Manacled to Identity: Cosmopolitanism,Class, and ‘The Culture Concept’ in Stephen Crane

Abstract

This article begins with a close reading of Stephen Crane’s short story ‘Manacled’ from 1900, which situates this rarely considered short work within the context of contemporary debates about realism. I then proceed to argue that many of the debates raised by the tale have an afterlife in our own era of American literary studies, which has frequently focused on questions of ‘identity’ and ‘culture’ in its reading of realism and naturalism to the exclusion of the importance of cosmopolitan discourses of diffusion and exchange across national borders. I then offer a brief reading of Crane’s novel George’s Mother, which follows Walter Benn Michaels in suggesting that the recent critical attention paid to particularities of cultural difference in American studies have come to conflate ideas of class and social position with ideas of culture in ways that have ultimately obscured the presence of genuine historical inequalities in US society. In order to challenge this critical commonplace, I situate Crane’s work within a history of transatlantic cosmopolitanism associated with the ideas of Franz Boas and Matthew Arnold to demonstrate the ways in which Crane’s narratives sought out an experience of the universal within their treatments of the particular.     

Acquired disability in young women: a challenge for identity?

ABSTRACT

Youth can be described as a transitional phase for the formation of identity. As young people often hold taken-for-granted assumptions regarding their future, disability may pose a challenge for their identity development. This paper analyses the retrospectively written autobiographical narratives by three young women who became disabled during their adolescence. The structure of the narratives is approached with sociologist Arthur Frank’s typology of illness narratives and identity through data-driven content analysis. This paper suggests that chaotic stories may hinder the development of identity, as the identity is described as delayed, hidden, silenced or neglected.     

Narratives of aging in intimate partner violence: The double lens of violence and old age

PurposeWith the increase in life expectancy, couples living in intimate partner violence are aging together. The aim of this article is to explore the constructions of aging in intimate partner violence as narratives of couplehood or narratives of old age.Design and methodsThirty individual in-depth interviews with 15 older Israeli couples were tape-recorded, transcribed verbatim and analyzed using a narrative approach.ResultsThree main domains emerged from the data: health issue narratives, loneliness narratives and relationships with adult offspring narratives. Each of the narratives that emerged from the data analysis consists of a narrative of old age constructing IPV and a narrative of IPV constructing old age.ImplicationsConflictual couplehood dynamics, such as intimate partner violence in old age, is not one-dimensional, but is diverse and complex and this should be taken into consideration.     

Lay theories and criticisms of mental health news: elaborating the concept of biocommunicability

Abstract

This article examines how mental health service users/consumers, advocates, professionals and researchers interpret and theorise the impacts of mental health news. It focuses on the following themes: Creating fears about mental illness by focusing on criminal and violent acts; Reinforcing power imbalances by privileging biomedical issues and sources; and Sanitising mental health issues through the selective use of personal narratives. The study draws upon the concept of biocommunicability, which casts light on the performative power of health news in reinforcing ideas and expectations about the appropriate role for different actors to adopt in relation to health knowledge. Previous research on health news has identified biomedical authority, patient-consumer and public sphere as three predominant models of biocommunicability and this article examines how these are bound up with criticisms of mental health news. The findings are related to the ‘mediatisation of psychiatric culture’ as one of extremes and perspectives from Mad Studies.     

Desiring nature: Identity and becoming in narratives of travel

Abstract

This paper explores the cultural value of desiring nature through reading the travel narratives of Val Plumwood and Alphonso Lingis with the writings of Deleuze and Guattari (1987). As Game (1991) suggests this textual practice produces different ways of writing the social that undoes the nature/culture opposition informing popular discourses and much cultural theory. Rethinking the value of nature/culture relations has tended to be the domain of environmental philosophy. Yet a cultural analysis also has much to contribute to current debates around value and identity, embodiment and representations of desire. Such a shift requires rethinking the sensory relation between self and nature through the mediation of language. Two quite distinctive experiences of awe provide texts for this analysis. In the desire to know non‐human nature as other, Lingis and Plumwood are moved by a wish to become nearer, to move beyond the bounds of an identity premised on a cultural relation of mastery over nature. These are compelling narratives, for they do not simply indulge the reader in a romantic appreciation of nature's wildness, as if nature was simply an object of aesthetic contemplation and background to the unfolding drama of human identity. These journeys involve disturbing transformations of self; Plumwood travels into the dangerous waters of the crocodile's territory in Kakadu National Park, Australia, while Lingis encounters the uninhabitable terrain of the Antarctic. The reverberating effects of awe produce a movement of becoming ‐ becoming‐animal, becoming‐nature, which contests the Hegelian desire for mastery of nature and the teleological structure of desire itself aimed at unity. Awe as a profoundly disturbing relation, threatens to undo the dominant fantasy of human identity as pure culture, separate from the realm of nature, body and materiality.     

