‘Why is our love an issue?’: same-sex marriage and the racial politics of the ordinary

This article analyzes the implicit white racial normativity underpinning the socio-legal struggle for same-sex marriage in Canada. I argue that discursive representations of ‘ordinary lives’ require alignment with terms of neoliberal citizenship – the privacy of property and intimacy – that hold whiteness as the unspoken yet aspirational ideal. As a contestation of heteronormative citizenship, same-sex marriage is not simply a politics of sexuality but also a politics of race.     

Unpacking racial identities: the salience of ethnicity in Southeast Asian-American youth’s schooling experience

This article reconceptualizes white teachers’ notion of their Asian-American students’ racial identity. Forty urban Southeast Asian-American (SEAA) students and seven of their white European-American teachers were examined to determine how the students responded to the white teachers’ assumptions about their identity. This study provides an overview of the U.S. historical and political contexts that shape the positionality of Southeast Asian-American youth in the black–white racial discourse. It found that despite the fact that the teachers lumped the SEAA students into one category, the students highlighted the salience of ethnicity in their lives. One implication of this study is for teacher education programs to train new teacher candidates to move beyond simple racial categorization or race-blind approaches. Instead, teachers should be taught to acknowledge the importance of ethnicity to their students; to examine their own positionalities; and to incorporate more culturally relevant pedagogies into their instructional practices.     

Multiracial matters – disrupting and reinforcing the racial rubric in educational discourse

When studying matters of race and education, there seems to be an assumption that the inclusion of all monoracial populations equates to a comprehensive look at all students, particularly students of color. But what about students who identify with more than one race? How do Multiracial students identify and how are they included/excluded with respect to educational curricula, policies and climates? This growing group presents an immediate opportunity and challenge to the educational community, because while educational researchers appropriately and vigorously pay attention to matters of traditionally under-represented monoracial groups of color, it has yet to be seen where Multiracial students fall into this discourse. Based on a qualitative study of 25 Multiracially identified college students, I explore the ways in which the notion of Multiraciality muddies traditional conversations about race and education in an effort to better understand the potential impact of this ‘new’ demographic within an educational context.     

‘Chinese-Mexicans’ and ‘Blackest Asians’: Filipino American youth resisting the racial binary

This study provides a deeper understanding of the interracial connections not just between non-whites and whites, but among non-whites. Filipino American youth attending high school in New York City contended with a dominant bipolar racial discourse that marginalizes the racialized experiences of Asians and Pacific Islanders. However, instead of feeling invisible or marginalized, data point to how they negotiated a black–white racial discourse to decide when and how they enter dialogues about race. Filipino youth reconceptualized this racial binary to position themselves on a continuum to form the racial ‘middle ground’ between blacks and whites. Importantly, rather than a racial hierarchy that places whites at the top, youth used discursive strategies to place themselves on a racial continuum that emphasizes the interconnectedness among racial minorities.     

Self reflection(s): Subjectivity and racial subordination in the contemporary African‐American writer

Abstract

Shelby Steele's The Content of our Character, and John Wideman's Philadelphia Fire are contrasted for what they reveal about the two authors’ confrontation with self‐expression and self‐definition in a society that denies African‐American individuality. I argue that Steele's and Wideman's distinctive solutions to personal expression as demonstrated in these works constitute the discursive boundaries, the poles between which black male subjectivity oscillates in this racialist society. To explicate these particular positions, I draw on psychoanalytic concepts of narcissism, masculinity, and subjectivity. Thomas Mann's Death in Venice is invoked to articulate, albeit in a different society and context, the subjective crisis of the intellectual, the linkage between one's inner world and outer society, and the relation between personal identity and national self‐understanding. While Steele opts for an isolated, transcendent individualism, Wideman embraces a conception of self inextricably connected to and constrained by the wider African‐American community. I argue that each ‘solution’ produces its own form of self‐estrangement, revealing the phychic cost and intractability of racial division in America.     

Abstracts about the Treatises of the Seminer

In the Tibetan calendar, the years are mentioned by a system known as Sexagenary Cycle. Inessence, it consists of the cycle of 60 years----each cycle called a Rab--byung. One of the prob-lems concerning the Chronological Tables is thus decoding this system for our understanding of theyear referred to in terms of the European calendar. But it seems important to mention here thatthere is some risk of inaccuracy in the standard practice of mechanically converting the Tibetan     

Identification,the exercise of democracy and the fear of the Other – the June EU referendum in the UK

