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"Khmer Pride": Being And Becoming Khmer-American In An Urban Migrant Education Program, Theresa Ann Mcginnis

Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement

This article focuses on the ways an urban migrant education program becomes a space where middle school Khmer students can explore who they are as Khmer youth living in an urban American context. I discuss how the youth are able to take a transformative, interactional stance to the literacy and sign-making practices within the program. I argue that the Khmer youth's identities are reflected within these literacy and expressive practices. Further, I suggest the experiences of these Khmer middle school children of agricultural workers provide rich examples of how immigrant youth draw on a variety of cultural resources (from urban …

Documenting Dylan: How The Documentary Film Functions For Bob Dylan Fans, Theodore G. Petersen

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to explore the role of the documentary film in the relationship between the artist and the fan; specifically how Bob Dylan fans use the documentary films Dont Look Back, directed by D.A. Pennebaker, and No Direction Home, directed by Martin Scorsese. Dylan, Pennebaker, and Scorsese are three important figures in American popular culture, and these are the two most prominent films about Dylan. These films discuss relatively the same time period, yet delineate two different versions of Dylan's identity. Dont Look Back, released in 1967, documents Dylan's 1965 tour of England. Because of Pennebaker's …

Displacement And The Text: Exploring Otherness In Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea, Maryse Condé'S La Migration Des Coeurs, Rosario Ferré'S The House On The Lagoon, And Tina De Rosa's Paper Fish, Melody Boyd Carriere

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is a study of how some displaced Caribbean and Italian American women examine identity within a literary tradition that considers them "Other." I have chosen four culturally diverse novels to explore, each one written by a different female author: Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea, Maryse Condé's La migration des cœurs, Rosario Ferré's The House on the Lagoon, and Tina De Rosa's Paper Fish. I identify the causes of the protagonists' displacement, and analyze the actions they take to make themselves heard in a tradition that has formerly silenced them. The role of the mother is especially important in …

Where Visual Literacy And Identity Meet: Adolescents Define Themselves Through Participation In A University Video And Art Enrichment Program, Susan Daniels, Patricia Little, Linda M. Reynolds, Alayne Sullivan

Journal of Critical Issues in Educational Practice

This article summarizes a project that oriented one hundred and twenty-five gifted and talented middle-school students to university culture through a series of summer workshops that emphasized visual media. Various workshops introduced students to methods of video and art production. The middle-school students created short videos and artistic collages to represent their identity in response to two activities: (a) in-depth explorations of the California State University campus at San Bernardino; and (b) literary reading. Art and video production are revealed as a powerful means of middle-school students’ identity formation and expression; the work summarized herein gains credence through its alignment …

Popular Representations Of Jewish Identity On Primetime Television: The Case Of The O.C., Tamara Olson

Media and Cultural Studies Honors Projects

Relying on a close reading of the primetime television soap opera The O.C., this thesis argues that Jewish identity on television has become perfectly compatible with normative Whiteness. While The O.C. is filled with signifiers of Jewishness, they are cultural rather than religious and are celebrated rather than rejected by WASPs. This analysis highlights the way Jews have been transformed from racialized “Others” in popular culture to Whites who embrace Jewish cultural styles, especially Jewish humor.

Sovereignty, Identity, And The Apparatus Of Death, Tawia Baidoe Ansah

Faculty Publications

Ten years after the genocide in Rwanda, the government issued broad new laws outlawing the use of ethnic categories, with a view to uniting all Rwandans under a single Rwandan identity. This self-erasure of ethnic identity is deployed primarily within the borders of the state, to enable reconciliation after the genocide in 1994. Outside the borders, the state deploys ethnic identity as one of the rationales for its cross-border wars (in the Democratic Republic of Congo).

Balagan And The Politics Of Israel/Palestinian "Identity", Terri Ginsberg

disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory

No abstract provided.

From Race To Class Struggle: Re-Problematizing Critical Race Theory, E San Juan Jr.

