scholarly journals The Returned Yank as Site of Memory in Irish Popular Culture

2013 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 1175-1195 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANN SCHOFIELD

This article examines the figure of the Returned Yank in Irish popular culture to explain the contradiction between the Irish preoccupation with the figure of the emigrant who returns and the low number of emigrants who actually do return to their native land. The article argues that the Returned Yank is a lieu de mémoire or site of memory – a concept defined by French historian Pierre Nora as “any significant entity, whether material or non-material in nature, which by dint of human will or the work of time has become a symbolic element of the memorial heritage of any community” and used by scholars of African American and other cultures with particular concerns about memory and history. As a site of memory, the Irish Returned Yank allows the Irish to explore the meaning of massive population loss, the relationship with a diasporic population of overseas Irish, and tensions between urban and rural life. The article also suggests a relationship between Irish national identity and the Returned Yank.

2019 ◽  
pp. 124-136
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Q. McCune

“Branded Beautiful” examines the relationship between individual pop celebrity, the promotion of a national identity, and the use of sexuality while branding each. Barbados promotes itself as a site of controlled abandon straddling performances of modernity while cashing in on imaginaries of “primitive” exoticism. Robyn “Rihanna” Fenty’s pop stardom is built on an ever-changing boldness that often includes in your face sexuality. The relationship between Rihanna and representations of Barbados is fraught with ambiguity. Using Rihanna’s August 2011 LOUD tour concert in Barbados, “Branded Beautiful” argues that the events surrounding the show shed light on the differing sexual economies of pop stardom and national tourism; that such divergences highlight the insecurities of nation-states seeking to make a name for themselves within a global market; and that despite the distinctions it is quite hard for a nation-state to divorce celebrity focused attention from an ideal national image.


2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 352-377 ◽  
Author(s):  
Saladin Ambar

AbstractThis article seeks to illuminate the relationship between two of the most important figures in American political thought: the pragmatist philosopher William James, and the pioneering civil rights leader and intellectual, W.E.B. Du Bois. As Harvard's first African American PhD, Du Bois was a critical figure in theorizing about race and identity. His innovative take on double consciousness has often been attributed to his contact with James who was one of Du Bois's most critical graduate professors at Harvard. But beyond the view of the two thinkers as intellectual collaborators, is the fraught history of liberal racial fraternal pairing and its role in shaping national identity. This article examines Du Bois and James's relationship in the context of that history, one marked by troubled associations between friendship and race.


1988 ◽  
Vol 170 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry A. Giroux ◽  
Roger I. Simon

In this paper, the authors analyze the importance of critical pedagogy by examining its potentially transformative relations with the sphere of popular culture. Popular culture is viewed not only as a site of contradiction and struggle but also as a significant pedagogical terrain that raises important questions regarding such issues as the relevance of everyday life, the importance of student voice, the significance of both meaning and pleasure in the learning process, and the relationship between knowledge and power in the curriculum. In the end of the piece, the authors raise a number of questions that suggest important inquiries that need to be analyzed regarding how teachers and others can further develop the notion of critical pedagogy as a form of cultural politics.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-142
Author(s):  
JOHN B. MARGENOT III

This study explores the relationship between graffiti and liminality during the Spanish Transition to democracy. Following Franco’s death in 1975, Spain experiences the in-betweenness associated with transitional phases, and such slippage creates a site of hybridity or third space enacted in part through the plethora of pintadas found in its towns and cities. Graffiti contribute to the creation of a middle-passage in which the nature of the Spanish nation unfolds. In this site of flux, the Francoist vision of a unified Spain is both challenged and defended through a multifaceted, conflictual and collective process of identification. Such markings - photographed from 1979 to 1980 - reflect both the ongoing uncertainty surrounding the Transition and the potential of a nation in a process of change. In my study I draw mainly from Homi Bhabha’s thoughts on Third Space, and on scholarship on graffiti. I show that while the message and tone vary widely between opposing ideologies, their politically charged graffiti enact the instertices where national identity is negotiated.


2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ling-Lun Chien ◽  
Marty Sapp ◽  
Jane P. Liu ◽  
Steve Bernfeld ◽  
Steffanie J. Scholze ◽  
...  

