Amalgamation and Regeneration

Contingent Spaces of Collective Action: Evoking Translocal Concerns

It has now been several decades since the image of American Culture as a melting pot first came under attack. But the multiculturalist discourse of the 1980s and the break-up of Cold War politics ...

The radical social and political changes experienced by the societies of the post-Soviet space determine the transformations in their sociocultural mentality and create new forms of relation with the past. The construction of a new historical identity, which now proceeds in contemporary Russia, can be considered as a typical process for the post-Soviet country, the particularity of which is created by several factors: traumatic experience and the particularities of sociopolitical life in a country that suffers transformation. The Russian State, which was built after the fall of the Soviet Union, had no clear ideology and value system for more than fifteen years. During this period, the elite of the state formed a utilitarian view towards various ideological systems, which could explain the development of reality through the concepts of political sciences and new models of historical narrative. In recent years all these components of sociopolitical identity have been used by the politicians of the Kremlin, the political scientists, and public relations' specialists as an instrument for the production of a peculiar formation – the "state patriotism." The intellectual foundations of the "state patriotism" in the sphere of political science are such terms as "energetic superpower" and "sovereign democracy," which were used simultaneously in order to present Russia on the international stage and to provide the state regime – the vertical of power – with meaningfulness in the eyes of the inhabitants of the state. Eventually, it became obvious that such artificial and inadequate terms as "energetic superpower" and "sovereign democracy" cannot fully satisfy the needs of the ruling elite. The failure of political science manipulations to build a new social identity in Russia was partly compensated by the rise of the importance of historical narrative. Historical narrative in contemporary Russian society plays a role not only of compensatory but also of a consolidating mechanism. The historical narrative which is powerfully established and dominates in Russian society is selective, monological, and expansive; it allows one to call it "negative historical identity." Despite the peculiarities of this historical narrative on the Russian past, present, and future, its creators managed to ensure major public support for the narrative, which became a very important part of social mentality in contemporary Russia.

For the European, even today, America represents something akin to exile, phantasy of emigration and, therefore, form of interiorization of his or her own culture. - Jean Baudrillard, America Our present age is one of exile. - Julia Kristeva, New Type of Intellectual The demand to recognize an irreducible presence of the in literary history has brought about qualifications or the substitution of American with ethnic-specific adjectives, leading to distinctions between, for instance, African American, Indian, Asian American, Chicano, Hispanic, and Puerto Rican literature. Redefining Literary History, edited by A. La Vonne Brown Ruoff and Jerry W. Ward, Jr. (1990), may serve as typical example of recent critical anthologies of literature. And, although in the critical/theoretical debate on the meaning of ethnic, broad spectrum of positions could be mapped, in anthologies and histories of literature ethnics are almost never mentioned (The Heath Anthology of Literature, 1990, edited by Paul Lauter being an exception). From the perspective of European academic interested in literature, this predominant absence of the category of European literature is quite baffling. Even if the ideological motives behind this recoil from Eurocentrism may be understandable and even desirable, some of the unspoken assumptions behind it strike me as problematic. What bothers me most is the implied homogenization of Euro-American literature. I think that the assumptions informing this unitary perception of Euro-American literature need careful reexamination. In what follows, however, I will only very briefly outline few general and very tentative queries, hoping to open debate on the principles of present-day constructions of ethnic literature. My initial remarks on the problematic neglect of Central European literature will serve as pre-text for more detailed discussion of Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation: A Life in New Language (1989). I will approach Hoffman's book as an example of postmodern autobiography written by Central European etrangere. What I would like to argue for is an insertion of what may (awkwardly) be called Central European literature in the Other canon of literature.(1) The first assumption encouraging homogenizing view on Euro-American literature seems to be the persistent myth of the so-called model of voluntary immigration, acculturation and assimilation that leads directly to if not quite painless absorption. From this vantage point, the melting pot is an apt metaphor in the case of Euro-Americans who, once acculturated, merge into the mainstream (read: oppressive) culture. And although the idea of the melting pot has been challenged since its very birth (the production of Israel Zangwill's play of that name in 1908), the concept seems to have reasserted its grip on the public awareness in recent years, as Rudolf Vecoli points out in his Return to the Melting Pot: Ethnicity in the United States in the Eighties.(2) The classic success tale often quoted as embodying this belief is of course Mary Antin's The Promised Land (1912). In criticism, Antin's narrative has been interpreted as a prime example of smooth, one-way assimilation. Her autobiography is singular celebration of her successful transformation from an Old World shtetl girl into New England Woman.(3) Few critics seem to have noticed the ambiguities and deep contradictions in Antin's autobiography; William A. Proefriedt's illuminating reading of The Promised Land is an exception rather than the rule.(4) It is indeed surprising that deconstruction-inspired suspicion of any seamless reading has not as yet led to radical re-examination of The Promised Land and of the straight line theory of assimilation. My feeling is that the deconstructive critical gaze has been averted from Antin's text because the writer is Caucasian immigrant. …

