Western Narrative Research Articles

Chinese Narrotologies

Chinese Narrotologies

PRAMOGINIO INTERNETINIO TURINIO MEDIJŲ VAIDMUO SKLEIDŽIANT VAKARUOSE DOMINUOJANČIUS POLITINIUS NARATYVUS

Abstract This article seeks to evaluate whether the fifth ideological filter presented in the Herman-Chomsky propaganda model in 1988 is detected when researching the activities of the online popular entertainment industry and its principles, and to what degree these activities contribute to the spread of prevailing political narratives in the West. The research investigates three popular online entertainment culture websites, whose content is evaluated based on the presence of prevailing Western narratives, and whether they are presented positively (approvingly) or negatively (disapprovingly). The results of the study reveal that although political narrative structures are detected while researching cultural content in popular online culture, they do not play a major role in the overall content, and the contribution to the spread of narratives depends on the editorial policies of the websites, and the forms of the published popular culture content.

Creating Archival Access: Benyamin Lukin and Late Soviet Scholar-Activism

Creating Archival Access: Benyamin Lukin and Late Soviet Scholar-Activism Ellie R. Schainker (bio) The rebirth of Eastern European Jewish studies in the postcommunist era, especially from the discipline of history, often leans on a narrative of archival access. Prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, local archives were closed to western researchers; the fall of the Soviet Union unlocked the archives and overnight the field was resuscitated from its Soviet and Holocaust extinction. It was a narrative that fueled my own passion for the subject and excitement over archival discovery. Some of my greatest joy in mining state records on Jews in Russia and Ukraine came with document delivery, when I signed my name on the paper slip attached to each file—like the library check-out cards of old rendered obsolete by computing. I felt I’d hit the jackpot if I was the first name entered on the archival slip, and often I was only second or third. This western narrative, however, obscures the grassroots efforts made by Soviet Jewish activists of the 1980s who had already then begun to revitalize scholarship on Eastern European Jewry, mining Soviet archives for unpublished sources on the Jewish experience. Many Jewish archival collections that were in secret storage were declassified in the late 1980s and early 1990s due to such interest. A critical personality in this effort and in making former-Soviet archival material accessible to all researchers— including Russian scholars—is Benyamin Lukin. He has worked as head of the Eastern European section of the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People in Israel since the early 1990s. He was trained and worked as an engineer in the Soviet Union, and fell into historical research and Jewish activism through disparate forays into Jewish cemetery [End Page 224] documentation and literary lexicography work. Lukin moved to Israel in 1990, where he became a professional archivist. He has spent the past three decades identifying and collecting historical materials on Russian-Polish Jewry from state archives throughout the former Soviet Union, publishing his own research, and helping several generations of scholars advance the field of Eastern European Jewish studies. His work is central to the spectacular growth of the field in the past thirty years. In the 1980s, Lukin joined a commission documenting local cemeteries in Leningrad. He was responsible for surveying the Preobrazhenskoe, or Jewish cemetery. A local academic, Professor Natal’ia Vasil’evna Yukhniova, asked Lukin to report his findings at an upcoming conference on the ethnography of Leningrad at the Institute for Ethnography. This foray into Jewish studies led to his subsequent participation in expeditions to Jewish towns in Eastern Europe. These expeditions were the brainchild of Ilya Dvorkin, who together with Lukin revived the Jewish Historical Seminar in 1987 and began leading expeditions to Jewish small towns in 1988. There were underground Jewish studies seminars in Leningrad from the 1970s, but Dvorkin and Lukin expanded the theme beyond the Holocaust and Jewish partisans to focus on communal histories. This seminar eventually became the Jewish University in St. Petersburg. In 1988, Lukin and his family joined Dvorkin on an expedition to Medzhibozh, famed town of the Ba’al Shem Tov. For the next two and half decades, Lukin participated in various expeditionary groups, often with art scholar Boris Khaimovich, traveling to hundreds of small towns in the Former Soviet Union (FSU), Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria to explore cemetery and synagogue remains and conduct oral interviews. Alongside this research, Lukin joined a team working on a biographical dictionary of Russian writers organized by the publishers of the Soviet Encyclopedia. Through this research project, Lukin furtively followed his interest in Jewish history via biographies of Jewish writers and Judeophobes and began collecting material in Soviet archives, paying attention to the vast and unknown corpus of archival documents on Jews. By researching Russian writers, he avoided labeling his archival requests as pertaining to “Jews.” As the only Jewish Historical Seminar participant with archival experience, Lukin prepared an overview of Jewish sources in the Leningrad archives, which he published through samizdat in the Leningrad Jewish Almanac. Lukin gained a reputation as a local Jewish history expert and was sought...

