Desilencing diasporic memory/ies in knowledge production on Highlife

Abstract

The paper draws on ethnographic and historical research on the formation of Highlife in a ‘trilocal’ setting: Ghana, Nigeria and England in the 1950s and 1960s, the time when Highlife evolved as one of the most popular forms of modern music of (anglophone) West Africa in the twentieth century. It tackles the issue of how the formation of Highlife-music and culture was (transnationally) related to the formation of an African Diaspora in the colonial centre London in the post-World War II decades, how West African cultural formation in the diaspora affected Highlife as a popular and transnational culture, particularly evident in the so far neglected ‘diasporic memory/ies’ on Highlife. The approach seeks to emphasise the critical role of travelling music/ians from West Africa and the Caribbean to London and back in the formation of both, African diasporic and transnational identities as well as African popular music, in that important phase of its history. In the final part of this paper I am reflecting upon methodological issues related to my study on Highlife, focussing mainly on the relationship of living memory, archive and qualitative research.     

Regional Modernization in China: Project Concept and Organization

Abstract

During the May Fourth Culture Movement, Chen Duxiu from New Youth and Du Yaquan of Eastern Miscellany engaged in a series of heated exchanges in their common search for a solution to the Republican crisis and an understanding of World War I. Du argued that nation-states are founded on the cultural and civilizational orientation of its people, therefore the essence of war and the source of political conflict are functions of the thoughts of the people. This insight shifted the debate from the political to the cultural arena, and allowed the May Fourth intellectuals to examine the attributes of Eastern and Western civilizations as a way to counter the threats of Hongxian monarchism, China’s political and social fragmentation, as well as the inadequacies of Western nation-statehood. Du predicted that the future master of the twentieth century would be a scientific laborer with a cultural outlook derived from the mediation of the traditional Chinese and twentieth-century European civilizations.¹     

‘For you were strangers’: Jewish ritual,black musics,and commemorative politics in Tel Aviv’s Refugee Seder

ABSTRACT

Each Passover since 2009, hundreds of East African asylum seekers and Israeli activists have gathered for ‘Refugee Seder’, a public event to support Sudanese and Eritrean communities in Israel. Featuring a ceremonial seder meal, storytelling, speeches, and a dance party, Refugee Seder draws on age-old Jewish rituals and contemporary global black pop musics to symbolize Africans as members of the Israeli national collective. This article explores Refugee Seder’s modified commemorative practices, which engage dual narratives of Jewish nationalism and cultural cosmopolitanism. I show how seder rituals enable African participants to temporarily embody a Jewish spiritual identity, and how black pop musics help publicly reframe Africans’ ‘blackness’ as a cultural asset instead of a political liability. Ultimately, I argue that Refugee Seder distills larger ideologies of identity and belonging that are deeply rooted in Israeli collective consciousness, and which shape the trajectories of ‘refugee issue’ politics and policy-making.     

Exile and globalization in the poetry of Tanure Ojaide: a case study of When it no longer matters where you live

Abstract

The twin concepts of exile and globalization are of great significance to contemporary African literature, as some African writers live and write in exile, while others deploy themes and styles that they believe make their works relevant to the global community. Since the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the end of the cold war at the end of the twentieth century, there has been a triumphalism of liberal democracy, free-market economy and other norms of the capitalist world order. Consequently there appears to be an increasing tendency among scholars to homogenize or globalize the practices and values canvassed by the advanced countries of the West.

In Ojaide's When It No Longer Matters Where You Live, the poet acknowledges the inevitability of some African elites living in exile in Western cosmopolitan centers, but rejects the uncritical notion inherent in globalization that western culture and values were synonymous with universal norms or superior to those of the Africans.     

‘No toques mi pelo’ (don’t touch my hair): decoding Afro-Cuban identity politics through hair

ABSTRACT

People across the African Diaspora have developed a complex socio-visual-language system of hair as a means of self-expression; however, the decades of economic sanctions in Cuba generated a unique political dynamic that has shaped concepts of self-image and cultural expressions. Sixteen Afro-Cuban women were interviewed about the cultural significance of their hair using The Guided Hair Autobiography methodology. Participant themes included aesthetic pride and confidence, hair bullying and embarrassment, and hair damage and distress. A Cuban cultural critique underlines how Afro-Cuban women have been socialized to have a bias towards straightened long hair over tightly coiled hair textures. These findings suggest that despite the ‘raceless’ political revolutionary spirit infused into Cuban cultural ideology, people of African descent process racial politics and identity through hair.     

