Multiculturalism: Identity, Language and Culture in Zadie Smith's White Teeth

Author(s):  
Alaal Lateef Alnajm

This paper aims at examining the specific meaning of multiculturalism, identity, language and culture in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, her debut novel. Smith depicts a clear picture of the multicultural society of Britain in general and London in particular. However, the paper studies the ways in which Smith’s novel transcends and promotes the limitations of black women. The study investigates how multicultural society of Britain drawn through the role of each character in the novel; therefore, it shows the complex construction of identity created by Smith to illustrate the relationship built by difference of race, language, and religion. The paper also examines how Zadie Smith in her use of language integrates the linguistic process existed in the intercultural experiences of both the characters and the author herself. This paper aims at examining the specific meaning of multiculturalism, identity, language and culture in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, her debut novel. Smith depicts a clear picture of the multicultural society of Britain in general and London in particular. However, the paper studies the ways in which Smith’s novel transcends and promotes the limitations of black women. The study investigates how multicultural society of Britain drawn through the role of each character in the novel; therefore, it shows the complex construction of identity created by Smith to illustrate the relationship built by difference of race, language, and religion. The paper also examines how Zadie Smith in her use of language integrates the linguistic process existed in the intercultural experiences of both the characters and the author herself.This paper aims at examining the specific meaning of multiculturalism, identity, language and culture in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, her debut novel. Smith depicts a clear picture of the multicultural society of Britain in general and London in particular. However, the paper studies the ways in which Smith’s novel transcends and promotes the limitations of black women. The study investigates how multicultural society of Britain drawn through the role of each character in the novel; therefore, it shows the complex construction of identity created by Smith to illustrate the relationship built by difference of race, language, and religion.

2005 ◽  
Vol 61 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
T.F.J. Dreyer

Before the new political dispensation in South Africa (1994), the Dutch Reformed Church in Africa (Nederduitsch Hervormde Kerk van Afrika) referred to the church as a “peoples church” (volkskerk). Owing to political changes the qualification “volkskerk” has created a certain degree of disturbance in the ranks of the church. The relationship between “church and culture” became a topical issue. Since 1994 the focus of the homiletical debate shifted to the question of the role of the church within a changing environment and again the answer to the question of “church and culture” was of utmost importance. Nowadays the reality of a multicultural society becomes a new challenge to the church. This article is an attempt to define the relation between culture and preaching from different hermeneutic perspectives, namely the cultural embedding of the biblical kerygma; the interwovenness of language and culture; and the necessity for contextuality in preaching.


Literator ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 51-78
Author(s):  
S. Meyer

Rivers and the construction of identity The collection of youth memories “Met ’n eie siekspens” (Engela van Rooyen) and the novel “Manaka: plek van die horings” (Pieter Pieterse) complement each other as literary embodiments of the phenomenon that human life and identity are influenced by an aspect of the characters’ natural environment, namely the river. This article focuses on the nature and extent of the influence of rivers on the development of identity in characters in these two works. In “Met ’n eie siekspens” the formative role of the Orange River is connected with a complex relationship between man and river in which elements of devotion collide with those of enslavement. The values taught by the river and its surroundings are core components of the characters’ identities. In “Manaka: plek van die horings”, the main character’s dream of a life on the Zambezi is part of his identity, in that it embodies selfrealisation and has directed his thinking and self-image since childhood. The river and its surroundings, however, later on also play an important role in the re-interpretation of his life goal and the acquisition of a wider understanding of his true identity. This investigation underlines the importance of research into the portrayal of the relationship between man and nature within the broader field of study in which the portrayal of matters of identity in Afrikaans literature is investigated.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Wykowska ◽  
Jairo Pérez-Osorio ◽  
Stefan Kopp

This booklet is a collection of the position statements accepted for the HRI’20 conference workshop “Social Cognition for HRI: Exploring the relationship between mindreading and social attunement in human-robot interaction” (Wykowska, Perez-Osorio & Kopp, 2020). Unfortunately, due to the rapid unfolding of the novel coronavirus at the beginning of the present year, the conference and consequently our workshop, were canceled. On the light of these events, we decided to put together the positions statements accepted for the workshop. The contributions collected in these pages highlight the role of attribution of mental states to artificial agents in human-robot interaction, and precisely the quality and presence of social attunement mechanisms that are known to make human interaction smooth, efficient, and robust. These papers also accentuate the importance of the multidisciplinary approach to advance the understanding of the factors and the consequences of social interactions with artificial agents.


Author(s):  
Ayşe I. Kural ◽  
Berrin Özyurt

In the current study, we examine the novel hypothesis that perceived stress is a mechanism through which the relationship between attachment orientations and university adjustment can be explained. Present study explored both attachment orientations and perceived stress regarding adjustment; and perceived stress as mediator for the relationship between attachment orientations and adjustment among in 277 university freshmen. Attachment anxiety and avoidance positively correlated with perceived stress whereas resulted in poor university adjustment. Perceived stress partially mediated the relationship between attachment anxiety and poor university adjustment. The findings suggest that enhancing attachment security and stress management skills among insecurely attached students may lead to greater university adjustment.