In the renewed Russian Fundamental Law, in addition to a number of provisions introducing changes to the political system, there are also statements of programmatic importance, as well as several provisions with symbolic and identity function. In this article these provisions are subject to functional and semiotic-cultural analysis. Particular emphasis has been placed on legally irrelevant content transmitted by the new regulations, on their semantic connections with the content of the preamble and on their cultural context. The research procedure carried out allows us to state that, compared with the 1993 text, the Russian Constitution in its current version participates to a much greater extent in the complex system of transmission of symbolic content, as well as the narratives that contribute to social memory, cultural and historical identity. In doing so, it goes beyond its genre limitations, opening the basic text to the functions assigned to the preamble. In the fragments I have analysed in the paper there are undoubtedly functional and genre disturbances, and with them changes the mode of semiosis of the legal text, both in its normative and programmatic form. Renewed Constitution is the case in which a legal text, by its very nature designing the possible future world, does so through ideas about the past.

Unlike other ethnie minorities, or sexual minorities, and in spite of their numbers, Franco-Americans do not make themselves visible. Their history is one of gradual acculturation. But they are adamant that the French culture is still alive, although it was dramatically affected by social change in the 1950's. Most Franco-Americans think of their ethnic group as a success of the Melting Pot. But this rather tends to show that they are not ready to face their status as a minority.

Reviewed by: The Modern and the Unknown: A Study of Science Fiction in the Late Qing Dynastyby Jia Liyuan Shaoming Duan Excavating Early SF in China. Jia Liyuan. "Xian Dai" yu "Wei Zhi": Wan Qing Ke Huan Ziao Shuo Yan Jiu[ The Modern and the Unknown: A Study of Science Fiction in the Late Qing Dynasty]. Beijing UP, 2021. 316 pp. ¥59.00 pbk. Jia Liyuan is a professor in the School of Literature at Tsinghua University in Beijing. His monograph focuses on science fiction in the late Qing dynasty (1840-1912) from the thematic perspective of "the modern and the unknown," suggesting the difficulty and complexity of using "modern" visions to explore "unknown" space-times, and demonstrating the excitement and confusion of novelists in the late Qing period when trying to imagine the future Datong[Great Unity] world and the possibilities of interstellar exploration. Focusing on sf texts written by intellectuals, Jia's monograph enables readers clearly to understand the attitude of these elites toward science. The fundamental purpose of science fiction in that era was to save a backward and corrupt government, and its mission was to publicize science and technology. Jia argues that the motif of "soul separated from body" that concerned novelists at that time still appears in contemporary Chinese sf. The relationship between "heart" and "body" (to which I return below) in these early fictions later became the motif of Chinese sf in the twentieth century (276). In the final days of the Qing dynasty, when ancient and modern ideas collided fiercely, intellectuals looked at social changes with new eyes and began to speculate in their fictions about future worlds. At this time there was no entry for "science fiction" in Chinese dictionaries. The subtitle of Jia's monograph, Science Fiction in the Late Qing Dynasty, is obviously a retrospective identification of its origins in China, something of great interest to Chinese researchers nowadays. Jia's study looks at late Qing sf from three perspectives: sf's origins in the late Qing era, the ways in which sf was expressed in these early writings, and the sf themes that were of particular interest to these early writers. The Modern and the Unknownis comprised of an introduction, four chapters, and a conclusion. Jia's introduction is entitled "What Is Science Fiction in the Late Qing Dynasty?" During this period, the Dowager Empress Cixi and her ministers decided to introduce elements of modern western civilization, hoping to reform the state system and reinvigorate China. The intellectuals began to learn new methods of observing the world, such as theories of evolution and [End Page 399]scientific positivism. For these writers, the exploration and conquest of unknown islands or planets was the "panacea" for China's rejuvenation and the guarantee that China would lead humanity into the Datong world (roughly equivalent to pantisocracy) after becoming world ruler (3). The novelists of the late Qing outlined imaginative future worlds in the hopes of enlightening a benighted people and inspiring them to take action. Jia's first chapter is entitled "Liang Qichao: The Precursor of Chinese Science Fiction." In 1902, Liang Qichao wrote his only work of fiction, The Future of New China, in which he imagined that 60 years into the future China has become prosperous and strong. Representatives from countries all over the world have gathered in the capital Nanjing to hold a peace conference. Because of disputes over the sovereignty of Tibet and Mongolia, the Qing government has gone to war with Russia. At the end of the novel, through the mediation of Hungary, the contradiction is resolved. The action is presented as set in a "revolutionary past" that is being recalled from the "future." The Future of New Chinademonstrated a modern consciousness and a new aesthetic attitude towards the future, providing a beautiful vision to be filled in by a future humanity. The second chapter is entitled "Mirror and Image: New Stone Storyand Wu Jianren's Ways of Observation." Wu Jianren published important works in the journal The New Novel, founded by Liang Qichao, and Wu became the main writing force of the journal. Among his many works, his novel New Story of...

