Beating the monochrome: emerging market multinationals and the bricoleur approach to embracing heterogeneity

ABSTRACT

The research aims to analyse the social identities of emerging multinational corporations from India. It looks at whether the difference of geography and ethnicity can be overcome with a multi-dimensionality or bricolage approach as a managerial paradigm – where the manager, as bricoleur, adopts a socially efficient hybrid approach of changing the arrangement of socio-historical rules through negotiation of both past and present practices, rather than assuming a revolutionary or disruptive engineering approach. We present thematic and discourse analyses of the communication (interviews, blogs, press releases, and public statements) made by the top and middle management of 15 Indian MNCs. The findings reflect the strategies adopted by the firms to fit their public image to a particular culture or audience, and the ways firms migrate to a transnational image with changes in its geographical identities.     

Lost in translation – A case study of a public debate on freedom of expression and a neo-Nazi rally

ABSTRACT

This is a case study of a neo-Nazi public gathering in Sweden and the debate the event caused in Swedish media. The debate focused on the fact that the police gave the neo-Nazis permission to demonstrate and on how this could have been avoided. The study thus concerns the dilemma that emerges when freedom of speech clashes with hate speech and the sense of jeopardized public safety that occurs when neo-Nazis are allowed to march. The study is based on Critical Discourse Analysis and strives to discover how this debate is embedded in more complex ideological contexts. The study helps shed light on how the growing neo-Nazi movement contributes to normalizing general racism. Under the banner of engaging in the fight against racism, public opinionmakers, cited in the articles under study, were willing to suspend freedom of speech for neo-Nazis and accused the police of being too hesitant. At the same time, as shown in the study, the police had other internal priorities that were never exposed. Internally, the police authority debated whether or not the neo-Nazi movement should be given some lenience, based on the assumption that severe handling of the neo-Nazis would cause them to radicalize into violence.     

Rhetorics of the State: The Public Negotiation of Political Character in Germany,Russia, and Quebec

National identity construction is a fundamentally rhetorical phenomenon maintained and transformed through public discourse. Through the analysis of dramatically rejected state speeches related to national identity and public responses to them, critics can compare competing articulations of national identity against the chronological historical record to identify various instances of strategic memory. By isolating dominant strategies of remembrance, the political character of emergent national identities can be outlined. In this essay, I explicate a critical rhetorical approach to controversial speech called limit work, providing examples of the public negotiation of national identity in 1988 West Germany, 1993 Russia, and 1995 Quebec that illustrate its utility.     

Of Mongrels and Jews: The Deconstruction of Racialised Identities in White Supremacist Discourse

ABSTRACT

This research explores the construction of race and mixed race identities in a wide variety of white supremacist newsletters and periodicals published between 1969 and 1993. While traditional accounts of the white supremacist movement treat it as a movement concerned with race relations, I read this discourse as a site of the construction of race. In white supremacist discourse, interracial sexuality is defined as the ultimate abomination, and mixed race people pose a particularly strong threat. This paper explores the ways in which mixed race people, and Jews in particular, threaten the construction of a supposedly pure white racial identity. Drawing upon the insights of poststructuralism, this analysis will explore the role of boundary maintenance and the threat of border crossings in the process of constructing racial identities.     

Hybridity,ethnicity and nationhood: legacies of interethnic war,wartime rape and the potential for bridging the ethnic divide in post-conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina

ABSTRACT

Relying on the biographical narrative Leila, a girl from Bosnia and the recorded narratives by adolescents born of wartime rape in Bosnia and Herzegovina we illustrate the difficulties and symbolic implications associated with negotiating hybrid identities in post-conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina against the dominant post-conflict discourse based on ‘pure’ ethnicities. We argue that in today’s Bosnia and Herzegovina, hybrid identities are marginalized by official politics and societal structures as a legacy of the war. However, they simultaneously embody the symbolic tools through which ethnic divisions could be overcome, envisioning and recalling a multi-ethnic Bosnia and Herzegovina as a supra-national designation.     