ABSTRACT

The focus is the oscillation among leave voters in the EU referendum from the exercise of rights - an act of dis-identification – towards the assertion of identity as members of a British community. This was mediated by voters acting in an association of citizens calling on the equalising agency of the British people whilst claiming membership of a locally circumscribed community, perceived as injured, through entanglement with the Other prominent among them Europeans. Hence the recovery of the injured community as the object of the denunciators’ desire for identity coupled with the fear of the Other. Predicated on this was the resumption of class, gender and ethnic roles reflected in division among voters. The denunciation of togetherness with Europeans served leave voters to substitute the exercise of rights with a longing for identity. Instrumental in this was the lack of deliberation in the plebiscite to articulate the will of individual voters through a general will. The ‘direct power’ exercised enabled many to cast away their role as citizen in an attempt to claim their privileges as members of a racially and culturally demarcated British community. Paradoxically, the voters’ unashamed disavowal of their agency as citizens by seeking to restore a divided social world as the source of their identity was represented as an exercise in democracy. To some playing on words was supplemented by the use of force removing the gap between the discursive exclusion of the Other and the continued physical presence of bearers of different races and culture.     

An Exploration on the Realization of the Approach for Harmonious Ethnic Relations from the Perspective of“the Pattern of Diversity in Unity” Theory

1 .The “Pattern of Diversity in U-nity ” is a true reflection of the Chinese Nation ’ s ethnic relations     

The Impact of Change within the “Cultural Context” of the Contemporary Art of Qiang Paper Cutting-Based upon an Investigation of the Art of Paper -Cutting in Mao County

The original meaning of “cultural context” refers to the socio -cultural background relating to language communication .The cultural context of the Qiang art of paper -cutting in Mao county discussed i...     

State power and the role of education in the constitution of natives’ subjectivities: the Druze in Israel

Collective identities are largely conceived as the essence of human subjectivity, the basis of moral collectivities and the code by which people tend to relate to histories and current affairs. Michel Foucault, notwithstanding, argued that identities are the product of power relations. Through various techniques, such as the classification of populations to certain categories, the hierarchical ordering of these categories, the allocation of differential treatment to those who occupy the various categories and the association between belonging to particular categories and certain jobs and means of living, regimes establish group identities. This process of sorting out, we argue, is the beginning of a laborious endeavor whose final goal is to institutionalize the new identities in the consciousness of the wider public as natural. Education is thought to constitute an essential tool by which regimes inculcate the young generations with constructed identities. Despite that, hegemonic discourses are not stable; rather, they are constantly challenged by all sorts of groups who speak in the name of silenced histories or moral claims. In line with these insights, we aim in this article to trace the Israeli methods employed to constitute the Druze as a distinct ethnic category, which is different not only from the Muslims, a faith community to which they affiliated until 1961, but also from the Palestinian-Arab minority. Particularly, we aim to look at the role that the educational system has played in the constitution of Druze separate identity.     

‘For the sake of the family and future’: the linked lives of highly skilled Indian migrants

ABSTRACT

While in Western literature, migration is generally considered an individual or (nuclear) household phenomenon, Indian context adds the strong presence of parents and extended family to the constellation. This paper addresses how significant others shape the life course events and the migration trajectories of highly skilled Indian migrants to the Netherlands and UK. We employ a qualitative approach to the life course framework to highlight the linked lives that can alter the migration decisions. Our findings are drawn from 47 semi-structured biographic interviews. The results underscore how further migration decisions are often informed by the implications of the different life stages of the linked lives, the key elements being care-giving by and for the parents. Furthermore, we also illustrate how migration provides space for negotiating social norms and expectations: due to the geographical distance between migrants and their parents, the local (non-Indian) context plays a bigger role and thus the need for and timing of conformity with norms can be postponed. The understanding of family life in transnational settings will be enriched when individuals are embedded within the cultural background and linked lives are extended beyond the immediate nuclear family.     

What’s left unsaid? In-group solidarity and ethnic and racial differences in opposition to immigration in the United States

Do racial and ethnic characteristics of non-immigrants play an important role in shaping attitudes toward immigrants in the U.S.? Using a 2010 survey experiment representative of the U.S. general population, this paper examines differences in opposition to immigration by the race or ethnicity of the respondent. By manipulating the amount of anonymity offered to respondents, the experiment allows explicit opposition to be distinguished from implicit opposition, which offers unique insight into the extent to which opposition is masked. Consistent with theories of in-group solidarity, we find that Hispanics, who comprise nearly half of all immigrants in the U.S., overtly express a less restrictive posture, which, relative to Black and White respondents, is not significantly masked. In contrast, White and Black respondents only overtly express more openness to immigration. When offered absolute anonymity, opposition is significantly and substantively greater. The implications are profound in that differences in the extent to which opposition is masked, rather than overtly expressed, fundamentally patterns racial and ethnic differences in opposition to immigration in the U.S.     

