Oestrogen Rising 2016: Ireland’s stained and bloodied cloths

A weaver, seamstress, laundress and artist, in this essay I shall spin a yarn, tangle a web, and construct a text(ile) of the inter-weave of narrative and identity that I define as my intellectual, textual, somatic and material/visual practice obsessions. My work explores ‘the places in-between’ in the entanglements of Irish and Northern Irish gender and identity, and in the abject fabrics of death and of desire. As an Irish feminist, sense-making of the complexities, conundrums, challenges and contradictions of my land, my cloth, my body and my culture owes much to Irish women before me who fought for female suffrage, and Irish women now – north and south of the border that divides the island of Ireland – who still struggle for equality of citizenship, social justice, human rights, and full reproductive autonomy. My contention is that when we accept that Ireland herself is a many-layered cloth, a stained and bloodied cloth, a cloth marked irreversibly by history, conflict, denial and abuse, stained by its own repression, marked through denial of all its people’s rights and needs, and bloodied by its greatest export, the haemorrhage of its people, then – polemical, didactic or reflective, with more compassion, empathy, humility and heart – we just might make peace with our past.     

Transcending apartheid in higher education: transforming an institutional culture

Twenty years after Nelson Mandela became President of South Africa, deeply entrenched inequalities and injustices are still at the core of the country’s social fabric. South Africa’s public and private sectors continue to battle with the situation and higher education institutions are no exception. The South African Ministry of Education has identified systemic problems within the institutional cultures of universities as one of the key obstacles to change. This article focuses on a racist incident that occurred at the University of the Free State (UFS) in South Africa in 2007. The incident shook the university’s institutional culture to the core and became a catalyst for change for universities across the country. We portray the institutional culture of the UFS on the basis of a series of interviews with management and student leaders who personally played key roles in handling the incident in 2008. The interviews reveal some of the ‘story stock’ within the institutional culture and highlight four interrelated dimensions of contestation. The stories also show that the interviewees frequently situate and justify their beliefs and actions in an intergenerational chain. Finally we consider some of the implications of our findings for the ongoing reconstruction of post-apartheid institutional cultures in higher education.     

从"权利"到"仪式":南非的艾滋病行动主义

在本文中,我考察了南非HIV/AIDS行动主义的道德政治如何有助于公民身份(citizen-ship)新形式的出现,这种新形式既与基于权利(rights-based)的斗争相关,又与个体HIV/AIDS患者对病痛和污名化(stigmatization)极端体验的共享意义相关。我指出,可以确定的是,正是晚期艾滋病患者"接近死亡"的绝境体验、以及与这种疾病晚期阶段相连的巨大污名和"社会死亡",为HIV/AIDS的幸存者对"新生命"和社会行动主义的委身提供了平台。行动主义者的干预和对这些创伤经验的重述也推动了HIV/AIDS对行动主义的委身和社会底层的动员。此外,污名和社会死亡的巨大否定性也驱使行动主义者重建对HIV检测呈阳性人群新的、正面的身份认同,并促使他们思考,作为一名公民-行动主义者和一项社会运动的成员意味着什么。     

Institutions,inculcation, and black racial identity: pigmentocracy vs. the rule of hypodescent

This research paper investigates the effect political institutions have on black racial identity. In particular, I study individual inculcation in contexts where political institutions institutionalize either of two forms of racial social structures – a pigmentocracy (the Dominican Republic), or the rule of hypodescent (the US South), and the effect such inculcation has on black racial identity. I sampled 101 respondents from the Dominican Republic and 102 from the state of Mississippi, USA. Consistent with the basic assumptions of my hypotheses, respondents in the Dominican Republic study sites showed a weaker degree of identification with blackness vis-à-vis something ‘whiter’. Nevertheless, respondents in the Dominican Republic sites demonstrated a stronger identification with blackness than what most conventional observers would have anticipated. Respondents in the Mississippi study sites showed a stronger sense of identification with blackness. Surprisingly, however, Mississippi respondents demonstrated a larger degree of neutrality than expected in their belief of being of a mixed racial heritage rather than just a black African heritage.     