Queering the war dead: gold star families and the politics of estrangement

ABSTRACT

Contemporary practices of mourning individuals lost to war violence assert correct and incorrect practices of grieving. Successful practices will emphasize the heroism and the sacrifice of the war dead, centralizing the role of American values in the act of dying for one’s country. To not honor the war dead successfully is seen as a betrayal of their sacrifice and an ethical failure. Through a critical reading of Gold Star Families and the identity politics surrounding acts of mourning, I argue that the social norms acting as guideposts for processes of mourning over-determine relationships and identities in ways that perpetuate a violence that is seen as redemptive. Working towards alternatives to these practices, I argue that a queer relationality can disrupt the idealized constructions of redemptive violence constitutive to notions of successful mourning. A queering of the war dead refuses to allow mourning to be dismissed as unsuccessful if grieving is anything other than the assignment of war hero, patriot, or the solidification of an American identity for those killed by war violence. Ultimately, I argue that acts of queering the war dead have potential to challenge the proliferation of dominant practices that tie a militarized redemptive violence to normalized identities.     

The transformation of the Occusphere

ABSTRACT

Between September and November 2011, the Occupy Wall Street protest encampment in New York captured the public imagination worldwide and generated similar events in hundreds of urban spaces. Even after riot police evicted the occupations, the Occupy social movement continued to confront political authority over questions of inequality, and it remains active both online and at diverse protest events. However, beyond the social movement there has been a growth of related anti-capitalist politics. The Occusphere is constituted by the totality of Occupy-inspired activity on the internet and in social networks, and in the larger area of political ideas. This study explores the Occusphere as an expanding zone of densely interlinked anti-capitalist politics with three modes of existence – urban spaces, virtual electronic spaces, and intellectual spaces.     

The Socio-Spatial Making and Marking of 'Us': Toward a Critical Postmodern Spatial Theory of Difference and Community

The modernist surveillance of strict, arbitrary borders between 'real space' and 'imagined space' both produces and hides 'Othered' spatialities. While assuming that spatialities are simultaneously real-and-imagined,postmodernspatial theory seeks to recover the identities that emerge in relation to the veiled, lived realms of 'social space'. Furthermore, critical postmodern spatial theory privileges the lived spatialities of left-margined communities as sites of socio-spatial critique. A postmodern identity politics enacts critical postmodernspatial theory by nurturing the developmentof, and solidarity between, 'counterpublics', which are subaltern community spaces where private spatialities of alienation are brought to public discourse.     

From consensual reconciliation to a discourse of friendship

When in multicultural states the concept of reconciliation is tied to national unity in order to institute consensus and stability, the outcome often is exclusion and oppression of those others who do not ‘fit’ or who ‘disturb’ the very consensus and unity reconciliation purports to form. The hidden side of violence embedded in consensual reconciliation is the main theme of this paper. Our aim is to problematize the relations between reconciliation and nationalism on the one hand, and to offer an alternative working concept of friendship on the other. Based on an ethnographic case study of conflict between religious and secular groups in Israel, we examine the language of reconciliation and its semiotic gestures, in order to demonstrate that sentiments of ‘neither/nor’ or ‘either this or that’, when rooted in nationalist ideology of unity, obfuscate identities for purposes of homogeneity, closing the social and cultural space for different others who are present but not included in the discourse of reconciliation. By contrast, a discourse of friendship signifies a movement (rather than diffusion) between social and cultural identities. Our concept of friendship is based on a civic idea of causing no harm to others as a way of life.     

Communicating intersectionality through creative claims making: the queer undocumented immigrant project

ABSTRACT

Social movements confronting overlapping inequalities face the unique challenge of elucidating the heretofore invisible experiences of those whose identities lie at the intersection of existing movements. Social media platforms provide a direct outlet for intersectional social movements to make political claims visually by illuminating these complexities creatively with discursive resources such as symbols, text, and narratives. Using content analysis of images posted to the organization’s Facebook, we examine how lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) immigration activists – as embodied by the Queer Undocumented Immigrant Project (QUIP) – attempt to communicate intersectionality online. Images posted by QUIP demonstrate how the existing ideas and values of separate established immigrant and LGBTQ movements can be reformulated and repackaged. However, the available discursive resources may compartmentalize identities, which then requires movements to generate new symbols, text, and narratives. By leveraging extant discursive resources and innovating new expressions, activists aim to communicate intersectional experiences and unite multiple struggles.     