Vastu compliance: the gentrification of India’s sacred spaces and the mobilities of ideas

ABSTRACT

This article examines the mobilities of ideas in the context of sacred spaces in India and transnational flows of trends and services. Mobile subjects on the global stage are still bound by immobile concerns, such as their homes. In this article I examine the anxieties of India’s globally mobile middle and elite classes through their efforts to make their gated multi-storey residences compliant with an ancient form of spatial spirituality: vastu shastra. Now common in advertisements for luxury apartments, I argue that vastu compliance is a form of liquid spirituality that is part and parcel of the privatisation of the urban landscape and the replacement of fixed or local sacred spaces and those that dwell around them: homeless or ‘occupying’ mendicants. In between these two polar opposite mobile subjects of the elite and the mendicant are vastu consultants who derive a living from their knowledge and practice of a form of liquid spirituality growing in popularity around the world.     

Experiments on puerile nations,or the impossibility of surpassing your father: the case of the Anglo‐Greek dialogue

This article is concerned with the dialogic construction of Greek national and British imperial identities. It examines the gendered language in which the Greeks and the British addressed each other in the 1860s and the 1870s. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, anthropology, studies of nationalism and post‐colonial theory, it looks at the symbolic structure of Anglo‐Greek cultural exchange. In this analysis, it is argued that the familial imageries both sides employed to describe themselves and/or each other were constitutive of the roles they had assumed in Anglo‐Greek relations, but also part of the very process of Greek nation‐building and British imperialism.     

Icons vs satirical inversions: Islamic rule and the ‘death of the author’ – the murder of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists in Paris

The satirical inversions of the images of the Prophet Muhammad by the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists that brought the wrath of two gunmen to their authors, projected a world in which the reader is recognised as an autonomous subject. Consequent on this autonomy is the restricted power of the author who used to derive it from the re-enactment of sacred Truth. Multiple and diverse readers, on the other hand, owe their authority from the right of the individual to reason and judge independently, which places them at arm's length from the author. The inverted images drawn by the cartoonists represented a departure from the Prophet's traditional iconic images whose resemblance to the referent left little room for variation among their faithful viewers driven to identify with the Messenger of Allah either by desire to imitate or for fear of punishment. The fixed iconic ‘reading’ by the faithful was mediated by the homogeneous Muslim Community (Umma) whose members were unable to use words to objectify among an association of citizens their internal sense of injury as an excess. As a consequence, this injury caused by the readers operating outside the Community called for the use of force by its members in retaliation (qisas) for the infidels’ reading as sanctioned in the sacred text. The more entrenched the membership of the Umma, largely the product of reading the sacred text – where the author retains his traditional power – the more inclined were the members to resort to brutal force to restore the traditional power of the author.     

International migration and the rise of the ‘civil’ nation

Scholars largely agree that immigration policies in Western Europe have switched to a liberal, civic model. Labelled as ‘civic turn’, ‘civic integration’ or ‘liberal convergence’, this model is not identically applied across countries, since national institutions, traditions and identifications still matter. Even so, the main focus is on processes which allow or prevent migrants to be incorporated into nations usually taken for granted in their meanings. Moving from policies to discourses, this article aims to interrogate what kind of nation is behind these policies as a way to further scrutinise the ‘civic turn’. Exploring how the term ‘civility’ and its adjectivisations are discursively deployed in Italian parliamentary debates on immigration and integration issues, the article points to two opposite narratives of nation. While one mobilises civility in order to rewrite the nation in terms of a common, inclusive, civic ‘we’, the other uses civility to reaffirm the conflation between national identity and the identity of the ethno-cultural majority. These findings suggest the importance of exploring the ‘civic turn’ not only across countries, but also across political parties within the same country to capture the ways in which a liberal, civic convergence in political discourses might hide divergent national boundary mechanisms.     

Communities of belonging in the temporariness of the Danish Asylum System: Shalini’s anchoring points

Refugees often find themselves in a protracted situation of temporariness, as applications for asylum are processed, deportations negotiated and possible extensions of temporary protection status considered within the context of increasingly restrictive governmental policies across Europe. Through the case of a young Sri Lankan woman who arrived in Denmark as an ‘unaccompanied asylum-seeking minor’ and spent five years within the Danish asylum system, this article explores how she experienced moving through different legal categories and the institutional settings associated with them. I argue that, by engaging in social relations in the localities where she was situated, she developed places of belonging that could serve as ‘anchoring points’ providing some measure of stability in her otherwise unpredictable and precarious life situation. This case suggests that, even under conditions of protracted temporariness and legal uncertainty, individuals are able to create important anchoring points and develop communities of belonging that can serve them in a difficult process of belonging to Denmark.