Writers from Anhui and provinciality in modern China

Abstract

This article discusses the problems of Chinese local and national identity in relation to Anhui province in the twentieth century. It begins with Anhui's contradictory image as both the location of some of the country's most esteemed cultural sites and a place currently perceived as backward and impoverished. After explaining the social uses of local affiliation in the Republican era, it then focuses on the attempts of aspiring young writers from Anhui to join the national literary scene in Beijing during the early 1920s, and analyzes their subsequent reception. It looks at the personal and professional choices that these writers made and, following a selective survey of developments in Anhui since the establishment of the People's Republic of China (PRC), concludes with a consideration of the evolving self-image and changing realities in the province today.     

Seeing/being double: how African immigrants in Canada balance their ethno-racial and national identities

With increased transnational ties to their homelands, immigrants' ontology now verges on being double – and, consequently, on seeing double – most of the time. This double consciousness, and the attendant dearth of fixity in identity among immigrants, has led some to wonder where the allegiance of minority immigrants, in particular, lies. Can these immigrants be loyal to both their ethno-racial identity and their host national identity? Is the identification with one's ethno-racial background and national identity a zero-sum game in which one side of the loyalty equation gains only at the expense of the other? This study examines these issues, using African immigrants (specifically, Ghanaians and Somalis) in Canada as a case study. In particular, we use multinomial logistic regression to predict the factors that prompt these immigrants to identify as: ‘just Canadians’, ‘just Ghanaians/Somalis’, or as ‘Ghanaian-/Somali-Canadians’. The study is significant not only because of the lack of research on African immigrants' identity formation in Canada, but also because immigrants' identity has significant bearing on their settlement and integration in host societies.     

Cultural heritage and national identity in Afghanistan

An innate sense of the essence of their culture sustained Afghans through 24 years of conflict and displacement. Although they continue to cherish the diversity of regional differences, individuals cling tenaciously to their national identity, upholding traditional values and customs that distinguish them from their neighbours. From the beginning of the twentieth century, attempts to foster unity through nation-building activities in mostly urban areas met with mixed success; the latest attempts to cast Afghans in a puritanical Islamic mould met with disaster. Years of discord stretched taut the fabric of the society and national traits once honoured hallmarks of the culture were compromised. Yet the fundamentals of the culture remain strong, changed in some ways but readily recognisable as uniquely Afghan. Current expectations aim to engage various cultural elements as bonding vehicles to hasten reconstruction and strengthen peace.     

“Imagining community” in Soviet Kazakhstan. An historical analysis of narrative on nationalism in Kazakh-Soviet literature

Although much attention has been paid to national construction in Soviet and post-Soviet Central Asia, the field of literary and cultural analysis of the origins of current national symbols and texts in this region is yet not fully acknowledged and discovered. This article tries to shed light onto the literary construction of an ethnic identity and its historical background in Soviet Kazakhstan and its influence on the post-Soviet ideology in this multicultural country. In doing so it investigates the ways and the time when most of the important historical epics were “re-written,” brought back by the Kazakh writers and intellectuals in the mid-twentieth century. The importance of investigating this period and this phenomenon is twofold. First, it provides further contribution to the Soviet creation of binary approaches to the formation of ethnic identities and the continuous attack on local nationalisms. Following the arguments of some scholars in the field (e.g. [Adams, Laura. 1999. “Invention, Institutionalization and Renewal in Uzbekistan's National Culture.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 2; Dave, Bhavna. 2007. Kazakhstan: Ethnicity and Power. London: Routledge]) this asserts that the local cultural elites found ways of bargaining and re-structuring such identity contributing to its “localization” through the usage of pre-Soviet and pre-Russian historical symbols. In a way, they were able to construct their own “imagined community” and resistance to the past and existing (according to them) colonialism within the given framework of Kazakh-Soviet literature. Secondly, the historicity that became a leitmotif of most important literary works and later on a main focus of national ideology in post-Soviet Kazakhstan must be viewed not just as an instrument of legitimation in this post-colonial state but also as a strong continuity of cultural and ethnic identity lines. The very fact that a detailed and continued genealogy of Kazakh medieval tribes and rulers was the main focus of major works by such famous Kazakh writers as Mukhtar Auezov or Ilyas Yessenberlin demonstrates the importance of the “continuity” and kinship and family lines for Kazakhs. The paper raises the questions of how national and elitist these movements were before the independence and how the further post-independent projects of using and re-establishing these links and continuity formed more questions than answers for the nation-builders in independent Kazakhstan.     

