Orientalising deafness: race and disability in imperial Britain

This article explores the conflations and connections that postcolonial and disability scholars have drawn between ‘race’, ‘colonialism’ and ‘disability’ from a historical perspective. By looking at the connections drawn between ‘race’ and ‘disability’ in the context of nineteenth-century imperial Britain, I hope to probe beyond them to examine the origins and implications of their interplay. I do so by focusing on ideas about deafness, an impairment radically reconfigured in the colonial period, and inflected with concerns about degeneration, belonging, heredity and difference. Disability, I argue, not only operated as an additional ‘category of difference’ alongside ‘race’ as a way of categorising and subjugating the various ‘others’ of Empire, but intersected with it. The ‘colonisation’ of disabled people in Britain and the ‘racial other’ by the British were not simply simultaneous processes or even analogous ones, but were part and parcel of the same cultural and discursive system. The colonising context of the nineteenth century, a period when British political, economic and cultural expansion over areas of South Asia, Australasia and Africa increased markedly, structured the way in which all forms of difference were recognised and expressed, including the difference of deafness. So too did the shifts in the raced and gendered thinking that accompanied it, as new forms of knowledge were developed to justify, explain and contest Britain's global position and new languages were developed through which to articulate otherness. Such developments reconfigured the meaning of disability. Disability was, in effect, ‘orientalised’. ‘Race’ I argue was formative in shaping what we have come to understand as ‘disability’ and vice versa; they were related fantasies of difference.     

The other Chinese: identity work and self-orientalization of Chinese host country nationals in multinational corporations

ABSTRACT

This paper draws on an in-depth case study of narrative identity work to explore heuristically the role of host country nationals in the reproduction of orientalist discourses in multinational corporations (MNCs). Based on this analysis, it presents an identity strategy termed the other Chinese. The other Chinese claims to be in-between the West, that is constructed as superior modern and rational, and China, that is constructed as backwards and chaotic. This in-betweenness allows the other Chinese to take the role of a mediator between locals and expatriates, and at the same time claim superiority towards normal Chinese. Thus, this identity construction is a creative act of hybridization and localization, but it is not subversive to existing power structures in the MNCs. However, as we show, the construction of the other Chinese is not inextricably bound to the field of the MNCs, but is based on a hybrid and creative entanglement of various sources such as class positions and public discourse in China, in which the MNCs only occupy an insignificant role. It is, therefore, to be understood as an aspect of identity construction in China relevant for MNC identity, rather than an aspect of the transnational field of the MNCs.     

‘It’s all bollocks!’ and other critical standpoints on the UK Government’s vision of global citizenship

The UK Government’s International Citizen Service (ICS) sends volunteers abroad to ‘fight global poverty’ as ‘global citizens’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the construction of development on the ICS programme forecloses important political and historical contexts, resulting in a model of global citizenship we might term ‘soft’. This article presents data from interviews with ICS volunteers with a specific methodological concern of recognizing the agency of young people and allowing their responses to lead discussion. The outcome is a range of themes across the data that critique the Government’s model of citizenship and, I argue, shows the volunteers to be ‘critical’ global citizens. I then ask whether we can consider this a mode of resistance. I conclude with a final data set that – the case is made – presents an imperative to allow these volunteers to have their perspectives on historical and contemporary North–South relations recognized as a critical mode of global citizenship.     

Narratives of national belonging: the domestic,the wild,and the mutant in Australian film

This article explores understandings of postcolonial national belonging through an analysis of cinematic representations of humans, animals and the environment. It does so by analyzing a series of Australian films about plants, animals or people who are out of place or out of control. The article registers some of the changing representations of Australian flora, fauna and, by association people, as native, domesticated, simpatico, feral and wild; interpreting these shifts as recalibrations of a moral hierarchy of cultural belonging. Films including Lantana (2001) Dir. Ray Lawrence; Razorback (1984) Dir. Russell Mulchay; Rogue (2007) Dir. Greg Mclean; and Black Water (2007) Dirs. David Nerlich and Andrew Traucki are read in terms of political anxieties. Drawing on work ‘that insists humans and animals are currently bound in a complex network of relationships’, I use these films to explore issues of the nation, place, belonging in relation to aliens and natives. Given that in the past 20 years there has been increasing recognition of the history of colonialism and its effects on Indigenous peoples but also a different but related blossoming of environmental nationalism, the key question that animates this research is how these understandings are represented in film and what work animals and plants might have played in filmic cultural representations of national belonging.     