THE BODY, IDENTITY, AND SELF:

Serious chronic illness undermines the unity between body and self and forces identity changes. To explicate how the body, identity, and self intersect in illness, one mode of living with impairment, adapting, is explicated in this article. Adapting means altering life and self to accommodate to bodily losses and limits and resolving the lost unity between body and self. It means struggling with rather than against illness. The process of adapting consists of three major stages: (1) experiencing and defining impairment, (2) making bodily assessments and, subsequently, identity trade-offs, as ill people weigh their losses and gains and revise their identity goals, and (3) surrendering to the sick self by relinquishing control over illness and by flowing with the experience of it. Adapting seldom occurs only once. Rather chronically ill people are forced to adapt repeatedly as they experience new losses. The data consist of 115 interviews about experiencing chronic illness and 25 more focused interviews about the body in chronic illness. The strategies of grounded theory provided the methods for completing the analysis.     

China’s modern image – contemporary Chinese art

Abstract

As a worldwide cultural phenomenon, contemporary art in China has not only been used as a diplomatic language but also a reflection of contemporary Chinese culture. Contemporary Chinese art, as an emerging field to display China’s global role, provides an important perspective to study China’s self-position in global relations, China’s diplomacy in exercising its soft power, contemporary Chinese culture, and the reinvention of China’s cultural/national identity in post-Mao China. Using the 2000 Shanghai Biennale and the Chinese pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale as case studies, this article investigates how the fluid construct of Chineseness is successfully promoted and demonstrated through the government’s support of contemporary Chinese art.     

Emancipatory engagement: An urban womanist social work pedagogy

ABSTRACT

Standing on the hope of the initial social work course from 1914 at Morgan College, this article provides insight into the significant learning outcomes of contemporary students in advanced social work practice with urban African American families. This research introduces the conceptual framework of urban womanist social work pedagogy as an inclusive practice-informed knowledge produced through the rituals, traditions, values, culture, and resilience of historically disenfranchised communities. Urban womanist social work teaching methods honor truth telling from the ones who have lived there. Urban womanist social work affirms transformative-centered research, teaching, and scholarship produced through institutions such as historically black colleges and universities (HBCU’s). The students’ reflective narratives reveal a process of transformation, centered in the freedom standpoint, which includes recognizing the location and context of their individual and collective identity as African Americans in the profession of social work. Urban womanist social work pedagogy cumulatively equips our students with intergenerational knowledge that inform their assessment of critical issues in Baltimore’s African American communities.     

EDITORIAL

Abstract

Alzheimers Disease is a form of progressive dementia associated with diffuse degeneration of the brain, and has become more common in Hong Kong as the population has aged. Individuals with Alzheimers Disease may experience symptoms such as memory loss, poor judgement, and incontinence. They generally lack selfcare ability and require considerable care as their illness progresses. As the traditional caring function of Chinese families has been eroded, individuals with the disease pose new challenges to their family caregivers. Research using an intensive interview method revealed that family caregivers of people with Alzheimers Disease suffer heavy psychosocial, financial, and physical burdens.     

Transnational Families: Memories and Narratives

This introduction to a special issue of the journal explores not only the role of memory and narratives in understanding gender and transnational families, but suggests how such families use and understand their memories to construct coherent narratives of the self and kin. In common with renewed thinking about the multifaceted nature of migration, the complexities of the process, and the continuing dialogue that migration establishes between the old and the new, the past and the present, those who engage with oral history/life story methods are increasingly aware that such data provide a ‘value added’ to rich empirical detail. These methods reveal the use of memory and its role in the continuing emotional adjustments in which most transnational experience is embroiled. They show how the multi‐layering of memory, language and narratives are indicators of the ways in which culture shapes recall and recounting. Families themselves become sites of belonging, part of the imaginary unity through which a transnational family may seek its identity. Equally, oral histories can tease out ways in which gender differences impact on, or are impacted by, transnational lives. The introduction situates the subsequent articles within a brief overview of oral history and migration.     

