Cultural Planning and Urban Renewal in South Africa

The author explores the role of cultural planning as a planning tool in South Africa. He argues that cultural planning contributes to arts "as an intrinsic part of the way humans operate in the world" (Bamford 2006, 19), thereby focusing on cultural identity, creativity, and the globalization of culture. Arguing that cultural planning, as an engine for community development, is essential in South Africa, the author examines the broad definition and importance of cultural planning; the status of South African cities, particularly Johannesburg and Tshwane in Gauteng Province; and the requirements for successful cultural planning.     

Deviant identity,negative self-feelings,and decreases in deviant behavior: The moderating influence of conventional social bonding

Abstract

Informed by Kaplan's general theory of deviant behavior it was hypothesized that adolescents characterized by deviant identities who developed negative self-feelings would decrease deviant behavior over time if the youths were bonded to the conventional social order but not if the youths were not bonded to the conventional social order. For adolescents not characterized by deviant identities, the development of negative self-feelings would increase deviant behavior over time regardless of the level of conventional social bonding.

The hypotheses were explored using data from youth (n=1019) tested during early adolescence and re-tested 3 years later. Ordinary least square regression models estimated the effects of negative self-feelings on later deviant behaviors controlling for earlier deviant behavior, gender, race/ethnicity, and father's education. The model was estimated separately for each of four subgroups: deviant identity/high social bonding; deviant identity/low social bonding; non-deviant identity/high social bonding; and non-deviant identity/low social bonding.

As hypothesized, negative self-feelings anticipated significant decreases in deviant behavior for the deviant identity/high social bonding group, but were unrelated to deviant behavior in the deviant identity/low social bonding group; and negative self-feelings anticipated increased deviant behavior in the two non-deviant identity groups regardless of the level of social bonding.     

Substance Abuse,Aggressive Behaviors,and Cultural Identity Among Jamaican Adolescents

ABSTRACT

The present study examined the extent to which cultural identity is related to substance abuse and aggressive behaviors among Jamaican adolescents. The data used in the analysis was derived from a sample of 80 Jamaican adolescents, aged 13-18. The Multigroup Ethnic Identity Measure (MEIM) and Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System questionnaires were used to record the responses regarding the sample's substance abuse and aggressive behaviors. Results indicated that the ethnic identity search emerged as a statistically significant predictor of cigarette use. Likewise, the relationship between marijuana and cigarettes; cigarettes and other drugs; and marijuana and other drugs denoted some significance. These findings are discussed in addition to limitations and implications.     

Values,imaginaries and templates of journalistic practice: a Critical Discourse Analysis

This article shows that templates are not only crucial for the ways in which journalists construct or structure the media discourse but also for how they perceive themselves and others in the process of journalistic practice. A Critical Discourse Analysis of interviews with Polish journalists on their practices related to reporting migration – a topic largely discarded and ignored by the Polish media – shows that the construction of practice in the journalistic field constantly negotiates the contradiction between “knowing-it-all”, a key element of the template of journalistic habitus/identity, and the frequent lack of experience or limited knowledge of practice and of journalistic work. The analysis reveals that, while often using a discursive strategy of pre-legitimation, journalists enact templates that blur the boundaries between discourses about experiences of journalistic work and imaginaries or scenarios of actions they would only potentially undertake. Journalistic discourses of practice thereby become increasingly displaced, that is, they run along similar templates of discourse of/about quasi-universalised ethics and values of journalism almost irrespective of media organisations of the informants. By the same token, it is emphasised that, rather than being limited by the ideologies and powers of media organisations, agency seems to be often self-constrained by journalists in their self-entrapment in values, templates and imaginaries of journalism.     

Branding national issues: India and the branding bandwagon

Branding in the global sense of the marketing discourse has firmly entrenched itself in India like most international markets. Branding and Urban processes are creating a whole new way of looking at oneself and creating new notions of self-worth. This paper will examine the obsession with the idea of branding that cuts across not only just products that are advertised for monetary purchase but also branding that cuts across matters of national concern, of belonging to ideological frameworks, and even reading cultures. Clearly, everything seems to require a label, a sign that comes with a ready sense of identity, of a shelf value that gives temporary sense of collective spirit and provides a much needed soul-stirring experience. This paper will examine recent media-driven branding exercises for issues of national importance against the backdrop of Gandhi as a super-sign and a brand that is revisited at every juncture of social and political phase in the country even today. The paper takes recourse to Umberto Eco's theory of sign production and the theory of codes to understand that signification is a complex process and all signs do not qualify as semiotic judgments. Herein, is the importance of Gandhi as a super sign – the power of cultural codes and Gandhi's ability to identify the semantics of these codes, where most contemporary branding exercises have failed. Another equally important example of a super-sign in India, the game of cricket is an exemplary of cultural codes and the modes of sign production coming together to stand in for “nationalism” of lasting value.     