Understanding African views of China: analyses of student attitudes and elite media reportage in Kenya

ABSTRACT There are few questions of greater significance in African international relations than China's actions in and engagement with other states. Chinese infrastructure, businesses, and people have blanketed the continent and revolutionized lifestyles, transportation, and political economies. The advantages and detractions of such developments, in turn, have shaped local attitudes. African attitudes towards China, nevertheless, remain largely the subject of conjecture. This article explores the contemporary attitudes of Kenyan university students to China through surveys and contributes empirical data to the literature. Combined with a comparative textual analysis of the main Kenyan newspaper, the article sheds light on largely unknown—but generally assumed—attitudes of Kenyans towards China. The findings question a stereotype of China in Kenya and, by extension, the actions and reactions of other Africans and African states towards it. They also uncover nuanced attitudes that confound the mostly negative Western narrative about China in Africa. Accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as debt, perceived racism and unfair labour practices, Kenyan university students' attitudes and discourse in the elite media have become less positive. There is, in addition, the broad perception that it is Kenya's leadership that benefits from the relationship and not so much its ordinary citizens.

Process of Developing Characters in an Eastern Story

The Chinese classic novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms has been reinterpreted by various authors and adapted into different media. In the novel, character images were shaped and the peculiarity of the characters’ characteristics was depicted by describing their behavior. This study uses Eastern and Western narrative theories to classify the character development (characterization) methods that various creators employed on this Chinese story in three distinct media (i.e., novel, antique book with illustrations, and temple painting). Thus, this study aims to identify the creation processes involved in characterization when adapting a literary work with substantial textual content. By integrating the results on Eastern and Western narratology approaches, a characterization method for the preproduction stage of animation was proposed. This explanation may serve as a reference for animation education and for creativity practices.

America’s longest war was founded on false pretences

The war in Afghanistan ended as it had started, with total ambiguity of its objectives as well as what it achieved. The official Western narrative in 2001 was that “everything changed” on the day four airliners were hijacked and nearly 5,000 people murdered. The US intervention in Afghanistan, by this account, was hastily improvised in less than a month. However, the decisions shaping the US military campaign in Afghanistan in 2001 show a remarkable continuity based on an ongoing pre-September 11 evolution in the US foreign policy. As a matter of fact, the US operations in Afghanistan did not begin 20 years ago. But in 1979, during the presidency of Jimmy Carter.

Missing is not a destination: Bringing the indigenous woman home in MMIW literature

This article underscores the relevance of literature within the current Missing and Murdered Indigenous Woman movement, which denounces the high rates of violence suffered by Indigenous women in Canada and the USA. As I argue, MMIW literature is a particularly useful form of activism because it makes the problem more visible as it offers a diversity of images that challenge the settler colonial silencing, dehumanizing and pathologizing of the Indigenous woman. Literary texts examine the multiple layers of the MMIW issue and its settler colonial sexist/racist roots, and simultaneously search for an emotional response that boosts engagement. The article offers a contextualization of literature within the MMIW movement in connection to activism, it reflects on the challenges of approaching the issue from a non-Indigenous perspective, and it engages in a close reading of works by Tanaya Winder and Linda LeGarde Grover to illustrate the most significant features of MMIW poetry and fiction. Both authors challenge the Western narrative of survivorism, moving beyond the passive or guilty victim roles in settler colonial representations, and positing relationality as a key value to refute the silencing and invisibility of Indigenous women.

Exploring the use of writing frames to teach and assess writing in English Additional Language learning in schools

The learning of writing is complex because it requires the development of cognitive and linguistic abilities. Effective teaching and learning of writing demand guided practice. The South African National Curriculum Statement Grades R–12 includes the Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS) for First Additional Language (FAL) teaching and learning. It introduces the use of question-prompt writing frames to learn writing in grade 4. In the second part of the grade 5 year, process writing is introduced as a writing frame that should be used when needed. From grade 7 to grade 12 process writing is implemented as part of the writing lessons. The education department adopted assessment for learning as a teaching and learning approach where feedback provides scaffolded learning. This theoretical paper argues that the writing frames used in the South African curriculum are inadequate to scaffold the learning of writing; furthermore, that the assessment of the writing skills of learners tends to focus on closed skills. The implementation of assessment for learning as an approach to teaching and learning is yet to develop fully to ensure successful scaffolded learning. Additionally, the writing frames introduced limit the teaching of a variety of writing genres and restrict the teaching of writing to western narrative and writing styles. The paper intends to demonstrate that the use of targeted frames appropriate to the writing task and outcome would improve writing learning and assessment.

