Articulating secession: self-determination,decolonization and stateless independence amongst the Kanaka Maoli

Two assumptions reign supreme in the secession literature. The first is that separatist groups seeking autonomy necessarily fall into one of two camps, one that stresses essentialist criteria for social membership, the other emphasizing instead a socially constructed collective identity. The second assumption is that secession can only be defined as taking place in the context of a separatist group whose claim to independence hinges on the attempt to galvanize a new state. This article challenges both assumptions by looking to a provocative counter-site. Amongst the Kanaka Maoli of Hawai'i secession is increasingly framed precisely as a rejection of those Western idioms that have historically undergirded colonial expropriation and racial subjection. As such, secession is being framed not as a struggle for new statehood, but rather as a reinvigoration of indigenous lifeworlds. In so doing, the Kanaka Maoli are asserting community boundaries in ways that contest the idea that indigenous identity is solely about biological criteria such as blood quantum, but also challenge the notion that indigenous self-determination can be reduced to postmodern identity politics. The argument I defend suggests that articulation theory can offer us orienting power in situating some of the stakes of Kanaka Maoli stateless secession. Articulation theory expresses the idea that identities are volatile collective self-assertions that take place at discrepant scales of interactive exchange. This article argues that we can detect some important emergent practices of articulation at play in the Kanaka Maoli's experimental revisioning of what secession can mean today.     

State Terror and the Reproduction of Imprisoned Dissent

Cuban visual art underwent an extraordinary renaissance during the 1980s, fuelled in part by a relaxation of cultural policy enacted at high political levels, by a relatively prosperous interlude, and by the emergence of an exceptionally talented and energetic generation of artists. Their increasingly critical work, together with the economic and political crisis that the country entered toward the end of the decade as the Soviet Union unravelled, sparked harsh measures against the artists and their works, and precipitated the emigration of most of the artists in the first years of the 1990s. This paper explores some of the reactions in the wake of these traumatic events, noting the many ways in which withdrawal became a characteristic artistic position for the period.     

The power of Hyphen-Nationalism: Martin Scorsese's sojourn from Italian American to White-Ethnic American

Martin Scorsese is one of the most celebrated American filmmakers of the last 50 years. This essay looks at his public story in films, books, television, radio, journals, and newspapers. This story reflects the personal and artistic journey of Scorsese and the collective rendition of this journey by Scorsese, critics, journalists, and others. It shows the intersection of the personal life, public biography, creative work, and critical reception of a public intellectual negotiating his ethnic and racial-identity for six decades. Informed by work in Race and Ethnic Studies, Critical Whiteness Studies, and Critical Rhetoric Studies, this essay uses this story as a case study of the ideological power of white ethnic-identity and white racial-identity in the racial formation of post-civil rights America. I show how the public story of one of the most popular and critically acclaimed American artists over the last half-century transcribed the conversion of an ‘unmeltable’ Italian-American of the late 1960s Ethnic Revival to a White-Ethnic American of an end-of-the-century Hyphen-Nationalism. I demonstrate the power embedded in the institutional and cultural regime of Hyphen-Nationalism in the United States that acts to erase in personal memory, creative imagination, and art the power and legacy of white privilege.     

论古代百越及其后裔民族的纹身艺术

纹身是古代百越及其后裔民族心理特征的一种外在表现和社会意识形态的一个独特的审美范畴,寓含着丰富多彩的内涵和深刻的文化意蕴,孕育出很多与纹身相关的风俗文化事象。从古代美学的角度来看,纹身是一种特殊的人体装饰艺术形式,是古代民族艺术发展史上的奇葩。本文多层次、多角度地深入考证和探究了古代百越及其后裔民族纹身艺术产生、发展的历史过程和主要原因。     

Ethnic entrepreneurship and the question of agency: the role of different forms of capital,and the relevance of social class