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

The misconstrual of "class" as a theoretical and analytic concept for defining group or individual identity has led, especially during the Cold War period, to its confusion with status, life-style, and other ideological contingencies. This has vitiated the innovative attempt of CRT to link racism and class oppression. We need to reinstate the Marxist category of class derived from the social division of labor that generates antagonistic class relations. Class conflict becomes the key to grasping the totality of social relations of production, as well as the metabolic process of social reproduction in which racism finds its effectivity. This will …

Stranger Within, Anniina Suominen

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

I base my teaching philosophy on the continuous self-directed learning of an individual. My goal is to help my students to learn to problematize their perception, their ways of thinking, their understanding of themselves, and their satisfaction with achieved learning goals. I support my students in their journeys of becoming critical searchers and inquirers of knowledge, visuality, and perceived reality. Although it is apparent they have learned to question authority and pre-given role and behavior models, I watch them searching for shortcuts for the answers within the complex structure of too many potential solutions.

Public Sexuality: A Contemporary History Of Gay Images And Identity, Shaun Erwin Sewell

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This study is an examination of the public imaging of gay men and lesbians during the latter part of the twentieth and early part of the twenty-first centuries. The study looks at public imaging as it is performed in the service of the political aims of gay people, with an eye towards the kinds of tensions and erasures that occur when one monolithic identity is promoted. Through these examinations, I create a kind of contemporary history of the gay political rights movement. In the study, I examine theoretical approaches to identity from several postmodern theorists and then use these approaches …

The Sociology Of Sexualities: Queer And Beyond, Joshua Gamson, Dawne Moon

Social and Cultural Sciences Faculty Research and Publications

We identify three trends in the recent sociology of sexuality. First, we examine how queer theory has influenced many sociologists whose empirical work observes sexuality in areas generally thought to be asexual. These sociologists also elaborate queer theory's challenge to sexual dichotomizing and trace the workings of power through sexual categories. Second, we look at how sociologists bring sexuality into conversation with the black feminist notion of “intersectionality” by examining the nature and effects of sexuality among multiple and intersecting systems of identity and oppression. A third trend in the sociology of sexuality has been to explore the relationships between …

The Infinite Plasticity Of The Digital: Posthuman Possibilities, Embodiment And Technology In William Gibson's Interstitial Trilogy, Tama Leaver

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Editors' Introduction]

Ever since William Gibson coined the term cyberspace in his debut novel Neuromancer, his work has been seen by many as a yardstick for postmodern and, more recently, posthuman possibilities. This article critically examines Gibson's second trilogy (Virtual Light, Idoru and All Tomorrow's Parties), focusing on the way digital technologies and identity intersect and interact, with particular emphasis on the role of embodiment. Using the work of Donna Haraway, Judith Butler and N. Katherine Hayles, it is argued that while William Gibson's second trilogy is infused with posthuman possibilities, the role of embodiment is …

The Photocopied Self: Perzines, Self-Construction, And The Postmodern Identity Crisis, Steve Bailey, Anita Michel

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Mike Gunderloy, creator of Factsheet 5, and co-author of The World of Zines, offers the following definition of perzines:

A personal zine, or perzine, is the most intimate kind of zine. It allows the editor/writer many freedoms, not the least of which is spouting off about anything or nothing-in-particular without worrying about editorial policies and other rules of regimented periodicals. It's also a way of corresponding with any number of people simultaneously while maintaining an aura of intimacy and friendship. And something else to remember when you're reading (or writing) a perzine -- because this intimacy …

From Butler To Buffy: Notes Towards A Strategy For Identity Analysis In Contemporary Television Narrative, Rob Cover

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Given the increasing significance of questions of identity, subjectivity and selfhood in contemporary postmodern western cultures, it is important to begin acknowledging how these questions are reflected in contemporary media and television and to develop new strategies by which to analyse television characters in terms of identity and subjectivity. The scope for analysing television series' characterizations through recent postmodern and poststructuralist theories of non-essentialist, non-foundationalist subject/identity performativity has not yet been considerably explored. It is my contention here, however, that such a method both reflects the representation of self and identity transformation in new television series as well …

Disposable Mothers, Deployable Children, Annette R. Appell

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

Review of Interracial IntimaciesL Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption by Randall Kennedy

Racial Attitudes Among South African Young Adults: A Four-Year Follow-Up Study, Timothy B. Smith, Christopher R. Stones, Anthony Naidoo