How njangui socio-cultural houses influence students’ collaboration towards boosting Africanism

One visible characteristic that Cameroonian immigrant students have brought to South Africa is njangui/ngumba house, which redefines social inter-relationships among South African and other African citizens who were previously unknown to them. A njangui is a traditional social gathering while a ngumba is a kind of sacred society often reserved for the elderly. However, njangui and the ngumba houses have morphed into a type of social meeting where people meet to discuss and solve personal or collective problems, whether emotional, social or economic and then dine and wine at the close of each meeting. This paper describes one njangui group, its purpose, process of selecting members and activities among a group of students within a South African University. I draw on concept of locality to explore the link between social mobility, language, business, and culture. In order to explain this traditional social gathering I used an ethnographic design. This allowed me to become part of the participants’ daily practices. One argument is that socio-cultural strength culminates in socio-economic relations. Therefore, I conclude that this kind of relation could influence the social cohesion of students which may extend to significant relationships.     

The legacy of Derrick Bell and Latino/a education: a critical race testimonio

In this article, we trace Bell’s influence in our lives from graduate students to teacher educators and engaged scholars, and note how we have always read Bell alongside and inseparable from Latino/a Studies and Latina/Chicana feminist thought. We highlight the powerful and fruitful tensions of these interconnections in addressing our curricular struggles and innovations, professional identities and scholarly trajectories. We address Bell’s theory of interest convergence to discuss the tensions and possibilities of personal ‘success’ in the academy by interweaving our testimonios with Critical Race and Latino Critical Race (LatCrit) scholarship in Latino/a education. Latina feminist scholars have re-worked the Latin American tradition of testimonio as a way to link individual stories to a collective story of Latina/o racialization in the US, and to epistemological racism in the academy. Our collective story centers the intersections of race with indigeneity, class, citizenship, language, gender and sexuality. We begin from the earliest influence of Bell’s counterstorytelling method for examining Latino/a students’ racializing experiences in higher education and move through other critical race work in Latino education that both directly and indirectly addresses Bell’s scholarship as these intersect with our intellectual journeys. Finally, we offer a story of the complex legacy of Bell’s anti-subordination and social justice scholarship for intellectual alliances, coalition building, and inter-, multi- and trans-disciplinary engaged scholarship.     

Flexible ethnic identity,adaptation, survival,resistance: The Garifuna in the world-system

In this paper we examine flexible ethnic identity formation as a mechanism of accommodation and resistance deployed by a particular social group with origins in the periphery as they respond to changing political and economic forces in the world-system. This paper addresses criticisms that world-system analyses are ‘too macro’ or ‘structurally deterministic’ by examining on the ground action and responses by a local oppositional movement within its broad political and economic context. Its focus is an historical case study of a particular group of people whose origins lie in European colonial expansion into the Caribbean in the seventeenth century. The paper begins by recounting ethnographic reports of Garifuna origin myths, then sketches this group's forced incorporation in a colonial world-system (and their responses), discusses their assignment to ‘minority group’ status within newly independent Belize at about the same time they are establishing transnational communities via migration to the United States, and concludes with some thoughts on the emerging ‘virtual communities’ of Garifuna and indigenous peoples around the world that are emerging on the worldwide web today. We explore what the notion of ethnic identity means in this particular case, and how and why it changes over time. We also try to understand if this flexible identity, and the social movements that arise as it is redefined, can be understood as a form of ‘resistance’. Finally, we ask if diasporic identity movements of indigenous people, like the Garifuna, actually or potentially can contribute to rising challenges against the forces of contemporary ‘globalization’.     

Too hot to handle: African Caribbean pupils and students as toxic consumers and commodities in the educational market

Secondary sources are used in this paper to highlight how African Caribbean pupils and students – the Black British-born descendants of post-war Caribbean migrants – are victims of symbolic violence, because they are denied the educational capital needed to improve their social status. Since African Caribbean children entered the 1960s British educational sector, their learning has been perceived as problematic by the State. Although assimilation, integration and multicultural education policies were implemented to supposedly address the ‘problem’ of educating Black children, subsequent government reports identified racism as a significant barrier in their education. I argue here that the contemporary marketisation of education makes it increasingly difficult to distinguish between racism and competition, as causal factors of ethnic differences in educational attainment. Moreover, due to increasing private sector intervention and decreasing mediation by the State, racism is now hidden within the vicissitudes of the educational market. School exclusions and discriminatory practices in universities are viewed in this paper as major barriers to the economic success and future social mobility of Black Caribbean pupils and students. I conclude by suggesting that marketisation policies can be appropriated to ameliorate racism in education, but only if the political will to do so exists.     