"第六代"电影的后现代性解读

所谓"第六代",是指活跃在20世纪90年代的一批年轻的电影人.他们在电影艺术上大胆地进行先锋探索和试验,并从当下的社会现实出发,通过电影语言来阐释他们的生命体验和人性关怀.本文结合中国20世纪90年代的社会文化语境--全球化/后现代/后殖民的多重交织,通过对"第六代"电影个案<苏州河>(娄烨,1997年)的文本解读,进而对"第六代"电影作品从整体上进行后现代性分析,以进一步阐释中国90年代的社会文化结构及中国电影的未来走向.     

后殖民技科学:科学跨文化传播研究的新维度

在传统科学实在论影响下,欧洲科学的跨文化传播表现为一种单向性线性传播与同质化过程;在后殖民科学观的影响下,"地方性知识"开始切断西方科学在不同文化之间的传播,走向文化相对主义。后殖民技科学观强调在西方科学的全球化传播或地方性建构中,西方科学与地方性知识、西方文化与地方性文化是在互动中共同影响,共同发展,西方在改造非西方的同时,非西方也改造了西方,两种维度是辨证缠绕在一起的。在哲学上,这突破了传统科学实在论与社会建构论的反映论与表象主义,进入了"实践唯物主义"。     

后殖民主义视角下的澳洲土著小说《野猫下坠》

澳大利亚土著作家马都鲁创作的第一部澳洲土著小说《野猫下坠》描绘了土著在殖民社会的孤独感、幻灭感和逃遁感.从后殖民主义的视角来看,马都鲁不仅试图探讨土著混血儿的身份认同问题,突出土著文化传承的意义,还试图通过模拟欧洲白人的文学形式、语言和后现代创作手法,动摇殖民话语的稳定性,解构白人的文化霸权.     

Epilogue of empire: East Timor and the Portuguese postcolonial catharsis

The demonstrations of solidarity with East Timor that occurred in Lisbon in September 1999 were the first major political demonstrations since the fall of the dictatorship in 1974. Solidarity with East Timor demonstrated the importance to the Portuguese of emotional and cultural ties to people whom they saw as sharing their language and Catholic religion. These commonalities have a clear colonial history and are now being reconstructed around the idea of Lusophony, which is taken to be the core of a Portuguese postcolonial identity. East Timor, a Portuguese colony that was occupied by Indonesia after the Portuguese revolution of 1974, used diacritical signs such as Portuguese and Catholicism in its nationalist struggle against Indonesia. These signs are the cultural patrimony of a local creole elite and are exaggerated in Portuguese perceptions of East Timor. The colonial and postcolonial ironies of this case of mutual constitution of identity are analyzed.     

State carnivals and the subvention of multiculturalism in Singapore

Increasing attention is being paid to the specificities of Asian multiculturalism in relation to ethnic pluralism, citizenship and developmental state formation. This article examines these relationships by analysing three carnival events in colonial and postcolonial Singapore that were organized by the state to promote its official multiculturalism. Through its cultural logics of horizontal racial segmentation, cascading symbolic authority from the state to co-opted communal representatives and multi-modal ritual iteration, the 1937 King George VI coronation celebrations proffered an imperial multiculturalism based on mediating plural groups and procedural norms. Adopting the same cultural logics in the 1970s, the newly-independent nation-state revived and transformed Chingay, a creole Chinese religious procession, into an annual parade celebrating the nation as comprising racially plural groups bound together by the modern ethos of progress the developmental state exemplified. In the 2000s, Chingay has been turned into an international spectacle celebrating Singapore as a cosmopolitan global city of hybridizing multiculturalism. But indicative of new racial-class segmentation, the old nation-building pluralism is promoted by Racial Harmony Day carnivals held in suburban public housing neighborhoods. This bifurcated multiculturalism reflects the developmental state's attempts to deal with new citizenship trends as they grind against the old ethnic pluralism. While faced with the same issues globalization brings, this postcolonial multiculturalism is distinctively different from liberal multiculturalism, not least because the subvention of multiculturalism is achieved through the state appropriation of vernacular cultural practices through its carnivals.     

美国印第安人生存模式的重构——路易丝·厄德里奇《痕迹》的后殖民解读

文章从后殖民视角出发,通过细读美国印第安女作家路易丝·厄德里奇的《痕迹》,探讨美国印第安人生存模式的变化和重构,揭露白人殖民者对印第安人所造成的严重后果,以唤起人们对当今美国印第安人生存状况的关注和对如何保存和发展印第安传统文化的思考。在当今全球化的时代背景下,研究《痕迹》这部小说有一定的启迪意义：在传承本民族优秀文化的同时,印第安文化应与其他文化积极交流,善于从其他文化中吸收有利于本族文化发展的积极成分,从而使美国印第安人在多元文化中找到自己的位置并发出自己的声音。