis, I juxtapose choreographic and cinematic representations of the African woman and Chinese workers with the complex social reality of their diverse experiences of encounters. Resisting any singular reading, the dance film provokes questions and stirs up reflections about the ever-intensifying interactions between Chinese and Africans at economic, political and cultural levels operating under global capitalism. This seemingly detached approach, while offering opportunities for multiple readings of the film, also glosses over the complexity of the very ideas of Africans and Chinese as well as their transnational encounters. The gap between the filmic representation and reality unveils the directors’ reductionistic approach to representing ethnic figures and their experiences of each other on screen, indicating a persistent but well-masked colonial gaze.

English in the key of Babel: Feeling, affecting, and performing language

ABSTRACTWhat is at stake for multilingual subjects when English becomes a site of conflicting emotions about being in/with the world? What does it mean to understand, negotiate with, and perform the meaning of English as a global curriculum, a lingua franca, a “thing” of the senses, and a desire awakened by narratives feeding into and being fed by discourses of power, appropriateness, globalization, and cosmopolitanism? In this performative auto/ethnography, I enact twenty years of data collected and organized in the feeling, teaching, studying, and experiencing of English through transnational encounters in classrooms, workplaces, immigration centers, and on the streets of the so-called “developed” and “underdeveloped” nations.

Transnational Identities of Dutch Nazi-Collaborators and their Struggle for Integration into the National Community

Transnational Identities of Dutch Nazi-Collaborators and their Struggle for Integration into the National Community This article aims to shed light on how Nazi collaborators’ transnational encounters and exchanges generated attitudes and outlooks that are different and more diverse than those that one would be able to find when focusing solely on the issue of reintegration from the perspective of the nation-state framework. Military service in the German forces produced significant reconfigurations in the sense of identity and belonging of these non-German Nazis. Highlighting the Dutch example, we argue that such far-reaching experiences strongly affected the position to which these people aspired in the restored post-war nation-state. We will demonstrate their ambition to adapt their own outlook in some respects to the guiding principles of their liberal-democratic surroundings, and indicate the limitations as well as the opportunities that both state and society provided in the process.

The Politics of US Feminist Internationalism and Cuba: Solidarities and Fractures on the Venceremos Brigades, 1969-89

Despite US travel bans to Cuba, a wide spectrum of US feminist and radical activists defied and crossed geo-political borders to participate in unique modes of solidarity activism and alliances with Cuba revolutionaries. Based on the narratives of US feminist political travellers who joined the Venceremos Brigades, an anti-imperialist radical education project, this article analyses the difficult conversations about feminism, gender politics, homophobia, racism, cultural imperialism, revolutionary priorities, social change strategies, and intersectionality as well as the productive organisational linkages that were generated by this political travel. This article highlights how political differences were both managed and/or silenced within transnational activist encounters, and concludes by suggesting the import of these debates for building and sustaining multi-issue and coalitional affinities within contemporary transnational feminist organising and solidarity delegations.

LANGUAGE AND POWER IN AN ENGLISH CONVENT IN EXILE, c. 1621 – c. 1631

AbstractScholarship on transnational encounter has predominantly focused on men's cross-cultural interactions. This article breaks new ground by exploring women's roles in similar forms of linguistic and power negotiation within the context of English convents founded in Europe during the seventeenth century. Moreover, recent scholarship on English convents has so far remained silent on the question of how these women negotiated the language barriers that many of them faced. This article proposes an answer by examining the correspondence sent in the 1620s from the English Benedictine convent in Brussels. These letters reveal the changing ways in which English nuns relied on both male and female translators to communicate. In so doing, this article expands existing scholarly understanding of epistolary and literary culture by exploring the authorial strategies employed in the convent, which afforded the nuns a sense of authority over their texts. The letters were vital avenues for the women to express dissent, and raise concerns over the way their community was governed. Finally, despite being enclosed institutions, English convents in exile were not monoglot spaces but porous sites of multi-lingual encounter.

Transmodalities and Transnational Encounters: Fostering Critical Cosmopolitan Relations

The ‘trans-’ turn in language studies illuminates human communication as the coordination and interpretation of a vast array of semiotic resources that are entangled with language in fluid and unpredictable ways. It also highlights the current era of globalization in which communication occurs with ever-increasing rapidity among ever-expanding audiences, through rapidly changing semiotic means and modes. It transcends the local, to become translocal and transnational, indexing the diversity of actors engaged in new configurations of communicative engagements. Framed by notions of repertoires and modalities, in this article I offer a rationale for and close articulation of transmodalities, to more fully consider processes of semiosis across place, space, and time. Because meanings matter—especially relational aspects of communication—I propose critical cosmopolitanism to account for humane, ethical approaches to human engagements and their outcomes. I provide data from a project that connects youth across the globe through technology-mediated communications to demonstrate how these dual frames—transmodalities and critical cosmopolitanism—can serve as guideposts and heuristic lenses for transnational interactions, relations, and learning in a globalized, technologized world.