Negotiating postcolonial Eurasian identities and national belonging in global-city Singapore

ABSTRACT

A racial classification regime, partly derived from colonial race categories that solidified during the British Empire, remains a key governance strategy in postcolonial Singapore, sorting citizens into the categories of Chinese, Malay, Indian or Other (CMIO). This racial grid continues to be a simplification of the actual complexity of lived identities and experiences, particularly for people of mixed descent. In this context, we explore the contemporary meanings and resonances of racial identity and national belonging as negotiated among members of a historic mixed-descent community – the Eurasians – in the context of a nation-state built on an institutionally fixed racial template. As a community, Eurasians are commonly attributed to the presence and mixing of especially Dutch, Portuguese and British – but also other Europeans – with an equally variegated palette of Asian cultures, since the 16th century. Based on 30 biographical interviews with self- identified Eurasians of two generations, this paper examines how individual and collective narratives of ‘old’ hybrid identities are changing in relation to the emergence of potentially new hierarchies of racial belonging with the arrival of new migration and the rise of international marriage in globalizing times. Given the lived reality of an expanding range of ‘race’ identities of different permutations and combinations, the politics of choice is played out between countervailing forces which draw racialized boundaries around the community more tightly on the one hand, and liberalize claims to racial and national belonging on the basis of self-identification on the other.     

Mobilising diasporas for justice. Opportunity structures and the presencing of a violent past

ABSTRACT

This article investigates how the global dominance of the transitional justice (TJ) discourse and practice – and the controversies and conflicts that arise around TJ – have come to make up an important context for diaspora mobilisation. The article looks at the increasingly globalised mechanisms and norms of transitional justice as a set of opportunity structures – political, legal and discursive – which shape diaspora mobilisation. Diaspora engagement in commemoration, truth-seeking and legal justice in relation to atrocities in Rwanda and Sri Lanka is studied. The article shows that in relation to Rwanda, state dominance and divides are largely replicated in the diasporic space, while the Sri Lankan case provides examples of how Tamil diaspora engagement have been able to reverse power dynamics around TJ. Combining opportunity structures with the concept of ‘past presencing’, the article shows how diaspora groups appropriate and strategise in relation to the dominant norms and practices of TJ, and how in doing so the past is performed and experienced in ways which are both personally and politically meaningful.     

Multi-level governance and migration politics in the Arab world: the case of Syria’s displacement

ABSTRACT

In the context of Syria’s displacement, supranational ‘migration governors’ in the Arab region have sought – in different forms and capacities – to devise initiatives for responsibility sharing and to reinforce the capacity of Syria’s Arab neighbours to deal with refugee inflows. While the case of Syria’s displacement has witnessed the proliferation of collaborative networks, institutional complexity has yielded low effectiveness for the governance of such large-scale displacement in Syria’s neighbourhood. Supranational bodies have formulated dissonant frameworks and agendas. In the context of securitised responses to displacement, the discourse has not reflected the realities of refugee assistance and protection. Multi-level policy frameworks need to be embedded in the region’s geopolitical field of migration governance and refugee protection. While colliding policy arenas are to be grounded within the region’s historical trajectory of migration politics, an understanding of their effects requires gaining an insight into how they have interacted with the various refugee-hosting Arab states, influenced their refugee discourse, and impacted the issue of refugee assistance and protection on the ground.     

A study of significance of racial and athletic identification on educational perceptions among African American male college athletes

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to analyze the racial and athletic identities of African American male college athletes to determine how the identities might impact the athletic and educational potential and performance of this specific group of college athletes. The study revealed that participants who responded negatively to a poor athletic performance were more likely to have lower levels of academic self-concept. In contrast, college athletes who highly identified with their racial group were more likely to have higher levels of academic self-concept. Overall, the findings reveal the intricacies and complexities of being an African American college student and athlete at predominantly white institutions (PWIs) in the US. As such, the article details the implications of the findings as they relate to African American culture, American sports culture, and higher education realities.     

‘Mixed’ Japanese-Filipino identities under Japanese multiculturalism

ABSTRACT

The ways in which multiculturalism is debated and practiced forms an important frame for ‘mixed’ ethnic identities to take shape. In this paper, I explore how young migrants of Japanese-Filipino ‘mixed’ parentage make sense of their ethnic identities in Japan. My key findings are that dominant discourses constructing the Japanese nation as a monoracial, monolingual and monoethnic nation leave no space for diversity within the definition of ‘Japanese’, creating the necessity for alternative labels like haafu or ‘mixed roots’. Japanese multiculturalism does not provide alternative narratives of Japaneseness but preserves the myth of Japanese racial homogeneity by recognizing diversity while maintaining ethnic and racial boundaries. Lastly, these categories have not been actively questioned by my respondents. Rather, they show flexibility in adopting these various labels – haafu, ‘mixed roots’, Filipino, Firipin-jin – in different contexts.     