Deconstructing Racial Democracy: A Personal Quest to Understand Social Conditioning about Race Relations in Brazil

Although considerable work has been done about racial democracy in Brazil, scant information is available regarding the mechanisms by which social conditioning related to the myth of racial democracy is reproduced among those in power. In order to better understand race relations in Brazil, we must include perceptions of those who are in power. I was born and raised by a white, privileged family in a traditional Brazilian state. My family comes from a long line of coffee growers who have always interacted with many oppressed African Brazilian employees. As a privileged white Brazilian woman I have wide access to white privileged Brazilians and I can provide a unique perspective on race relations in Brazil. This auto-ethnographic research project used ethnomethodology and visual ethnography to answer the following research questions: 1) What are the assumptions about race relations in Brazil held by me, my family, and those African Brazilians who interact directly or indirectly with my family and me? 2) How do these assumptions influence my subjective understanding of and responses related to race relations in Brazil? 3) How do these assumptions influence the interactions between myself, my family, and those African Brazilians who interact directly or indirectly with my family and me? Data included journal entries, an in-depth interview of my life history, and photographs collected over 40 days in a traditional state in Brazil. Data analysis identified five main themes: 1) blackness versus whiteness; 2) gender, power and sexuality; 3) mechanisms maintaining practices that reproduce oppression; 4) power of social conditioning; and 5) normative expressions of agency against racial democracy ideology.     

Popular Culture and Politics: Whispers and the ‘Dramaturgy of Power’ in Kenya

Popular culture has become one of the most visible sites of critical social and political interpretation in post-colonial Africa. It is a site where an alternative public space is created and where various discourses; social, economic and political are invariably debated and negotiated. In many ways its various forms reflect, other times allegorize, fundamental transformation in society. In Kenya, a weekly newspaper column, Whispers, written by one of the country's most prolific fiction writers Wahome Mutahi, became arguably the most visible site of social, cultural and political expression for the last two decades, at a time when freedom to such expression was highly constrained by the state. The column echoed life in Kenya in all its banality but also in its distinctiveness. It interrogated a range of issues but most profoundly, the ‘performance of power’ in the country. Drawing from a pool of cultural resources and various forms of social and political culture, Whispers made legible the ambiguous interactions of ‘political performance’ in Kenya, how the subject population and the polity are all actors in a contradictory carnival of ‘mutual zombification’ which is at once empowering and disempowering. This paper engages with how fiction lays bare the intricacies of ‘political performance’ in the African postcolony using Kenya as a case study.     

Gendering a Language,Liberating a People: Women Writing in Afrikaans and the 'New' South Africa

I discuss contem porary South African women's writing in Afrikaans, particularly as produced by white women. Long overlooked, this body of work has quickly become the new avant garde of South African writing, reflecting (upon) as it presages dramatic transformations in the South African social fabric. Mapping the contributions of this writing in Afrikaans, I contrast them with the absence of engagement in South African writing in English with narrative techniques concerned with the nuances and ironies, the boundary and border transgressions of women's writing in Afrikaans- of traditional styles and themes, standard subjects and narrative technologies, of the gendered formation of language itself.     

Brushed aside: African American women’s narratives of hair bias in school

ABSTRACT

For African American women, hair is a key site of identity formation and self-esteem that has been largely ignored by education researchers. Fifty-six African American women shared memories of negative hair experiences in school as a means to magnify the implicit injuries of racial and gender marginalization in educational environments. Memories consisted of hair shaming and suffering the consequences of hair damage, by way of classmate or teacher. Embarrassment and anxiety were the most frequently reported emotional reaction, resulting in participants’ discomfort in school and in their interpersonal relationships. Findings from this study suggest that hair bias represents a source of trauma and identity negotiation within school contexts. Critical Black feminist theories were used to frame the method and interpretation of participants’ reflective narratives. The insights provided through the narrative sample fuel recommendations regarding anti-bias teaching and school policy reform.     

‘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.     