Narratives of identity: Denying empathy in conservative discourses on race,class, and sexuality

Issues of identity are crucial in current political debate. This article analyses narratives of identity using three very different examples, namely colonial-settler Australia, lesbian romance genres, and the role of class in contemporary American and British politics. It explores both privileged and marginalized identity narratives and the tensions between them. For example, lesbian romance narratives are contrasted with religious right arguments against same-sex marriage. Some argue that the complex intersections, compatibilities, and differences between conflicting narratives of identity reveal a great deal about how specific concepts of identity are formed. The narratives examined do not produce explicit binary constructions of dominant and subordinate identity categories. Rather, being able to imagine (or not imagine) other narratives plays an important part in the process of constructing identities within these discourses. Narratives that foreclose empathy facilitate the denial that discrimination or subordination is taking place. Similarly, privileged narratives of identity facilitate subjects ability to think well of themselves and their treatment of others.     

“Brown girls can’t be gay”: Racism experienced by queer South Asian women in the Toronto LGBTQ community

Abstract

The absence of scholarship on South Asian discrimination in Western queer discourse contributes to a narrative that South Asians are not subjected to racially charged forms of discrimination in the LGBTQ community, which is fundamentally untrue. This article presents narrative-based accounts of nine queer South Asian women in Toronto, Canada, to examine the ways in which they experience racial discrimination in the LGBTQ community, and the impact that this mistreatment has on identity formation and connectivity to queer spheres. It finds that queer South Asian women experience racial discrimination in the form of racially charged microaggressions, which are evidenced through expectations of assimilation to Western-normative performances of queer identity and erasure of South Asian culture in the LGBTQ community. Further, it reveals that Toronto’s LGBTQ community perpetuates a culture of White privilege that discredits the intersectional identity of queer South Asian women, and consequently invisibilizes, alienates, and revokes agency from these women who do not fit the majority’s conceptualizations about what a queer woman looks like.     

Conserving Habitus: Home,Couplehood and Dementia

ABSTRACT

Compared to research on home in circumstances of aging, place and care, our knowledge about home in relation to couplehood is limited despite increases in the percentage of married and cohabiting older people in the UK. Specifically, our understanding of the experience and meaning of home for couples where one partner has dementia remains under-explored. This article presents a scoping review of published empirical literature to examine older couples’ experiences of home in dementia. The literature identified and reviewed through searching academic databases and Google Scholar is interdisciplinary and a thematic analysis suggests interactions of couplehood, home and dementia. To discuss these interactions, we use Bourdieu’s framework of field, capital, practice and habitus. We observe that habitus may gradually alter and fracture. But, in locating and supporting the performance of (adapted) everyday relationships and domestic practices, home has a distinct role in contributing to conserving habitus and in turn continuity of relationships and home. The gradual fracturing of habitus with the progression of dementia however also suggests that the continuity of relationships and home remain contingent, but this needs further investigation. It is an element of home futures that cannot remain invisible.     

The anorexic body: Reading disorders

ABSTRACT

This article examines the feminist interpretation of self-starvation or anorexia nervosa as a pathology brought about by women's consumption of media images of thin femininity. The anorexic subject is presented as a synecdoche for the alienated female body in general; female corporeality is damaged by the consumption of phallocentric representations. This negative view of women's uncritical ‘consumption’ of media texts can be connected to nineteenth-century discussions of the causes of hysteria, revealing a similar pathologization of women's reading practices. An alternative framework for conceptualizing eating disorders is outined. First, closer attention to the biomedical identity construct of anorexia nervosa reveals it to be contested by the very subjects it names. Second, a consideration of the continuum between the disordered practices of self-starvation and weight-loss regimens more generally suggests that both are informed by the biomedical discourse of metabolism, as a framework which inscribes the body as a calculable source of energy. The practices of anorexia nervosa are thus situated within a genealogy of weight-loss regimens which in turn produce narratives about the female body.     

@GaddafisGhost: on the popular memoro-politics of a dead dictator

Qaddafi was widely lampooned in American popular culture before his death. This paper addresses this, together with representations after his death on Twitter and other social media sites, to explore the figure of the ‘dead dictator.’ It argues that the display of the gruesome body of a ‘dead dictator’ is enabled by the material and discursive construction of ‘dictators’ in contemporary narratives, which posit them as easily deposed with Western assistance and internal protests, thereby legitimating the triumph of democracy. It explores these constructions via a comprehensive analysis of Twitter accounts satirizing Qaddafi, which invoke a particular audience that ‘gets the joke.’ In this instance, jokes about Qaddafi’s death circulated in popular culture media enabled the display of his dead body, together constructing the figure of the dead dictator for a Western audience marked by being part of the in-group who were preconditioned to assume dictatorship as a form of political deviance. The paper seeks to contribute to literature on visual culture and visual politics by exploring the popular construction of memorial narratives, and to contribute a theorization that blends materiality and visuality by looking at the dead body and the way it is visually reproduced.     