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iain Mackinnon

This article employs a new approach to studying internal colonialism in northern Scotland during the 18th and 19th centuries. A common approach to examining internal colonial situations within modern state territories is to compare characteristics of the internal colonial situation with attested attributes of external colonial relations. Although this article does not reject the comparative approach, it seeks to avoid criticisms that this approach can be misleading by demonstrating that promoters and managers of projects involving land use change, territorial dispossession and industrial development in the late modern Gàidhealtachd consistently conceived of their work as projects of colonization. It further argues that the new social, cultural and political structures these projects imposed on the area's indigenous population correspond to those found in other colonial situations, and that racist and racialist attitudes towards Gaels of the time are typical of those in colonial situations during the period. The article concludes that the late modern Gàidhealtachd has been a site of internal colonization where the relationship of domination between colonizer and colonized is complex, longstanding and occurring within the imperial state. In doing so it demonstrates that the history and present of the Gaels of Scotland belongs within the ambit of an emerging indigenous research paradigm.


Author(s):  
Jane Caputi

The proposed new geological era, The Anthropocene (a.k.a. Age of Humans, Age of Man), marking human domination of the planet long called Mother Earth, is truly The Age of the Motherfucker. The ecocide of the Anthropocene is the responsibility of Man, the Western- and masculine-identified corporate, military, intellectual, and political class that masks itself as the exemplar of the civilized and the human. The word motherfucker was invented by the enslaved children of White slave masters to name their mothers’ rapist/owners. Man’s strategic motherfucking, from the personal to the planetary, is invasion, exploitation, spirit-breaking, extraction and toxic wasting of individuals, communities, and lands, for reasons of pleasure, plunder, and profit. Ecocide is attempted deicide of Mother Nature-Earth, reflecting Man’s goal to become the god he first made in his own image. The motivational word Motherfucker has a flip side, further revealing the Anthropocene as it signifies an outstanding, formidable, and inexorable force. Mother Nature-Earth is that “Mutha’ ”—one defying translation into heteropatriarchal classifications of gender, one capable of overwhelming Man, and not the other way around. Drawing upon Indigenous and African American scholarship; ecofeminism; ecowomanism; green activism; femme, queer, and gender non-binary philosophies; literature and arts; Afrofuturism; and popular culture, Call Your “Mutha’ ” contends that the Anthropocene is not evidence of Man’s supremacy over nature, but that Mother Nature-Earth, faced with disrespect, is going away. It is imperative now to call the “Mutha’ ” by decolonizing land, bodies, and minds, ending rapism, feeding the green, renewing sustaining patterns, and affirming devotion to Mother Nature-Earth.


Author(s):  
Alison James

This book studies the documentary impulse that plays a central role in twentieth-century French literature. Focusing on nonfiction narratives, it analyzes the use of documents—pieces of textual or visual evidence incorporated into the literary work to relay and interrogate reality. It traces the emergence of an enduring concern with factual reference in texts that engage with current events or the historical archive. Writers idealize the document as a fragment of raw reality, but also reveal its constructed and mediated nature and integrate it as a voice within a larger composition. This ambivalent documentary imagination, present in works by Gide, Breton, Aragon, Yourcenar, Duras, and Modiano (among others), shapes the relationship of literature to visual media, testimonial discourses, and self-representation. Far from turning away from realism in the twentieth century, French literature often turns to the document as a site of both modernist experiment and engagement with the world.


Author(s):  
Jason Young

This chapter chronicles the relationship between African religious practices on the continent and African American religion in the plantation Americas in the era of slavery and the transatlantic slave trade. A new generation of scholars who emerged in the 1960s and 1970s have demonstrated not only that African religious practices exhibit remarkable subtlety and complexity but also that these cultures have played significant roles in the subsequent development of religious practices throughout the world. Christianity, Islam, and traditional African religion comprised a set of broad and varied religious practices that contributed to the development of creative, subtle, and complex belief systems that circulated around the African Diaspora. In addition, this chapter addresses some of the vexed epistemological challenges related to discussing and describing non-Western ritual and religious practices.


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