The lethal intentions of the Nazi Final Solution to the Jewish Question through mass murder adds a special dimension to the common and banal phenomenon of collaboration between sections of the popu...

OHQ vol. 118, no. 2 288 economic peer groups — and distant from the establishment politics of elite Jewish politicians — at important junctures patricians and immigrants drew together in what might be called a progressive Jewish politics. As the chapter 5 title suggests, “A Western Exception” documents why, unlike other western cities such as San Francisco, a strong anti-Zionist movement never emerged in Portland. Eisenberg points to the crucial role of Rabbi Stephen Wise, who served in Portland only briefly but left a deep imprint on communal sensibilities. The final chapter of the book explores Portland Jews’ relationship to the city’s racial minorities — Nikkei and African-Americans — arguing that “although Jewish Oregonians had a history of expressing support for civil rights in the abstract, negotiating local issues . . . continued to present challenges” (p. 215). Eisenberg’s vibrant prose draws in readers, and her authorial voice is not only persuasive but also evinces sympathy to her subjects. NATAN M. MEIR Portland State University THE JEWISH OREGON STORY, 1950–2010 by Ellen Eisenberg Oregon State University Press, Corvallis, 2016. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. 336 pages. $24.95, paper. This detailed study of Jewish life and activities in Oregon focuses primarily on their experiences as an ethnic community in Portland where the vast majority of Jews in the state reside. The narrative takes the Jewish story from that of a small, fairly isolated group to its present position as an active and recognized force in Oregon society. Ellen Eisenberg traces how the community developed its local history and identity as a selfconscious social group in Portland. She gives particular attention to how women shifted their personal identities and actions from domestic to public spheres. Then she uses Jewish women’s ties to the non–sectarian League of Women Voters to demonstrate their shift to embracing the changes in the roles of middle-class American women during the past six decades. In Portland, the analysis posits two broad themes as changing the local social situation. First, it shows how the rising Black Power movement and calls for Black Nationalism pushed Jews and other liberals away from the broad national civil rights movement in the late 1960s. At the same time, but not necessarily related to that shift, an increase in young, collegeeducated Jews moved into the Pacific Northwest . This brought more secular people into the community, and by 2000, only one third of the Jews claimed to have any religious affiliation while nearly half of the community reported having only a cultural ethnic identity. This influx of outsiders nudged the staid, established ethnic leaders to shift their goals and tactics gradually in order to incorporate the newcomers. These two trends occurred while urban renewal destroyed most of the historic South Portland Jewish neighborhood. This forced the residents of that area to move into two other parts of the city, as they resettled in communities on the southwest and northwest sides of the city. As the renewal razed the long-established neighborhood, its citizens worked to gather and memorialize its history through reminiscences and interviews with long-time residents. The author uses much of this material to show how physical disruption of the traditional ethnic neighborhood and the increasing social changes brought a new acceptance of Jews in Portland. The author describes one phase in the story as looking outward and joining local reforms such as school desegregation, civic work with the League of Women Voters, and membership in formerly exclusively nonJewish clubs. Eisenberg then demonstrates that the 1967 Six Day War abruptly ended this move toward community involvement as the Israeli victory brought a wave of ethnic pride. The narrative notes that this event “came to represent a watershed in American Jewish history; in its wake Israel came to occupy the center of what it meant to be an American Jew” (p. 170). This brought a renewed interest in international ethnic matters, particularly the treatment of Soviet Jewry and 289 Reviews efforts to encourage and support immigration, which attracted many largely secular eastern European Jews less interested in religion than in social and economic opportunity to Portland. Throughout the narrative the author analyzes the Oregon Jewish experience clearly, and her data...

