Power To Our Journeys: Re‐membering Michael

The following personal reflections are in honour of Michael and all that he contributed to our lives. And, we honour Brigitte a key member of the group who died in 2006. Mem, Sue and Veronica, December 2008.     

《根》中黑人文化身份的嬗变与重建?

《根》是美国黑人作家亚历克斯·哈利在二十世纪七十年代出版的一部家史小说。小说在追溯家族七代黑人曲折命运的过程中,清晰折射出黑人祖先身上不同的文化身份。通过对黑人家族三个典型人物文化认同的分析来探析黑人文化身份的嬗变与重建过程,这将对文化大融合背景下的少数边缘人群寻找精神归宿起到一定的指导意义。     

“I Really Belong Here”: Civic Capacity-Building among Returning Citizens

This article focuses on unlikely movement actors whose civic engagement has been understudied: people with criminal records (“returning citizens”). We present findings from 18 months of ethnographic research with members (leaders) of Fighting to Overcome Records and Create Equality (FORCE), a civic group led by returning citizens. FORCE leaders received institutional support from Community Renewal Society (CRS), a larger faith and community-based organization, to lead a rights reform movement in Chicago. Findings suggest that FORCE leaders constructed notions of kinship, recognition, and power through civic capacity-building efforts—and that social belonging was core to such capacity-building efforts. While bonding social belonging occurred as FORCE leaders formed kinship with people facing similar social and economic marginality, bridging social belonging emerged as leaders felt recognized by CRS staff organizers, affiliates, and elected officials. Bonding and bridging social belonging enabled FORCE leaders, who faced constant social exclusion in society, to experience much needed kinship, recognition, and power. Future studies should continue to uncover how local capacity-building processes have life-changing relational effects on movement participants from socially and economically marginalized groups.     

The powerful relational language of ‘family’: togetherness,belonging and personhood

This article examines the notion of ‘family’ to consider how it may be understood in people's everyday lives. Certain recurrent and powerful motifs are apparent, notably themes of togetherness and belonging, in the context of a unit that the person can be ‘part of’. At the same time, there may be important variations in the meanings given to individuality and family, evoking differing understandings of the self and personhood. I consider these ideas further through globally relevant but variable cultural themes of autonomy and relationality, suggesting the term ‘social person’ as a heuristic device to distinguish the sense of ‘close‐knit selves’ that may be involved in some understandings of personhood. I argue that this version of personhood may be powerfully expressed through ‘family’ meanings, with a significance which can be at least provisionally mapped along lines of inequality and disadvantage within and between societies around the world. These forms of connectedness may be hard to grasp through those theoretical and methodological frameworks which emphasize the (relational) individual. I argue that, in affluent English speaking societies, ¹ there may be little alternative to the language of ‘family’ for expressing such forms of relationality and connection.     

Imagining a future in ‘bush’: migration aspirations at times of crisis in Anglophone Cameroon

This article addresses the migration aspirations of young, lower middle-class Cameroonians living in Anglophone Cameroon. Deportations and prevention campaigns portray the negatives of migration, yet often have little impact because they assume that migrants’ aspirations are grounded in the prior success of other migrants. This research takes its lead from the question: Why aren’t aspiring migrants in Cameroon discouraged by migration failure? It is based on an ethnographic fieldwork conducted between September 2007 and January 2009 in Buea (South West Cameroon). Since the late 1990s, the desire for a future ‘away from home’ has come to be expressed in Anglophone Cameroon by aspirations of going to ‘bush’. Taking seriously people’s conceptions of success and failure in places of departure, the article argues that locally voiced claims of ‘global belonging’ exert an important influence on migration aspirations. An understanding of deeply rooted migration desires must include an analysis of identity politics.     

先秦岭南的政区归属

岭南作为中国历史地理的一个重要单元,自秦平百越置三郡起而归于中原统一王朝版图。战国以前,今桂东北、粤北、粤东部分地区分属古九州之荆、扬二州。战国时期,岭南政区和民族格局发生了重大变化,今广东潮、梅二州部分地区属闽越,韶关、清远、河源大部分地区属楚国,广西贺州、桂林大部分地区属楚国,两广其它地区为传统的百越之地,分为杨越(南越)人、西瓯人、骆越人所属。     

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.     

How the host nation's boundary drawing affects immigrants’ belonging

Across Western democracies, the place for newcomers in the host society is debated, involving often a questioning of immigrants’ belonging to their new nation. This article argues that immigrants’ feeling of host national belonging depends on how the host nation imagines its community and its concomitant boundaries. Utilising survey and country level data in multilevel regressions, immigrants’ belonging is found to vary significantly across the 19 countries included. A central contribution is the finding that citizenship policies do not explain this cross-national variation. Instead, what matters is the informal boundary drawing produced in the majority population's conception of what is important for being part of the national ‘us'. Thus, immigrants’ belonging is significantly greater when the majority population prioritises attainable criteria of national membership. In addition, these priorities are shown to have deep historical roots as immigrants’ belonging is greater in settler countries and in nations which democratised early. By showing that national imageries have consequences for a country's welcoming capacities, and by showing that these welcoming capacities are historically path dependent, the study contributes to the debate within nationalism studies about national identity's causal significance.     

“天下为公”是中国古代的统治思想

公天下论是中国古代影响最大的政治理论之一。它的主要内容是君主论,着重回答设君之道、为君之道和择君替君之道等重大政治理论问题。"天下为公"既论证了治权在君的合理性,描绘出"圣王之制"的理想政治蓝图,又为君权的存在与行使设置了条件和规范,还为政治批判提供了价值尺度。立君为公、君位为天下之公器、君道尚公、天下非一家一人私有等思想是中国古代统治思想的重要组成部分。这表明,中国的帝王观念有其精致、周到之处,甚至包含着许多超越时代的政治理性。以往的思想史研究对这个特点缺乏深入细致的分析,这是需要改进的。     

Belonging: women living with intellectual disabilities and experiences of domestic violence

Women with an intellectual disability are under-represented in domestic violence research, yet they are one of the most vulnerable groups who are at risk of violence and abuse. This article aims to contribute to the domestic violence field by reporting on a narrative dialogic performative study, which utilised a feminist poststructural perspective to explore significant relationships and the concept of belonging in the lives of women with a mild intellectual disability. Four in-depth narrative interviews were conducted. The study found that the women shared similar stories of devaluation and rejection in childhood and hence the women’s search for belonging contributed to their vulnerability to exploitation and abuse in domestic violence relationships. The paper argues that gendered discourses and constructions of intellectual disability regulate domestic violence as a personal problem or way of life for women with intellectual disabilities.