Sexual Anxieties and Rampant Masculinities in Postcolonial Kenyan Literature

Postcolonial African society has been characterised as one in transition. Institutions, communities and individuals experienced (and some continue to experience) rapid political, social, economic and cultural changes with differing consequences. The independence era in many African countries, the 1960s, unleashed freedoms and liberties that had been unimaginable to a majority of native Africans during the colonial era. These freedoms changed the nature of the social space and relationships, especially between men and women. As men jostled for and won political positions and power, the public and domestic space became highly masculinised. Men, who were seen as conquerors of the colonial establishment, seemed to transfer this masculinised mentality into the social fabric of the new nation-state in which ‘charged’ sexuality and virility was projected to ‘conquer’ their womenfolk. Postcolonial fiction from Kenya seems to suggest that urban working men indulged in hedonistic pursuits, primarily sex as a form of performing their new-found freedom, often to the detriment of their own lives and those of their families. These behaviours reflect the anxieties experienced by individuals when collective and individual freedoms suddenly became available.     

Mixed matters in Australia

ABSTRACT

Mapping attitudes toward intermarriage – who is and who is NOT considered an acceptable mate – offers an incisive means through which imaginings of belonging – ethnicity, nationhood, citizenship, race, and culture – can be critically evaluated. Looking specifically at Australia, despite a growing body of research on whiteness, and Mixedness, there is very little qualitative research on attitudes toward mixing among the different groups in Australia. Therefore, in this article, I document attitudes towards ‘mixed’ marriage through focus group interviews in communities across Australia to explore what boundaries, if any, exist and the attitudes of different groups toward intermarriage and ‘mixed’ families in Australia. Drawing from these 69 focus groups conducted across seven cities and the surrounding area of the six states of Australia: Darwin, Perth, Sydney, Brisbane, Canberra, Adelaide, and Melbourne with homogenous groups based on the ways Australians self-identify – indigenous (Aboriginal/Torres Strait Islander), white (differentiating if applicable between those who identify as Australian as opposed to European or South African), African Australian, and other groups at various community locations, I argue that national discourses of multiculturalism and imaginings of who and what constitutes being Australian heavily influence attitudes toward mixing. Furthermore, there is a clear hierarchy of desirability in terms of who is considered marriable, with pattern in the narratives and counter-narratives offered by different groups. These findings are presented within a larger discussion of how the contemporary situation in Australia compares to the institutional, individual, and ideological practices that discourage mixing globally.     

Colonial legacies,post-colonial (in)securities,and gender(ed) representations in South Asia's nuclear policies

Through a comparative study of India and Pakistan's national security discourses, this article explores the linkages between post-colonial India and Pakistan's nationalist/communalist identities, configurations of masculinities, and gendered representations underpinning their nuclear (in)securities. This paper contends that the colonial politics of place-making in the sub-continent has not only inscribed a process of ‘othering’ between these states but has also facilitated the rise of divergent visions of post-colonial nationalisms, which, at each of their phases and with particular configurations of masculinities, have used women's bodies to re-map India-Pakistan's borders and national (in)securities. This article particularly draws attention to a new form of gendered manipulation in South Asian politics in the late 1990s, whereby both states, embedded in colonial notions of religious/cultural masculinities, have relied on discourses of Hindu/Indian and Muslim/Pakistani women's violence and protection from the ‘other’ to pursue aggressive policies of nuclearization. It is at this conjectural moment of a Hinduicized and Islamicized nationalism (flamed by the contestations of a Hindu versus an Islamic masculinity) that one needs to provide a feminist re-interpretation of India-Pakistan's nationalist identities, gendered imaginaries, and their re-articulation of national (in)securities – that represents a religious/gendered ‘otherness’ in South Asia's nuclear policies.     

Migration,masculinity, and family

Previous studies of migration, family, and gender have shown that migration is not only an event that changes family life, the change itself is a gendered process. How migrant women develop strategies to cope with challenges posed by either their own migration or their husbands’ migration has been widely studied. However, how migrant men adjust and change their care practices and domestic roles to accommodate challenges brought about by migration to their family lives has not been as extensively explored. Using interview data gathered from male rural-to-urban migrant workers in South China, this paper fills this gap by studying male migrants’ agency and masculinity through the concept of masculine compromise. Masculine compromise delineates how migrant men strive to respond to changing family circumstances triggered by migration while maintaining the gender boundaries that underpin their dominance within the family. As a concept, masculine compromise underscores the material impact of migration on gender practices and family life; and the limited effect it has on gender attitudes and identity. Masculine compromise provides a feminist lens to analyse the complex effect of migration on changing masculinity and gender relationships within the family.