Faculty Publications

Due to many social changes that have occurred in South Africa since the first democratic elections in 1994, careful scrutiny must be given to the racial attitudes of South Africa’s young adults. Their degree of acceptance of the doctrine of deracialisation and reconciliation represents a hope or a warning in regard to a stable future. A follow up study was thus carried out in order to update data collected in 1995, with the hypothesis that, over time, greater acceptance of other racial groups would be reported. The authors examined the differences among the 180 Xhosa-speaking black, 89 so-called coloured, and …

Dread, Route And Time: An Autobiographical Walking Of Everything Else, Phil Smith

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

This response to Reconstruction's Summer 2002 edition, Volume 2, Number 3, autobiogeography: considering space and identity, particularly to the papers of Matthew Wolf-Meyer and Davin Heckman, Subhash Jaireth, Deirdre Heddon and Sally Munt, is an attempt to establish provisionally whether a discourse that sets critical theory, autobiographical practice and a poetics of space in performative motion orbiting each other can add anything to the critical discussion of autobiogeography. Part of my motivation is an antipathy toward criticism that can be applied to everything but itself. Given that hybridity will be an important part of a critical discourse about …

Social Identity And Navajo High School Students: Is A Strong Social Identity Important In The School Context?, John W. Hinkley, Herbert W. Marsh, Dennis M. Mcinerney

Online Readings in Psychology and Culture

In this paper, we explore the concept of identity. We do this by suggesting that one's identity self-concept is multi-dimensional (personal, social, & cultural). Before examining the question in the title, we distinguish between these constructs. We then describe social identity theory and illustrate its utility by examining Navajo high school students' positive and negative ability beliefs about school and how social identity theory might explain the results. We conclude by pointing to the need for more research in this important area of study, particularly in terms of the need for similar research with other cultural groups.

Autotopography: Graffiti, Landscapes, & Selves, Deirdre Heddon

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

For some time now I have been interested in autobiographical performance -- some form of the theatrical, in which performers explicitly use personal material in their work. Within this general field of autobiography and performance, one area of research concerns performances that are dependent on being located in personalised space -- what could be called, then, site-specific autobiographical performance. A recent example of this would be the performance Bubbling Tom (2000), by the UK based performer Mike Pearson, which saw Pearson return to the village of his childhood, to reflect upon and re-enact certain memories, events and persons …

Being-There And Being-From-Elsewhere: An Existential-Analytic Of Exile, Farhang Erfani

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragrap]

I find myself in an unsettling position, as I do not know where to begin to talk about a philosophically neglected topic: exile. I cannot hide behind the famous names of the tradition; I cannot speak through them about exile in order to make my inquiry sound more legitimate since most of them did not address the topic. Isn't it interesting though that my inability to know where to start and the lack of legitimacy that I feel are in themselves two typical symptoms of the exiled? In all fairness, exile has become a buzzword and is fashionable …

The Cyborgian Self: Toward A Critical Social Theory Of Cyberspace, Michael Ian Borer

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Contemporary social theory currently remains at a virtual standstill, quivering over the decision to radically leave the past behind or to continue within the historical narrative of the Enlightenment. Postmodern social theorists, advocating the position that we have, in fact, entered a new historical epoch, pose serious challenges to our perception of modernity and cultural identity. As an influential strategy that has infiltrated both the humanities and the social sciences for more than thirty years, postmodernism can no longer be dismissed as merely a fad or trend. In a world where the use of complex, and often mobile, …

Solaris, America, Disneyworld And Cyberspace: Salman Rushdie's Fairy-Tale Utopianism In Fury, Justyna Deszcz

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

In this paper, I discuss the figure of professor Malik Solanka, the protagonist of Salman Rushdie's latest novel, Fury (2001), and his attempts at constructing a fairy tale utopia as a means of establishing his identity. I try to elucidate this problem referring to the concepts of the fairy tale utopian as formulated by J. R. R. Tolkien, Ernst Bloch, and Jack Zipes, as their propositions can be regarded as the most effective exponents of the utopian imagination and seem very applicable to Rushdie's utopian attempts. On the basis of such a reading, I also reflect on the …

Supposing A Space: The Detecting Subject In Paul Auster’S City Of Glass, Richard Swope