Despite the assumption that Sport for Development and Peace programs can foster social change, many fail to provide intentional educational experiences. This limits the attainment and sustainability of positive outcomes for participants and communities. The literature calls for such programs to use sport as an educational tool that shifts power to participants in a way that is responsive and respectful to the local context. In this article, we present findings from a program designed to promote youth development and social change through youth sport in a Central American nation. The teaching personal and social responsibility (TPSR) model provides the instructional framework for this program and local coach training was guided by the principles of critical pedagogy. Participants were eight youth sport coaches who became local trainers in the program. Data sources include interviews, observations and artifacts. Participants appeared to have meaningful educational experiences characterized by the following themes: reframing the coach's role; personal reflection; developing a critical perspective; and increasing feelings of agency. Findings indicate that in this program, TPSR was a relevant instructional framework that combined effectively with the principles of critical pedagogy to foster transformative learning among the participants.

Christopher Columbus has been a durable and changeable symbol of the Americas.1 In the case of the United States, the special district where the nation’s capital is located is named after him, as is the goddess Columbia, a nineteenth-century figure who symbolizes the American nation.2 The Columbia River in Washington State bears his name, along with one of the country’s great universities. Ohio’s capital is similarly named after Genoa’s most famous son. Understanding the representation and depiction of Columbus in the consciousness of the people of the United States is therefore a useful undertaking for the twenty-first century, where historical assumptions are being questioned in light of social changes that have occurred in the last 50 years. The purpose of this study is to conduct a content analysis of the representation of Christopher Columbus in US secondary education history textbooks from the 1870s to the present. In our research we trace the representation of Columbus in textbooks from 1875 to 2003. Selecting this broad period allowed us to see changes in the representation of Columbus corresponding to the development of modern American history textbooks. As recently as 30 years ago, high school and college American history courses began with Columbus’ voyages to and discovery of the “New World.” Native Americans or Indians (as renamed by Columbus) were thought to have very little to do with American history and the subsequent creation of contemporary American society.3 The relatively recent growth of ethnohistory has shifted the focus from Europeans to pre-Columbian Americans so that there is a marked change in whose history is told. Nineteenth-century historians presented exalted biographies of the explorers who came from Seville, Paris, Amsterdam, and London and who laid claim to the North American continent. Early twentieth-century historians featured the establishment of the colonies in Santo Domingo, Quebec, and Jamestown, and more current inquiries discuss the lives of Tainos, Cree, and Iroquois before the events of 1492. Views about Columbus’ discovery and encounter with the New World range from benign amusement to uncontrollable rage. Alfred Crosby suggests that Columbus “was the advance scout of catastrophe for Amerindians.”4 Nowhere was this more clearly the case than the recent 500th anniversary celebration of Columbus’ voyage of discovery. Summerhill and Williams maintain, for example, that, “the 1992 Quincentenary succeeded because it failed.” Planners set out to celebrate an imperial past but found themselves confronting difficult questions about the “rise of colonialism, the destruction of native American societies, and the disruption of biological habitats throughout the globe.”5 For Latin Americans, especially, the quincentenary did not call for a celebration but a mourning for the loss of native cultures, languages, and lives that resulted from events following Columbus’ voyage in 1492. As a result, quincentenary celebration or commemoration organizers worldwide acknowledged these concerns and dubbed the event “The Columbian Encounter.”6 Part of our interest in this study was to see if a similar trend developed as partof a “Columbian discourse” in the United States-a discourse reflected, at least in part, in the content of high school American history textbooks. Our model of discourse, as in the term “Columbian discourse,” is very specific and is based on the work of the French social theorist Michel Foucault (1926-1984). According to Foucault, the corpora of text that are connected in a genealogical system and give rise to knowledge is a discourse. He maintains that the modern individual is produced by the disciplines and discourse of institutions.7 A discourse works to generate knowledge and power by the imposition of a model through a body of work (texts, textbooks, periodicals, political speeches, drama, and popular literature) that functions to redirect beliefs, concepts, ideas, and notions. Fundamental to this study is the assumption that textbooks play an important role in the generation of discourse. Compulsory education ensures that most citizens of a country have been exposed to history textbooks and the quasi-official accounts of history found within them. Michael Apple maintains that textbooks embody “the visions of legitimate knowledge of identifiable groups of people.”8 The 1988 report on US history textbooks published by the Council on Interracial Books for Children suggests that the textbookeven if it is despised, boring, or not read in full, or later forgotten in almost every detail-stamps an indelible imprint on the minds of students. The imprint is the imprint of “truth” . . . [t]he stamp is the stamp of authority.9