The construction of the Beta Israel identity

Competing narrative discourses still define the early origins of the Beta Israel (Ethiopian Jews or black Jews of Ethiopia). A difficulty with reconstructing the past of Judaism in Ethiopia is that written records, though scarce, claim for themselves the 'unquestioned' role of narrating, controlling, containing and policing what can be said about the identities of the Beta Israel. This arrogance of written records is however constantly subverted by the oral sources of the history of the origin of the Beta Israel. The oral sources imply a multiplicity of versions of the same story, and their use in this article suggests that the question of the use of narrative discourse in attempting to name the identities of the Beta Israel in a context of social crisis is a process potentially subject to different interpretations in different historical periods.     

Politics and Facets of Identity: Changing Lenses in Gaston Kaboré's Cinema

In spite of the resurgence of interest in the re-examination of the concept of identity, the shaping of multiple identities can benefit from interdisciplinary scholarly efforts and artistic insights. Based on a diagnostic political reading of cinematic text and an interview with the artist, this article draws some conclusions on the shaping of multiple identities. Following a conceptual scheme of characteristic locations of identity in a postcolonial setting, the study identifies four political forms of identity - the global, the cultural, the ideological/political and the individual. Those different facets are configured through ideological and discourse analyses of three cinematic texts and the declared intentions of Burkinabe filmmaker Gaston Kaboré.     

Adulteration of pure native blood by aliens? mixed race kapya in colonial and post-Colonial Myanmar

ABSTRACT

Colonization may be viewed not only as loss of sovereignty and territory but also of ‘purity’ of a native race to an alien power. After the British colonized Burma in the late nineteenth century, they brought in Chinese and Indians to the sparsely populated colony as labour for new administrative and economic activities. Intermarriage, mainly between native Burmese women and men of alien races – British, European, Chinese and Indian – was thus inevitable. Mixed-race peoples – kapya in Burmese – were then born out of these relationships, and their identities became a key political issue in colonial Burma. Importantly, all natives, foreigners, and kapya were British subjects at that time. Independent Burma from 1948 through 1962 was not expressly anti-foreigner/kapya; working to naturalize those who had overstayed or remained. However, the Ne Win government from 1962 through 1988 was openly against ex-foreigner and kapya citizens, passing a new citizenship act in 1982 to downgrade their citizenship to a second class tier. The Myanmar Citizenship Law (1982), which remains in force, has downgraded the legal, political and social stature of ex-foreigner and kapya citizens. A more problematic and racist term thway-nhaw or ‘adulterated’ race has come to the fore, being used in official law-like language in recent years and highlighting the racist roots of the Myanmar Citizenship Law.     

A tale of four cities: the boundaries of blackness for Ethiopian immigrants in Washington,DC, Tel Aviv,Rome, and Melbourne

ABSTRACT

Scholars increasingly view urban areas as fragmented spaces where migrants are policed in ways that promote differential access to mobility, but the glocal meanings of race are often undertheorized. This paper explores the mobility experiences of Ethiopian migrants in four cities: Washington, DC, Tel Aviv, Rome, and Melbourne. Using a textual analysis of newspaper coverage in each city, the analysis finds that media and police often act as agents who racialize Ethiopian migrants relative to native minorities and other migrants. The paper concludes that the experiences Ethiopian immigrants faced in urban areas were informed by glocal meanings of race (blackness); they were shaped in relation to not only other migrants and native minorities, but also a globalized discourse on immigration.     

Taiwan and ROC: A critical analysis of President Chen Shui-bien's construction of Taiwan identity in national speeches

Names used to address Taiwan – such as taiwan and zhonghuamingguo (Republic of China [ROC]) – are symbols defining Taiwan's political realities, each with their own unique historical significance. Since his election in 2000, Taiwan's president Chen Shui-bien has had to alternate between taiwan and ROC to strike a balance among conflicting ideas about Taiwan's national identity. The act is grounded in complex political discourse dictating that Taiwan must not be seen as separate from the sinic world and simultaneously to respond to steadily rising Taiwanese consciousness. Facing intercessions by the United States and China, as well as ever-present domestic clashes, rhetorical exigency requires the president to fashion unique political discourse concerning what Taiwan is and ought to be. This study explores how these names and related expressions are used in Chen's public addresses to the nation during his two-term tenure from 2000 to 2008, and how their development reflects the struggle over Taiwan's national identity.