Digital Commons Network^™

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 …

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 …

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 …

Books Noted: Recent Pacific Islands Publications: Selected Acquisitions, June 1999–February 2000, Riley M. Moffat

Pacific Studies

This list of significant new publications relating to the Pacific Islands was selected from new acquisitions lists received from Brigham Young University –Hawai‘i, University of Hawai‘i at Mânoa, Bernice P. Bishop Museum, University of Auckland, East-West Center, University of the South Pacific, National Library of Australia, Melanesian Studies Resource Center of the University of California–San Diego, and Secretariat of the Pacific Community Library. Other libraries are invited to send contributions to the Books Noted Editor for future issues. Listings reflect the extent of information provided by each institution.

"Active" And "Passive" Heroics In The Odyssey, Erwin F. Cook

Classical Studies Faculty Research

No abstract provided.

Depression: Illness, Insight, And Identity, Mike W. Martin

Philosophy Faculty Articles and Research

Depression needs to be understood within interdisciplinary scientific, biopsychosocial, therapeutic frameworks, but it also has a moral dimension. The tendency to oppose moral and therapeutic perspectives, as well as to replace moral outlooks with mental-health outlooks, handicaps thinking about depression and many other topics. John Stuart Mill's midlife crisis illustrates how an experience of depression can be both a sickness and a source of moral insight. Furthermore, therapy has a moral dimension, and conversely a humane outlook is interwoven with health-oriented approaches and avoids excessive blaming and guilt. Complicating matters, depression sometimes undermines moral autonomy, and there is a continuum …

Using Porn: Discourse And Identity Construction In Male Consumers, Andrew Fletcher Harper

UNLV Retrospective Theses & Dissertations

A number of cultural perspectives address the question of male consumers of heterosexually oriented pornography. Porn and the consumer have been characterized from feminist, conservative, and scientific positions. Despite the presence of these perspectives, little work informed from the consumer perspective exists. This research allows consumers to speak about their own experience. This research analyzes the impact of framing discourses on the identity construction of consumers. Using concepts from Foucault and cultural studies, these questions are explored: How do discourses about consumers affect their identity construction? Which are important? How do men construct their consuming experiences? How does consumption context …

What Is Critical Literacy?, Ira Shor

Journal of Pedagogy, Pluralism, and Practice

We are what we say and do. The way we speak and are spoken to help shape us into the people we become. Through words and other actions, we build ourselves in a world that is building us. That world addresses us to produce the different identities we carry forward in life: men are addressed differently than are women, people of color differently than whites, elite students differently than those from working families. Yet, though language is fateful in teaching us what kind of people to become and what kind of society to make, discourse is not destiny. We can …

Marcelous Akapito And Joakim Peter's Review Of Vicente M. Diaz's Sacred Vessels: Navigating Tradition And Identity In Micronesia, Marcelous Akapito, Joakim Peter

Pacific Studies

No abstract provided.

Identity: Cultural Knowledge--Self-Knowledge. Disclosure Interviews Linda Alcoff, Ann M. Ciasullo, Christine R. Metzo, Jeffery L. Nicholas

disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory

No abstract provided.

Touting Touristic Primadonas: On Tourism, Ethnic Negotiation And National Integration In Sulawesi Indonesia, Kathleen M. Adams

Anthropology: Faculty Publications and Other Works

No abstract provided.

[Review Of] Karen Christian. Show And Tell: Identity As Performance In U.S. Latino/A Fiction, J. Alemán

Ethnic Studies Review

Christian's crucial contribution to ethnic studies is her book's argument that ethnic identity is more performance than essence. Of course, this is an unresolved and essentialized issue, but Christian summarizes the debate well, situating her study in the performance camp as she relies on Judith Butler's theory of performativity to examine the inter-related performances of ethnicity and gender in Chicano/a, U.S. Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Dominican texts. As Christian explains, static U.S. Latino/a identity categories create "collective fictions" that "regulate performances of gender, sexuality, and cultural identity," but alternative performances of ethnicity and sexuality, Christian argues, subvert these "collective fictions" …

Crossed Wires, Noisy Signals: Language, Identity, And Resistance In Caribbean Literature, Barry Eidlin

Honors Papers

I ask the question: is it possible to posit a Return that is historically informed by the disjunctive, fractured narratives of the Caribbean, one which both challenges and negotiates what Spivak has termed the neo-colonial "structures of violence?" Likewise, can the Caribbean subject articulate a space for communal identity, self-representation, and historical agency, in opposition to the disempowering dissection of the (neo-)colonizing gaze? I would argue that such a discursive project is possible, indeed necessary, in order to continue developing the insurgent narrative of resistance to colonialism that traces its roots back to the arrival of the first white colonizers …

Making "Music At The Margins"? A Social And Cultural Analysis Of Xinyao In Singapore, Lily Kong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Formalist critics and aestheticians have argued that music does not possess any kind of "extra-musical" significance, that there is no meaning beyond the form and structural relations of the notes. For them, music exemplifies the laws of mathematical harmony and proportion rather than the social and political contexts within which it is produced, reproduced and consumed. This view has been challenged by a number of social theorists: Max Weber, Theodor Adorno and Edward Said have all argued for an understanding of music within its social, cultural, economic and political contexts. Such analysis of popular music is now unquestioned. Indeed, it …

The Garifuna Journey Study Guide, Andrea E. Leland, Kathy Berger

Documentary Study Guides

Garifuna tradition bearers, artists, and technicians collaborated with filmmakers Andrea E. Leland and Kathy Berger to produce The Garifuna Journey, a documentary focused on the story of resistance and continuity of culture. The National Garifuna Council of Belize also worked on the project with the goal of cultural retrieval, as little had been documented and collected for its own archives.

With direction from tradition bearers in Belize, video footage and audio taped oral histories were collected, transcribed, and returned to the Belize community. The documentary was produced from these materials, focused on the Garifuna experience in Belize.

Honoring The Farm: Identity And Meaning In Personal Narratives, Jeannie Banks Thomas

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This thesis employs the literary folklorist methodology to explore personal narratives. Personal narratives told by Elizabeth (Beth) Wyatt Winn were analyzed. It was discovered that these narratives provide an eyewitness account of history, reveal world views, and encapsulate experiences into values and personal meanings. The depth of meaning found in Elizabeth (Beth) Wyatt Winn's personal narratives illustrates the importance of personal narratives in historical research and historical re-creation and simulation.

Appendices include several oral interviews containing personal narratives.