The literature on ethnic entrepreneurship has focused on structural factors, group characteristics or a combination of both when explaining the entry and/or success of different ethnic groups in/to self-employment. While the active involvement of individuals has often been noted, agency has been under-theorised, and frequently conflated with what are considered as ‘cultural’ factors. This article explores the question of agency in ethnic entrepreneurship by looking at how entrepreneurs access and mobilise different kinds of resources. Using a forms-of-capital approach, the article draws on qualitative data from the U.K. and Spain, and looks at how entrepreneurs mobilise cultural, social and economic resources in structural contexts that include constraining as well as enabling features. Our findings show that the entrepreneurs are active agents who play an important role in shaping ethnic businesses. However, their agency varies significantly depending on the extent to which entrepreneurs have access to different kinds of resources, which is closely linked to their socioeconomic position. The article contributes to the literature through its direct engagement with the question of agency in ethnic entrepreneurship, and by highlighting the relevance of social class in entrepreneurial processes.     

壮族民俗文化中的动漫文化创意产业元素

动漫是一种特殊的艺术形态,它的成功体现在文化带来的巨大商业价值上。动漫切忌随波逐流,只有拥有自身独有的民族元素和文化符号,才能成就其独特的艺术生命力。中国动漫的发展,须以民俗文化作为基石,才能散发出奇异的芬芳。本文旨在讨论从壮族的民俗文化中提炼作为动漫文化创意产业的元素,切实把握壮族民俗文化的精髓,并融入时代特征和品味,打造广西独树一帜的动漫品牌。     

Retirement migration and transnationalism in northern Mexico

This article examines the phenomenon of transnationalism among retired immigrants living in border areas of northern Mexico. Using in-depth interviews conducted with US retirees residing in Baja California, Mexico, we seek to examine how transnational aging is constructed through different practices, relationships, networks and exchanges between both cultures and countries. We analyse several analytical dimensions of transnationalism including social, economic, cultural, identity and belonging conditions. In particular, networks and exchanges among these elderly migrants are most frequently constructed across social and family networks, economic transfers, access to healthcare, and culture. Additionally, we find that these maintained transnational practices in northern Mexico parallel those of international retired migrants living in other parts of the world. However, we argue that the proximity to the US border enables and encourages many types of connections of varying intensities. Finally, we discuss the implications for future research linking transnationalism with international retirement migration.     

Recognition and Difference: The Power of Perspectives in Interpretive Dialogue

Confronted with vast cultural differences mediated by social power relations, the human and social sciences face a major challenge: How can one adequately recognize a differently situated human agent, given that all interpretation is grounded in culturally local, partially implicit, and socially shaped background assumptions? Based on the hermeneutic premise that understanding is grounded in the interpreter's background and identity, the article develops an argument how the recognition of difference is possible in interpretive dialogue. According to our view, epistemic and ethical recognition of the other can be achieved if the linguistic potential for reflexive perspective-taking is taken into account and unleashed in interpretation. Proceeding through constructive criticism, we first show with Said's analysis of Orientalism how power-defined symbolic perspectives can distort the hermeneutic recognition of the other. Yet we also show how Said himself fails to develop the possible position of a new hermeneutic attitude toward cultural difference. We then turn to Levinas’ radical recognition of otherness since it forcefully undercuts an essentializing or objectifying attitude toward human agency. However, Levinas fails to integrate the recognition of the other with the concrete linguistically mediated self-understanding of socially situated agents. This forces us to suggest, in the third and final section, a new approach. We show that an epistemically and ethically adequate understanding of the other—which includes the normative constraint of an interpretive orientation at the self-understanding of the other—can be grounded in the linguistically mediated competence for interpretive perspective-taking.     

物以致用与审美超越——从民俗情境中看蔚县剪纸的艺术功能

剪纸是一种较普及的民间美术形式,它的创作、传承和艺术功能的发挥依托民众特定的文化背景和生活环境而展开。蔚县剪纸作为彩色剪纸的典型代表,也在民俗生活情境中有效发挥着实用与审美功能,并以此成就了自己持久的艺术魅力。     

Cultural response to forced labour and commodity production in Portugal's African colonies

Abstract

In the Portuguese colonies in Africa, forced labour was the principal feature I of commodity production. It was central to capitalist accumulation in Portugal. The common experience of forced labour and commodity production was (and is) widely remembered in the societies of Mozambique, Angola, Guinea‐Bissau, Cape Verde, and São Tomé e Principe. This contribution attempts to establish the historical relationship between what Amilcar Cabrai termed the cultural situation and the economic (and by long term implication the political) situation. It focuses on cultural forms such as songs, poetry and sculpture, as articulations of a collective memorization of the experience of colonial capitalist exploitation. It argues for a dynamic political mobilizational potential of such cultural manifestations in the process of national liberation. This article should be read in conjunction with the pictures of colonial commodities above. They respectively provide antagonistic images of colonial commodity production.     