The evolution of nationhood in twentieth century Europe: lessons from the Northern Adriatic borderlands

This article is a short introduction for a special edition on Italian nationhood. The articles that comprise the special edition are the following: From a cosmopolitan to a fascist land: Adriatic irredentism in motion; Erecting fascism: nation, identity, and space in Trieste in the first half of the twentieth century; Building Italianità in northern Adriatic: The case of population from Pola.     

Intellectual Orthodoxy,the Economy of Knowledge and the Debate Over Zhang Jingsheng’s Sex Histories*

Abstract

Since the Guomindang (GMD) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) adopted it as the basis of the marriage system in the early twentieth century, yifu yiqi zhi — which literally means a system of one husband, one wife—has been translated as monogamy. Yet the conflation of the Chinese characters yifu yiqi zhi with the English word monogamy resulted from contests over meaning that can be traced to Republican discussions on marriage and sex in general and on concubinage in particular, which attached the new notion of conjugal fidelity to yifu yiqi zhi. The criminalization of concubinage as adultery under GMD law and as bigamy under CCP law signaled the different meanings yifu yiqi zhi held in the early twentieth century, meanings that continue to influence contemporary usages of the term.     

Afrovision: rehearsing diasporic Africanism in a Tel-Aviv nightclub

ABSTRACT

During the second half of the 1990s, an extended number of illegal African labor migrants arrived at Israel. Whereas associational life among them was based almost exclusively on their national and tribal social clubs, the Afrovision nightclub was a unique grassroots initiative that crossed these boundaries. Based on studies of festive rituals, and more specifically of the role of music and dance in processes of identity formation among migrants' communities, I show how and why Afrovision enabled African immigrants in Israel to come together and experience a sense of diasporic Africanism as a sort of shared identity beyond the salient sub-divisions within their community. Although this experience was partly a reaction to, or implementation of, common perceptions in Israeli society that view African people as of one fiber, the practical significance of the pan-Africanist option offered by Afrovision in the everyday lives of foreign residents far exceeded purely symbolic aspects.     

Citizens of sound: negotiations of race and diaspora in the anthems of the UNIA and NAACP

Abstract

The development of large-scale black protest organizations in the early decades of the twentieth century precipitated an unparalleled amount of communication and exchange between African descended populations. This paper argues the centrality of black organization anthems to the enterprise of black diaspora formation and solidarity. Through the composition and ritualization of their anthems, black organizations defined and announced an agenda for their membership, who similarly constructed their identities through the performance of the song. Anthems were central to the efforts to solidify and mobilize these organizations yet they also contained important contests that highlighted the differences in access and experience amongst the membership. The anthems of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) are central to an examination of these complicated processes. The organizations’ sonic histories are highlighted here in order to trace the creations of modern, black citizenship.     

CONCEIVING THE “WEST”: EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY VISIONS OF KHAM

Abstract

As the nineteenth century drew to a close, the Tibetan plateau in the eyes of the gentry and officials of Sichuan Province was little more than a defensive fence bolting the back door of the empire. Although a stone stele erected in 1727 proclaimed much of the Kham region of ethnographic Tibet to be under Sichuan's jurisdiction, its invested rulers were administered by a “loose rein” policy, leaving its polities effectively independent of Chinese authority, the borderland and its inhabitants being of little interest to the Qing state. Yet the turn of the nineteenth century marked the reenvisioning of the once-barren borderland as a resource-rich terrain worthy of industrial development and inhabited by a population in need of cultural transformation. This article examines the convergence of local and regional dangers and opportunities with the influence of absolutist notions of two newly globalizing norms, territoriality and sovereignty, a convergence that fostered this new vision of Kham as integral to the burgeoning Chinese state and nation. The ramifications of this transformation in perceptions of the former imperial frontier as “West” would resonate across China's western interior throughout the twentieth century.     

