Through a fine-grained reading of a London-French blog, this article aims to shed light on the lived experience of the French community in London. The ethnosemiotic conceptual framework brings together ethnographic and semiotic schools of thought, focusing in particular on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus and Gunther Kress’s multimodal social semiotic analytical model. Habitus is broken down into its material manifestations of habitat, habit and habituation, all displayed in the blog and revealing of the blogger’s identity and positioning within the migration setting. As all modes are considered to be of equal semiotic potential, equivalent emphasis is placed on the multiple modes of meaning-making present in the blog, such as layout, colour, typography and language. By examining the dynamic relationships between blogger and audience, subjectivity and objectivity, on-line and on-land habitus, and intermodal dynamics themselves, through the prism of multimodality, hidden facets of the blogger’s cultural identity and sense of community belonging within the diasporic context begin to materialise.

Food tropes remain potent literary devices to both dissimulate political critique and revitalize individual agency. In what follows, we propose a comparative analysis of Baltasar Lopes’ Chiquinho and Paulina Chiziane’s Niketche: uma historia de poligamia that examines their respective literary use of food. Through food tropes both authors navigate their respective worlds of change where scarcity and abundance coexist as constant reminders that sustenance is not merely a part of their modern realities, but fully embedded into their search for self-fulfillment and self-realization. Through this scope, it is argued that food tropes allow the authors to unmask the fractures within colonial and post-colonial modalities of oppression. Lastly, we ultimately suggest that food tropes provide a space in which characters embark on a return journey to “wholeness” and self-liberation. This article is published under a CC-BY license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

The article examines patterns in the terminology used to label the Nazi genocide of the Jews, focussing in particular on the case study of late 20 th -century and early 21 st -century Italy. It argues that a very specific and unusual shift occurred in this context, in that the long-established and most common term for the genocide across many languages, “The Holocaust”, was displaced in this period within Italian media, official and public-sphere language by the more arcane, but in certain respects more “approved” term, “Shoah”. The article looks at evidence to establish that this shift occurred and examines possible the reasons for and implications behind the shift and what it tells us about developments in Holocaust memorialization and cultural knowledge at the turn of the millennium. This article is published under a CC-BY license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

This article focuses on two debut works of cinema that were released within a few months of each other shortly after the turn of the century and which offer quite different modes of representation of the 'dirty war' that devastated Peru for two decades before that: Paloma de Papel (Fabrizio Aguilar 2003) and Dias de Santiago (Josue Mendez 2004). It sets out a critical analysis of the cinematic treatment of the violence of terror as imagined via their film-makers and reflects upon their critical and commercial reception in Peru and beyond. It seeks to refute the accusations of neglect on the part of film-makers from some journalists and politicians by highlighting the ongoing importance of the period, its events and consequences for cinema in and of Peru. Moreover it explores the extent to which individual films, and cinema as a collective practice, play a key role in harnessing the potential for testimony and triggering debate about cultural and historical heterogeneity. In the final analysis, I argue that fiction cinema continues to play an influential and controversial role in shaping a sense of collective identity in nations such as Peru that are in the process of 'crystallization' and that have suffered recent trauma. I contend that so-called 'national' films (those supported to a certain degree by the State) remain vital in their provision of diverse representations of landmark events of national concern that draw attention to the fractured and fragmented nature of such experiences, emphasising the persistence of division at every level.

<span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: 'Calibri','sans-serif'; color: #1f497d;">"The mystery of the appearance of a new being, a great mystery and an inexplicable one", as Shatov describes the birth of his wife's son, is one of the great unanswered questions in Dostoevsky's <em>Demons</em>. A baby boy is born to free-spirited former governess Maria Shatova just hours before her husband is killed by a secret clique of would-be revolutionaries. Shatov's murder and Kirillov's suicide precipitate the new mother's fatal illness and, consequently, the infant's death within three days of entering the world. Legally Shatov's son, biologically Stavrogin's, this nameless baby represents one of several apparently unfinished subplots within <em>Demons</em>. Why produce a child with such complicated origins, only to kill him off? Why transform a universal symbol of hope into banal tragedy? My paper examines the metonymy between the child's brief life and the novel's theme of abortive radicalism, both of which are linked by the figure of the nihilist midwife, Arina Prokhorovna Virginskaia. </span>

This article takes its title from an experience in a liminal moment after completing a PhD but not yet finding a comfortable academic home to offer reflections based on what to contemplate when making decisions after the PhD. It considers how to find spaces to work in which there is the possibility for congruency between what we do, what we believe in and the realities of needing to earn a living. These reflections and experiences are read through the theoretical lens of work on gendered silences and the relationships of our gendered selves to knowledge and research. The article interweaves narratives of early-career decisions, gendered and feminist experiences of cultural studies with the relationships between me and my research project.