Leveraging the common and outsourcing the distinct: institutional difference and multinational company identity in emerging economies

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the challenges of outsidership faced by multinational companies (MNCs) accessing emerging economies. The paper departs from popular conceptualisations of culture drawing instead on social identity theory as part of an institutions-based view, to explain how employing a singularities approach can allow the identification of commonalities of Indianness and Australianness that can be leveraged to ameliorate negative socially embedded business norms that pose a challenge to MNC success in emerging economies. This study shows that despite recognised formal (regulatory) and informal (cultural) differences, managers of Australian MNCs operating in India were able to innovatively identify and exploit cultural commonalties/singularities to ease cultural adjustment and mitigate intergroup conflict, allowing them to achieve an innovative institutional fit. The paper discusses how, using this approach, sole-venture MNCs can access many of the benefits provided by collaborative entry modes while preserving MNC identity. We further propose that the singularities approach can provide a valuable starting point to develop culturally appropriate competence training initiatives.     

Ideal liberal subjects and Muslim “Others”: liberal nationalism and the racialization of Muslim youth in a progressive Danish school

Drawing on an ethnographic case study of Muslim youth in a Danish lower secondary school, this article explores teacher talk about Muslim immigrant students and how teachers engaged liberal ideals of respect, individualism, and equality in ways that racialized immigrant students. I consider moments of vacillation in teacher talk to explore tensions between teacher’s desires to assimilate immigrant students to national norms of belonging and their desires to be perceived as inclusive and ‘open.’ In doing so, I ask how visions of liberal schooling impose ideas of what a ‘normal’ citizen should be and how teachers produce ‘ideal’ liberal subjects in their talk and in the everyday practices of schools. I argue that teachers engage the ideals of abstract liberalism to establish a colorblind discourse of non-racism. While educators described the school as an idealized space where students are encouraged to freely express themselves, to develop unique individual outlooks, it was clear that this vision of ‘openness’ did not include Muslim students’ attachments to religious and cultural identities.     

萨满教创世神话中的人本主义曙光

本文通过对萨满教创世神话与相关祭礼人神关系的考察,探索萨满教传承早期人本主义思想的文化基质,不仅造就了对后世人类具有永恒魅力的艺术形态,而且寓含着对人类当下与未来的文化发展具有生生不息生命活力的文化"基因"。     

Contamination,deception and ‘othering’: the media framing of the horsemeat scandal

Food and consumption practices are cultural symbols of communities, nations, identity and a collective imaginary which bind people in complex ways. The media framed the 2013 horsemeat scandal by fusing discourses beyond the politics of food. Three recurrent media frames and dominant discourses converged with wider political debates and cultural stereotypes in circulation in the media around immigration and intertextual discourse on historical food scandals. What this reveals is how food consumption and food-related scandals give rise to affective media debates and frames which invoke fear of the other and the transgression of a sacred British identity, often juxtaposing ‘Britishness’ with a constructed ‘Otherness’.     

Perception of identity in Modern China

Abstract

China had developed relatively independently and had been almost immune to Western influences until the 19th century. Its basic way of life, cultural identity and state organization had continued almost uninterrupted from the very beginning of the archaic period. How China has adapted to the modern world since it was forced to be integrated into the modern world and, in the process, how it has changed its perception of self‐identity provide an interesting topic for study.

This paper offers a tentative discussion of the perception of cultural identity in modern China. It first explores the ideas of culture and cultural identity in traditional China, and then examines how these ideas were transformed in the context of the changing social, political and cultural environment of the early 20th century. The final part of the paper is devoted to the recent search in China for new ideas of culture and cultural identity in the context of a series of unprecedented events marked by the opening of China, economic reform, and rapid industrialisation.     