A Cultural Approach to a Canadian Tragedy: The Indian Residential Schools as a Sacred Enterprise

For over a century, the Canadian state funded a church-run system of residential schools designed to assimilate Aboriginal children into Euro-Canadian culture. In addition to the problems associated with its ethnocentric philosophy, the school system was also characterised by terrible health conditions and physical and sexual abuse of the students was widespread. Recently, the schools have been the object of the most successful struggle for redress in Canadian history. One particularly puzzling aspect about the school system is that it persisted for so long, despite that many of its failings were known very early in its operation. In this article, this puzzle is addressed via a cultural analysis of a political struggle over the residential schools that occurred within Canadian Anglicanism at the outset of the twentieth century. The article concludes that the meaning of the school system as a sacred enterprise contributed to its persistence.     

Slovenes: “a nation of owners of one of the three original European languages?”

The Slovene national movement of the late nineteenth century was based primarily on the myth of an eternal linguistic community, an essentialist position within historiography. The national development itself best fits into patterns described by Hroch and Gellner. Although most objective conditions for national constitution were met by 1929, it is not clear if subjective ones had been met by that time. World War II revitalized the nation-constitution process, particularly by warring Communist- and Catholic-supported political and military factions, both claiming to fight for a Slovene identity, while Communists also claimed to be fighting for a “Greater” (Megali) Slovenia. With the war’s end, and Slovenia becoming a Yugoslav republic and expanding geographically, there was no doubt of a Slovene national identity, as understood by Connor, among the general population. However, important developments followed in nation-constitution after 1945, particularly upon gaining independence in 1991. The process need not be considered completed. Slovenes may be considered leaning towards a cultural type nation, with a cultural nucleus in an essentialist understanding of the Slovene language.     

Repackaging national identity: Cool Japan and the resilience of Japanese identity narratives

‘Cool Japan’ is an instance of Japanese government's nation branding exercise as part of its soft power projection in which the unique selling point is identified as Japanese national identity. In this paper, I examine the relationship between Cool Japan and Japanese national identity and highlight a tension in the construction. Cool Japan is about emphasizing Japan's attractiveness for public diplomacy, while the top-down nature of the branding undermines the imagery that the branding is designed to convey. I show that policy elites resolve this tension by invoking the traditional Japanese identity narratives that construct Japan into both a non-Western and an un-Asian entity, reproducing the myth of Japanese uniqueness. I argue that the elite narratives surrounding Cool Japan readily replicate the language reminiscent of prewar identity construction. Despite the contemporary popularity of manga and anime, the purported ‘coolness’ of these products are framed within older constructions of Japanese Self that can trace their pedigree back to the nineteenth century. Using the minutes of committee meetings, policy documents, as well as media interviews given by policy- and business elites, I show that Cool Japan is effectively a twenty first century rendition of the familiar Japanese identity construction.     

Journeys of Candombe Federal by Martín Boneo. Their contribution to the social imaginary on Afro-Argentines

Among Martín Boneo's works, Candombe Federal is one of the most disseminated if we concentrate on its journeys through the visual imaginary; it depicts history books, memoirs, and academic research. This image combines aspects closely associated with negritude in our imaginary: the permanent link to Rosas (politician and army officer who ruled the Argentine Confederation almost uninterruptedly from 1829 to 1852), their immediate association with popular manifestations, specifically the candombe, and the relationship established by liberal writers at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century between this specific image and historical writings or memoirs. We believe that this conception about Afro-Argentinians becomes a stereotype and an invisibilization strategy whereby Afro-Argentinians are confined to the past, an abominable past which must not be repeated. Our purpose is to give an account on the use which was and is made of this image, because it fuels the social imaginary about Afro-Argentines.