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

Framing Intelligibility, Identity And Selfhood: A Reconsideration Of Spatio-Temporal Models, Sally Munt

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

The relationship between intelligibility and identity over the past thirty years has largely been approached through the linguistic construct of the subject. Proposing that our subjectivities be theoretically comprehended (made intelligible) as discursive effects is now common sense. Poststructuralism, following particularly Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan, has ensured that the subject is a cardinal category of contemporary thought; in any number of disciplines, it is one of the first concepts we teach to our undergraduates. But are we best served by continuing to insist on the intellectual primacy of the subject, formulated as it has been …

To Blend In The Place You're In, But With A Mind To Do Something: The Practice Of Merging In James Dickey's To The White Sea, Casey Clabough

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

In a final sortie the day before the great fire-bombing raid on Tokyo in the last months of World War II, Muldrow (his first name is purposefully never given), an American tail gunner, parachutes from his burning B-29 into the city. Protected at first by the smoke-blackened anarchy on the ground, he journeys north, away from the chaos and ruin of Tokyo, instinctively drawn toward Japan's sparsely-populated northern island of Hokkaido, a frozen, desolate sanctuary he is certain will assure his survival. With little more than a knife and a small map of Japan he makes his way …

Becoming Native, Patricia Monaghan

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

With relentless beaks, a squad of crows attacked a winter field. It was a fine fair Irish field, sweeping upwards in the pale sunlight towards a dark bulwark of rhododendrons surrounding a single gnarled oak, beneath which three ruddy cattle grazed. Welcoming this peaceable scene as an excuse to slow my journey, I parked on the verge and walked to the field's iron gate.

Writing Identity Into Space: The Relationship Between Ethnography, Autobiography, And Space In Bronislaw Malinowski's A Diary In The Strict Sense Of The Term And Claude Lévi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques, Lawrence Phillips

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

From a number of disciplinary perspectives autobiography has always presented a challenge to more or less discrete modes of reading and evaluating the text. To read autobiography as a literary text is to suppress its close relationship to the writer, however fictionalised and evasive the writing subject might be about a textual identity so closely related to his or her public persona. On the other hand, to read it as history or a documentary presentation of a life is to fail to acknowledge the heavy use of literary techniques and imbedded subjectivity that makes autobiography what it is. …

See Me, Touch Me, Feel Me':(Im)Proving The Bodily Sense Of Masculinity, Marc Ouellette

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Ultimately, this paper stems from two cultural strands which intersect in one cultural form, self-improvement advertising aimed at men. The first of these is the figure of the new man, which appeared in the mid-1980s. The novelty lies in the positioning of masculine bodies precisely for the purpose of being seen. The available criticism was not equipped to account for these positionings. The second cultural strand, the proliferation of technologies which alter the body itself, as opposed to its coverings, makes the gap in the criticism more apparent. The two cultural trends intersect most noticeably in the advertisements …

On Public Culture 12.3: Special Issue On Cosmopolitanism (2000), Dorothy Barenscott

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

For those engaged in any dimension of the vastly complex and highly contentious network of ideas, theories, and interdisciplinary projects under the rubric Cultural Studies, <> is a valuable, if not essential, journal. Since its inception some fourteen years ago, <> has maintained its mandate of intervention, creating a valuable and much needed space to publish politically charged and critically engaged work, often by unknown and marginalized scholars. Today these names read like a virtual who's who of the cultural studies world -- Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Jurgen Habermas, Michael Taussig, Dipesh Chakrabarty to name but a few. This of …

Revisiting Social Theory In Art Education: Where Have We Been? Where Are We Today? Where Are We Going? Where Could We Go?, Jan Jagodzinski

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

The title's spin-off from Gauguin's self-reflective statement: D'où vernons-nouse? Que sommes-raus? Où allons-nous? painted towards the closing of the 19th century when colonialist expansion and Imperialism were at their heights, seems to be an appropriate allusion as this year's 21st Social Caucus journal inaugurates the beginning of a new millennium. The irony of the title should be apparent, as should the fortuitousness of the volume's number. The epic proportions of the questions (and the painting) compressed into the bit size of an editorial seems laughable. Yet the questions are worth deliberating in the context of the essays that have been …