The Woman and Her Obscure Versions

AbstractThe objective of this article is to analyze the production of the subject Woman by reviewing some practices, discourses, and technologies promoted by the state, the church, and elites. It is important to emphasize that in most research about women or femininity, female subjectivity appears tightly linked to sexual difference. However, in this work I want to show that the notion of Woman is co-determined by race and class. The experience characteristic of such representation was possible only for a small group of white and bourgeois women. Others—Indian, black, and mestiza “women”—could hardly account for a social experience comparable to the Western narrative about woman. Nevertheless, processes of homogenization allow these others to be classified and disciplined according to the gender norm, yet without altering the prejudices and inequalities produced by the prevailing racist and classist system, which implies the production of other female subjectivities, of other “women.”

HOMI BABA: OD POSTKOLONIJALNIH TEORIJA KA TRANSKULTURNIM POLITIKAMA

/ Homi Baba, American-Indian literary theorist and philosopher of cul- ture, is one of the key figures in postcolonial theory. His original contribution is in the introduction of the terms „hybridization“, „mimicry“, „cultural difference“, „ambivalence of colonial discourse“ and „third space“, which enriches the repertoire of postcolonial theories and problematizes these theories in the key of poststructur- alist philosophies, especially those of Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault. As a postcolonial literary and cultural theorist, Baba opposes binary divi- sions of theories / policies in The Location of Culture (1994) to try to show the true meaning of postcolonial theories. Of course, in order to arrive at this new practice, it was necessary to discuss some aporia into which his thought often falls, especially to develop a complicated dialectic of the ambivalence of post/colonial discourse. In parallel with postcolonial thought, Baba develops philosophy of culture, which is thematized in the second part of the text. In the essay „DissemiNation“ (1990), as a poststructuralist-inspired thinker he does not derive a systematic transcultural theory, but only deconstructively points to the „splitting points“ of the unison-understood Culture as a monolithic and monopolistic Western narrative.

Precolonial Igbo Voices in Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater (2018): A Palimpsestic Search for “Home”

The present article examines how Freshwater (2018), the debut novel of the Nigerian writer Akwaeke Emezi, offers a layered portrayal of precolonial Igbo and western narratives. By recourse to the auto-fictional narrative mode, the fiction deploys a constant tug of war which suggests the culturally hybrid nature of discourses connected to spiritual belief, self-identity dynamics and gender. My analysis pivots around three main discussions. Firstly, I trace and exemplify the aesthetic and thematic imbrication between Igbo cosmology (and Animism) and Christianity. Secondly, I seek to evince the unconventional depiction of plural consciousnesses coexisting in an individual in an effort to contest long-established truisms of self formation. I also focus on the ensuing amalgam between western conceptions of mental illness, trauma and Igbo mystic interpretations of reality. Considering the peripheral Igbo stance the novel depicts, the fiction will be contextualised within the current literary meta- and trans-modernist axis. Thirdly, I refer to transgender issues mapped up and brought to the fore through the main character’s predicament; a search for existential answers commingling divergent paradigms. Thus, Freshwater offers a peculiar polyphony of numinous narratorial voices which strive to question extant (neo)postcolonial truths.

Considering the Revolution

Considering the Revolution

A game of mirrors: Western/Eastern European crime series and the struggle for recognition

Our article focuses on a corpus of crime television series reflecting upon differences between western and eastern Europe – a phenomenon that we will address as the ‘West–East slope’. The series figure as instances of the struggle for recognition at the level of the social imaginary, between western and eastern Europe. Addressing the double logic of the western narrative on eastern Europe and the eastern narrative of western Europe, one of our main findings is that the recognition aesthetics of eastern Europe produced a multi-layered representation of the West varying from country to country. On the other hand in western productions, there is still a bias towards a more politically correct image of easternness, a state of affairs that is questioned by eastern European attempts to produce their original contents.