Networks of Modernism offers a new understanding of American modernist aesthetics and introduces idea that networks were central to how American moderns thought about their culture in their dramatically changing milieu. While conventional wisdom holds that network rose to prominence in 1980s and 1990s in context of information technologies, digitization is only most recent manifestation of networks in intellectual history. Crucial developments in modern America provide another archive of network discourses well before advent of digital age. The rise of railroad recast American landscape as an assortment of interconnected hubs. The advent of broadcast radio created a decentralized audience that was at once medium's strength and its weakness. The steady and intertwined advances of urbanization and immigration demanded reconceptualization of community and ethnic identity to replace failing melting pot metaphor for nation. Indeed, signal developments of modern era eroded social stratification and reorganized American society in a nodal, decentralized, and interpenetrating form--what today we would label a distributed network that is fully flattened and holds no clustered centers of power. In this ferment of social upheaval and technological change, moderns found what we would today term the network, though they did not have vocabulary for it that we do now, to be a versatile model for their aesthetic experiments in representing social space and social relations. Whether they used figuration of network as a kind of formal experiment to negotiate tensions between dispersal and unity, fragment and totality, or took network as a subject in itself, as seen when dealing with crowds or public spaces, network was a way for writers and artists to conceptualize and explore their rapidly changing society. Through readings of works of Randolph Bourne, Jean Toomer, Anita Loos, John Dos Passos, and Nathanael West, Networks of Modernism positions network as defining figure of American modernist aesthetics and explores its use as a conceptual tool used to think through rapid changes in American society.

Abstract: This contribution sheds light on a fascinating and dynamic period of Indonesian theatre history through translation of a novel primary source. The emergence of popular theatre traditions in Indonesia toward the beginning of the twentieth century reflected important developments in the formation of a modern Indonesian public culture. In Batavia (Jakarta), a melting pot of Chinese, Indonesian, and European influence, new theatrical traditions crystallized that broke away from earlier relationships of patronage with the archipelago’s various royal courts and instead catered to the demands of the modern, multiethnic, and multireligious populace. In this article, we translate “Sair Opera Bangsawan,” a poem composed around 1911 which recounts the syncretic public life of urban Batavia. In it we are led to picture a city in the clutches of theatre-mania, all the while wrestling with the profound social and cultural changes of Indies society that this new form of performance reflected. The poem may also fascinate those interested in Sino-Indonesian and, more broadly, Chinese diasporic traditions of performance in Southeast Asia.

Occupational therapy is about to meet a slow explosion of possibilities. The nature of work and the nature of societies will change through the greater emphasis to be placed on artificial intelligence (AI), and the crisis of climate change and associated global health issues. These changes will not be overnight but will be seen over the coming years as, for example, we see further innovation and development in AI and the effects of climate change take hold. Old systems and technologies, together with patterns of everyday life, will co-exist with the new ones, for example, an increased emphasis on preventative health. Theoretical development will remain a challenge for occupational therapy in these changing contexts. The sociodemographic conditions that create the demand for the profession may make practice a priority over taking time to explore the consequences of social, technological, and environmental changes and expanding theory. However, the time to begin making occupational therapy theory forward-facing to address these anticipated seismic changes in how humans occupy time and remain healthy is now. We implore the profession’s scholars to embrace this challenge, begin updating theories, and creating new ones that will be effective tools to guide occupational therapy practice in this future world.

Between Paradigm Shift Judaism and Neo-Hasidism