民族艺术设计与品牌化战略研究

民族艺术设计与品牌化战略的结合是加强国际市场竞争力的有效途径,苦荞茶、5100矿泉水的包装设计及《民族学刊》的装帧设计都证明了民族艺术设计品牌化的重要价值和意义。民族艺术设计品牌化战略构想包括民族艺术设计与品牌战略的结合,民族艺术设计与市场营销相结合,民族艺术设计与科技创新相结合,民族艺术设计与文化创意相结合,民族艺术设计与国际化战略接轨。     

试论中央与民族自治地方的经济关系

经济关系是民族关系的核心和基石,处理好经济关系,对于妥善解决政治、文化等其他关系具有十分重要的意义。应规范、完善处理中央与民族自治地方经济关系的法律,并以此为依据,严格执行。中央与民族自治地方经济关系主要包括资源共享、财权划分、财政援助、经济自治等四个方面;中央与民族自治地方的经济关系总体上是良好、和谐的。     

Partisans of Nation-States: Comparing the Role of Minority Identities in New Zealand and Finland

Cultural diversity and the decentralisation of cultural self-determination are principal aims in the cultural strategies of modern western countries. However, there is no general agreement as to which groups should be granted such autonomy, or about who should be regarded as the authentic spokesmen for their groups. This article asks how two smallish but developed countries, Finland and New Zealand have historically arranged the status of their cultural minorities. The comparison is based on the cultural differences between these two countries, which have similar views on political rights and share a similar dependence on a limited number of economic sources. The chief guides of my reasoning have been Michael Volkerling's notion of cultural policies as ‘difference-engines’ and Alessandro Pizzorno's conception of ‘partisan identities’. The analysis showed that the State has, in both cases, actively interfered with the construction of sub-identities. This was done by carefully creating the channels of negotiation, and specifying the individuals actually involved in the negotiations about minority rights. These ‘appropriate national sub-identities’ have ensured a stability for the state, but have simultaneously led to enormous social concentrations of power within and between the groups themselves.     

‘Presentable’: the body and neoliberal subjecthood in contemporary India

The opening up of the Indian economy through a series of neoliberal reforms since 1991 ushered in processes of globalization that have led to a rapidly changing socio-cultural environment in India. Economic growth, globalizing discourses, and new consumer choices have driven desires for new global-yet-Indian identities. An emerging consumer agency has allowed for the embodiment and performance of these identities at the site of the body, even as new spaces of consumption have necessitated new bodily dispositions and practices. In this paper, I focus on how access to new commodities and discourses has affected understandings of the modern Indian body. In particular, I concentrate on appearance and the notion of exercising consumer agency to be ‘presentable’ as a lens through which to examine broader aspects of the body in the creation of neoliberal subjects in India.     

The Benefits of in-betweenness: return migration of second-generation Chinese American professionals to China

In an era of growing transnational practices, this paper considers the trend of second-generation Chinese Americans who have ‘returned’ to the People's Republic of China (PRC) to work. Previous studies of return migration to China have focused on issues of ethnic and racial identity that arise during temporary homeland trips undertaken by those seeking to connect with ancestral and cultural origins. Accordingly, most research has highlighted the sense of cultural ‘in-betweenness’ experienced by Chinese Americans whose travels in the ancestral homeland bring an uncomfortable realisation that they are considered neither fully Chinese nor fully American. By contrast, my in-depth interviews with 52 second-generation Chinese American professionals in Beijing and Shanghai suggest that this liminality can be particularly useful in the workplace. I argue that first-world Chinese co-ethnics who work on a long-term basis in the PRC can uniquely leverage Western training with their assumed knowledge of Chinese culture to create personal economic advantage: a practice that I refer to as ‘strategic in-betweenness'. Nonetheless, while participants described distinct career-related benefits to being Chinese American in the PRC, they also feared they would soon be replaced by high-skilled, Western-educated Chinese natives who are moving back to their home country in large numbers.