Two Wikipedias in Bhutan: problems and solutions for knowledge equity in the digital age

ABSTRACT The growing influence of English Wikipedia as a provider of information has created powerful new gatekeepers and publishing practices that determine not only what constitutes knowledge in the online world, but whose knowledge is privileged. The structural inequalities of the offline world are being reproduced online, creating new sites for information imperialism. Research shows western contributors are overwriting local knowledge, perpetuating western narratives, and presenting cultures through an outsider lens, resulting in subtle and not so subtle forms of hegemonic cultural dominance. Nonetheless, Wikipedias have multi-media capabilities, which can be utilized by oral cultures as well as providing new asynchronous online meeting places where communities can continue their social imaginings. This paper considers the impacts of English Wikipedia on global knowledge equity and cognitive justice. It analyzes two articles about Bhutanese culture to demonstrate the risks of dilution brought by western ontological expansiveness, and argues that, by contrast, the Dzongkha Wikipedia offers an online space mostly inaccessible to outsiders, and thus a bulwark where the community can continue its cultural conversations in ways not possible before Web 2.0 technologies.

China and the Antarctic: Presence, policy, perception, and public diplomacy

China has made significant investments in Antarctica and has become an active participant in Antarctic governance. Its activities in Antarctica in particular appear to be designed to ensure that China will not be left out should there be beneficial opportunities in Antarctica in the future. In some Western narratives, China has become a so-called ‘challenger’ due to their perception of China being ‘aggressive’ in the polar regions. However, this point has its own counter argument based on the common practice of states to actively join international institutions and subsequently update their domestic law-making process. China appears to have taken a two-fold approach in Antarctic governance—being generally both supportive of the Antarctic Treaty System (ATS) and also keen to make its own mark in shaping future development of the ATS in a manner that promotes China’s interests. The outcomes of China’s polar investments may well bring as much benefit to itself as to many other interested players. It is important that China continues to support current norms that promote cooperation and limit competition or challenge them.

African Modernism in America, 1947–1967

African Modernism in America, 1947–1967

Modernist Art in Ethiopia

Modernist Art in Ethiopia

A Study on the Postmodern Narrative Features in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon

Toni Morrison (1931-2019) is renowned as the Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist. Her third novel Song of Solomon was written in the context of postmodernism, which embodies a variety of postmodern narrative features. Postmodern works are frequently inclined to ambiguity, anarchism, collage, discontinuity, fragmentation, indeterminacy, metafiction, montage, parody, and pluralism. Such postmodern narrative features as parody, metafiction and indeterminacy have been manifested in Song of Solomon. In this novel, Toni Morrison employs the strategy of parody in order to subvert traditional narrative modes and overthrow the western biblical narrative as well as African mythic structure. Meta-narratives are also used in the text to dissolve the authority of the omniscient and omnipotent narrator. By questioning and criticizing the traditional narrative conventions, Morrison creates a fictional world with durative indeterminacy and unanswered problems. Through presenting parody, metafiction and indeterminacy, this paper attempts to analyze the postmodern narrative features in Song of Solomon and further explore Morrison’s writing on the African-American community and its future development.

Rethinking the taproot of the security challenges in Africa: bringing back the colonial legacy

This paper offers a counter-narrative to the constricted Western narratives that often discount how colonial domination, exploitation, and external interference have shaped Africa’s past and present, especially in the area of security. It focuses on the numerous security challenges in Africa and its complex historical nexus to the colonial legacy. The piece draws from the variegated dominant arguments and counterarguments on African (in)security issues, colonial rule, and the theoretical security models and concepts. The paper demonstrates, through an exploration of the formation of postcolonial states, that colonialism cannot be excused as some distant root cause of the security problem on the continent, but has deliberately crafted some specific subjects, societies and states that serve to perpetuate the challenges in the security complex of Africa. Keywords: security, colonial legacy, nation-state, Africa

The Diffusion of Identity: A Study of Three Contemporary Thai Short Stories through the Lens of Western Narrative Conventions

Abstract Literary works give expression to universal themes through settings, subjects, and techniques that are culturally tied. This article reviews generic conventions involving point of view, protagonist, conflict, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution that typify Western short stories in order to examine how varying patterns can illuminate cultural contrasts between Thailand and the West. Widely known stories by Katherine Mansfield and Amy Tan serve to exemplify the conventional Western pattern and its versatility and to provide a basis for discovering alternative patterns that characterize numerous contemporary Thai short stories. An analysis of stories by S.E.A. Write award winners Phaitoon Thanya, Anchan, and Ussiri Thammachot through the comparative lens of Western conventions reveals how divergent narrative techniques involving point of view and plot elucidate and corroborate divergent expressions regarding the nature of identity. Narrative patterns in these Thai short stories help produce diffusions of identity that reflect a collectivist ethos and an acceptance of uncertainty and impermanence, while adherence to the Western formula reinforces a core belief in the permanence and persistence of the individual ego over time.