Do we practice (or teach) what we preach? Developing a more inclusive learning environment to better prepare social work students for practice through improving the explorationof their different ethnicities within teaching,learning and assessment opportunities.

ABSTRACT

Teaching experience at the University of Suffolk noted anecdotally that Black Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) students avoid discussing their identity, cultural heritage, norms and values, in lectures, tutor groups and in assignments.

To improve the integration of different cultural perspectives into the social work curriculum, we devised a small-scale qualitative research project Spring, 2017, to explore students’ views of teaching, learning and assessment about cultural norms and differences, seeking the views of both BAME students and white students on the programme in order to compare and contrast their experiences.

Focus groups were used to gather the views of BAME and white students about the opportunities and barriers to discussing identity, culture, and anti-racism. The findings raised significant issues, specifically about the barriers for both BAME and white students to considering cultural differences. Student perspectives suggest more sensitive approaches to considering cultural differences; more responsibility for white lecturers to explore white privilege and its impact; and more safe spaces to manage emotional responses to oppression to enable exchange of experience and learning about different cultural norms and values. The article analyses the findings, discussing ways forward to improve the student experience and promote good practice in teaching and learning.     

The lived body in dementia

Little is known about how people with dementia live day to day with this illness and the meaning it has for them. To explore this question, three in-depth interviews and participant observation were conducted with nine people experiencing mild to moderate dementia (MMSE 16–23) and their family caregivers. An interpretive phenomenological analysis revealed how dementia symptoms were experienced in and through the lived body: (1) “Being slow” is about the body slowing down as taken-for-granted activities become halting and tentative; (2) “Being lost” is about being unable to find ones way in an unfamiliar world; and (3) “Being a blank” is about being in an empty world wherein meaningful habits and practices fall by the wayside. These findings challenge the problematic mind–body dualism that pervades current understanding of dementia, thus opening the possibility for developing a vocabulary of care that takes more complete account of the lived experience of dementia.     

Serving our (in)visible elders: The impact of a LGBTQ+ aging presentation on a rural college campus

ABSTRACT

As the number of individuals 65 and older continues to grow, so too does the richness and complexity of their identity. Specifically, the culture of aging within the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) community has received little attention in the literature. In order to best serve this population, human service professionals must understand the reality of aging within diverse communities. This article explores the impact of an invited campus speaker focused on LGBTQ+ aging on a rural college campus. Results indicate a general increase in overall knowledge and appreciation for issues directly impacting the aging LGBTQ+ community. Recommendations for practice, grounded in a social justice framework, are shared.     

Auto-photography in aging studies: Exploring issues of identity construction in mature bodybuilders

This article seeks to contribute empirically, theoretically, and methodologically to the literature on aging bodies and identity construction by analyzing auto-photographic data from a project that explores the embodied identities of mature bodybuilders. The analysis identified three salient identities that the participants constructed via the auto-photography task. These identities were; a healthy body-self, a performing body-self, and a relational body-self. In combination, these three identities offer insight into what mature bodybuilders themselves regard as important in their lives and social worlds. The ways in which the respondent driven photographs might allow additional insight into the meaning of aging, and also act as counter-narratives to dominant narratives of decline in older age is reflected upon.     

Doing research in a ‘conflict zone’: history writing and archival (im) possibilities in Jammu and Kashmir

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that in conflict zones like Jammu and Kashmir, the embodied stories of Kashmiris punctuate the past, often silenced by dominant Indian narratives. Narratives about certain key political events in the region's past co-exist with other forms of memory. Kashmiris weave these stories to make sense of the present, build connections to the past, and stake claims for the future. They build and nourish an archive based on lived experience, keeping a record of past wrongs. Novels, anecdotes and underground literature form part of this embodied archive, and provide a resource for recovering stories that remain silent in institutional archives which serve the interests of power. These interests are visible through restrictions on access to institutional archives, and demonstrate the effects of power and the overall politics of archives.