Reinventing political subjectivities: studying critical documentaries on the war on terror

This paper casts a look on media aspects of the anti-war-on-terror struggle in western countries. A peculiar warfare, the “war on terror” that officially begun in 2001, is a low-density global warfare, fought in different internal and external fronts . Within a liberal, increasingly post-political social terrain, where social affairs are objects of expert management lacking public accountability and legitimacy, the role, status and the identity of the contemporary citizen is in decline. New media “affordances” offer critical possibilities for challenging hegemonic political discourses, and addressing political alternatives for a broad range of social problems; a re-invention of citizenship through the construct of a new (collective) political subject is central in the reinvention of democracy today. Discourse analysis, drawing reflexively on post-structuralist discourse theory and critical discourse analysis, is deployed in the study of counter-war-on-terror discourses in different documentaries critical to the “war on terror”. Analysis looks at different constructions of “us” and “them” in the context of counter-hegemonic discourses today. Identity is central in the engagement, participation and orientation of citizens today. Identity is central in organising a collective centre and in initiating subjectivity to fragmented liberal, postmodern individuals.     

Sensibility in the era of global communication: a semioethic perspective1

This article proposes a phenomenological and semiotic analysis of sensibility in the era of globalization, which is the era of global communication. How are time, space, self, others, life, death, health, illness, work, employment, unemployment, free-time, development, underdevelopment, and so forth, perceived in today's world? As vast as this excursion may seem, these different issues concerning sensibility all bear on the problem of the relation between identity and alterity. The hypothesis guiding my analysis is that the common denominator in science and sensibility today is the ideology, or ideo-logic, of identity. However, taking Europe as our societal paradigm the ideo-logic of identity reveals itself as a menace to the difficult process of forming the European Union. In Europe – indeed, in world history at large – the logic of identity and of alterity can be traced in all the important phases that have determined peoples’ historical destiny. In the current phase of development in the social reproduction system of advanced capitalism, the contrast between identity and alterity is at an extreme, at the point of exasperation. In this article I intend to explore the possibility of opening sensibility to alterity not only in Europe, but in the anthroposociosemiosic sphere at large.     

Of “other” histories and identities: partition novels from the Indian subcontinent

Ever since the Partition, novelists on either side of the India–Pakistan border have used fictional space imaginatively to formulate discourses on a humanistically-centred, multiplistically-defined Other identity, which writes itself into existence through the prism of the novelists’ contextual present. In this article, I will focus on three partition narratives: Salman Rushdie's Midnight's children (1980), Bapsi Sidhwa's Ice candy man (1988) and Amitav Ghosh's The shadow lines (1988). By employing different modes of knowledge, the novelists draw out the micro-history embedded within the historical event, and resonate the voice of the Other, a creation of partisan politics. Bapsi Sidhwa appears as a social historian who perceives the event through the eyes of an eight-year-old Parsi girl Lenny; Amitav Ghosh, akin to a modern historian, focuses on rigid and illusory territorial divisions from Thamma's (grandmother's) perspective; while Salman Rushdie emerges as a postmodern historian who draws attention to the ambiguity and opacity of both historical and fictional knowledge through Saleem Sinai, born on the day India won her independence. History, as it is perceived by the Other – each belonging to a different generation – is a palimpsest: it is always in a state of becoming, of being lived, evaluated and rewritten. Fiction, as it interprets the historical knowledge, fills in the fissures and absences between the history of the past and that of the present. The article will eventually study how fiction and history inform each other, and how the rhetoric of fiction and history together constitute a dialectical discourse on identity – mapped by borders – which sees a convergence of private and collective memories.     

The Mujahideen in Bosnia: the foreign fighter as cosmopolitan citizen and/or terrorist

This article explores the idea of the Mujahideen in Bosnia as ‘cosmopolitan citizens’. During the Balkan War in the early 1990s, these foreign fighters flocked to Bosnia in order to take up arms alongside those whom they understood to be their besieged Muslim brethren. Although this act of transborder mobilization can be framed as an act of cosmopolitan citizenship, the subsequent ‘problem’ of the Mujahideen in a post-9/11 context destabilized their original cosmopolitan act through a re-enactment of borders and the revocation of their (literal) citizenship. Within the larger post-9/11 narrative, where the Mujahideen must necessarily be understood as terrorists/potential terrorists, they are an interesting point of study in an examination of what can be seen as the sinister side of transnational citizenship, and they expose what Appadurai (A. Appadurai, 2006. Fear of small numbers: an essay on the geography of anger. Durham: Duke University Press.) calls our ‘fear of small numbers’. Particularly compelling is that the post-9/11 Mujahid is an unsympathetic figure, and is always already a questionable candidate for ‘citizenship’ as it is commonly understood. Furthermore, his (sic) original ‘cosmopolitan’ act suggests that, although the ‘cosmopolitan ideal’ is the achievement of a citizenship that transcends or escapes borders, the cosmopolitical must nevertheless be assigned value in order to be ethically intelligible.     

Incorporating immigrants as foreigners: multicultural politics in Japan

With the growth of immigrant population over the past couple of decades, a ‘multicultural’ discourse has emerged in Japan. A notable point is that immigrants are expected to be incorporated into the host society primarily as foreigners rather than as Japanese nationals with full citizenship rights. The purpose of this article is to understand this prevailing mode of immigrant incorporation and to consider the comparative implications. By examining the discursive aspects of claims-making on behalf of both old-timer and newcomer immigrants, I argue that the underlying opportunity structures have been reproduced in each phase of immigration-related development in Japan, facilitating the use of the ‘foreigner’ category in advocacy efforts. Official recognition of the category has also helped to further institutionalize it as the main target of immigrant policy. In comparative perspective, ‘incorporation as foreigners’ can be understood as a variant of the ethnic model of immigration regimes in that it tends to reinforce the dominant ethnocultural conception of Japanese nationhood.