Aporias of foreignness: transnational encounters in cinema

ABSTRACTThis introduction examines the meaning of foreignness, drawing on Jacques Derrida‘s discussion of ‘the aporia’ to propose that foreignness is critically aporetic - undecidable and unstable. At a moment when racist political rhetoric is being normalized and xenophobic political movements are on the rise, thinking about ‘aporias of foreignness’ allows us to reflect upon questions of belonging and hospitality, and the complexity and historical contingency of the relationship between self and other, indigenous citizen and immigrant, asylum-seeker or refugee. The introductory chapter proposes that cinema is a crucial medium through which to rethink foreignness since cinema always involves a potentially disorienting encounter with the unfamiliar, an encounter that is at the centre of the work of artist Ai Weiwei in film and other media.

A Korean, an Australian, a Nomad, and a Martial Artist meet on the Tibetan Plateau: Encounters with Foreigners in a Tibetan Comedy from Amdo

This article examines the complex processes by which a Tibetan comedy reaches state-sponsored stages in western China's Qinghai Province. By reflecting on my own participation in a Tibetan sketch comedy for a Tibetan-language, provincial version of the Chunjie wanhui, China Central Television's annual New Year's Gala, I examine the Tibetan sketch comedy as a staged vernacular ethnography of a transnational encounter. Juxtaposing Tibetan nomads with characters of Korean and Australian origin, such staged encounters create a productive friction that provides a space for public meditation on politically and culturally sensitive issues central to the negotiation of Tibetanness in the twenty-first century, including cultural preservation and ecological conservation.

Mapping the Transnational in Contemporary Native American Fiction: Silko and Welch

Author(s): Merish, Lori | Abstract: Revisiting the terrain of the 2012 JTAS Special Forum, “Charting Transnational Native American Studies,” this essay argues both that the transnational is a valuable, productive lens for understanding Native American literature, and that a consideration of Native American texts is indispensable to the “transnational turn” in Americanist literary scholarship. The essay argues that Native American literary texts engage the transnational in three ways: affirming “America” as transnational cultural space from its inception by staging ways Native cultures “dis-identif[y] with the nation”; affirming the transnational complexity of Native cultures; and registering Pan-Indian and indigenous transnationalisms vitally alive in the present. The essay advances these claims through readings of two recent historical novels by major Native American authors: Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens of the Dunes (2000), and James Welch’s The Heartsong of Charging Elk (2001). Both novels are set in the late nineteenth century, a critical period in Native American history, especially in the American West; and both novels map complex itineraries for Native American characters who travel abroad, scripting transnationalism in diasporic terms. The essay argues that Silko’s novel portrays transnational encounter as global transindigeneity, casting the transnational as a vehicle to awaken and activate feminist and especially ecofeminist transindigenous solidarities, while Welch employs the form of the transnational bildungsroman to make visible tribal processes of cultural adaptation and transnational dimensions of tribal cultures at “home.”

THE LOGIC OF TIV FILM COMMUNICATION FOR SOCIOECONOMIC GROWTH AND DEVELOPMENT.

There is a growing demand for there inforcement of minority rights against the empty rhetoric of patriotism and unity in diversity within the framework of the Nigerian nation state. It has become obvious that transnational encounters within Nigeria has created various forms of superiorities and dominance-cultural, democracy-wise, ethnic, media, communication, economic, political-and be-wigged to alienate and subvert minority rights, privileges and heritage thus creating complicated consequences which severally call for self assertion, even aggression and crisis. Communication, and particularly the film media, has been one of such centre and periphery monopolistic practices that appropriate a majority culture and number within the notion of Nigerian culture and democracy thereby broadening boundaries of majority cultures and numbers which often clash at some bitter point with minority cultures and numbers, values and visions. This paper examines the complicated network of cultural control and subjugation, mass entertainment and popular culture deploying majority culture as the national one with the consumerism status vested on the minorities as it forsake minority identities and culture and the socio-economic disadvantages there of using Nollywood, a majority cinema, as the basis of binary discourse. This paper calls for a new engagement, one that expressly asserts and appropriates minority rights to deploying film and multimedia for cultural, linguistic, artistic, economic, social and political growth and development. The paper finally calls for theoretical constructs that will accommodate minority rights and projections in communication, film and multimedia for sustainable development keywords: minority rights, majority rights, film, cultural control, Nigerian culture, democracy.

Transnational Encounters between Germany and Japan: Perceptions of Partnership in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.Edited by Joanne Miyang Cho, Lee M. Roberts, and Christian W. Spang. New York: Palgrave, 2016. 280 pages. $100.00.

<b>Transnational Encounters between Germany and Japan: Perceptions of Partnership in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries</b>.<i>Edited by Joanne Miyang Cho, Lee M. Roberts, and Christian W. Spang. New York: Palgrave, 2016. 280 pages. $100.00.</i>