Author(s):  
Christina Phillips

This chapter introduces the topic of religion and literature, theorises the novel as a secular genre, and develops a concept of religion as the other in the Arabic novel. It begins with a discussion of the relationship between religion and literature, identifying imagination, metaphorical language and mythos as areas of overlap, before turning to the question of religion and the Arabic novel as a modern form which eschews faith and dogma but is nevertheless packed with religious themes, images, characters, language and intertextuality. This is accounted for by the form’s secularism, which is theorised in terms of Charles Taylor’s conditions of belief. Literary secularism is not static and stable however, thus religion emerges as the other in the Egyptian novel, with all the ambivalence which alterity characteristically entails. This religious other calls into question postcolonial studies’ over-valorisation of the East/West binary insofar as it has obscured the critical role of religion in Arab postcolonial literature and identity.


2020 ◽  
pp. 115-138
Author(s):  
Cat M. Ariail

This chapter explores how black women athletes began to emerge as accepted exemplars of American identity after their performance at the inaugural US–Soviet Union dual track and field meet in Moscow in 1958. An almost perfect adherence to normative, white-defined gender expectations allowed black American track women to assume this symbolic status. These young women athletes, especially the sprinters and jumpers of Tennessee State University, now protected, rather than contested, the relationship between race, gender, and Americanness. The celebrated emergence of Wilma Rudolph ahead of and during the 1960 Olympic Games highlights the central role of heteronormativity in determining the boundaries of belonging in modern America.


Author(s):  
V. Litiaga

The article analyzes basic scientific approaches to the interpretation of the terms of «linguoculturology», «linguistic conceptology» and «linguistic concept». We consider the relationship of language and culture, and the role of the term «concept» in this regard. In the article we structured the term «concept» from a linguocultural point of view. These theoretical considerations are the basis for the study of ways and mean of forming a conceptual image of Kyiv Rus in the French medieval linguistic cultural picture of the world. The aim of this article is to examine the influence of the country’s image on shaping the bilateral relations between Ukraine and France in a linguocultural conceptual aspect. The article reveals the main semantic and linguoconceptual aspects of medieval French culture. It shows the links between historical and actual aspects of the conceptual sphere in the formation of public opinion in contemporary international relations. Despite the increasing interest of the scholars in the influence that the image of country may have on bilateral relations, this topic has been under‐researched. This article presents the author’s insights based on theoretical and empirical studies that could shed some new light on this important topic. By looking at the «linguocultural» aspect of the relationship between Kyiv Rus and France in the Medieval times the article gives a basic analysis of the process of country image formation since the tenth century and its impact on present times. The article also provides a basis for further linguistic research of this topic.


Author(s):  
Ingrida Eglė Žindžiuvienė

The aim of this article is to examine the representation of the events in Cyprus in the middle and second half of the twentieth century as depicted in Andrea Busfield’s novel Aphrodite’s War (2010). The article discusses the methods and narrative strategies of disclosing collective trauma and considers the fact-fiction dimension, arguing the presence of it in a trauma narrative. Narrative strategies in trauma fiction are discussed and the author’s approach to the restatement of the national trauma is analysed. It is debated whether the novel can be described as a post-trauma testimony and whether the narrative is constructed on unified memory concepts. Postmemory is viewed within the framework of transgenerational trauma and the role of collective memory in the transmission of trauma is emphasised. Based on the ethical charge of the narrative, the reader’s status in the relationship with a trauma novel is questioned.


Biotecnia ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-16
Author(s):  
Estefanía Garibay-Valdez ◽  
Marcel Martínez-Porchas ◽  
Kadiya Calderón ◽  
Teresa Gollas-Galván ◽  
Luis R. Martínez- Córdova ◽  
...  

La microbiota del tracto digestivo es diversa y provee grandes beneficios al hospedero; participando en múltiples funciones relacionadas con su estado de salud, nutrición y crecimiento. Recientemente ha cobrado relevancia el estudio del papel de la microbiota en organismos de importancia acuícola, incluyendo a camarones peneidos. Los estudios pioneros en conocer la relación de los microorganismos en el desarrollo de camarones peneidos utilizaron técnicas dependientes de cultivo. A pesar de los novedosos hallazgos, esto representó solo una pequeña fracción del total de la población; sin embargo, estas primeras aproximaciones permitieron vislumbrar el rol relevante de la microbiota en la biología de estos crustáceos. Más tarde, el desarrollo de métodos basados en técnicas moleculares extendió el panorama con nuevos registros de bacterias no cultivables en estos ambientes, elucidando el efecto de diversos factores incluyendo dieta, antibióticos, probióticos, prebióticos y enfermedades sobre la modulación de la microbiota del tracto digestivo. Sin embargo, el desarrollo de técnicas de secuenciación masiva de alto rendimiento, comenzó a proporcionar bases de datos más robustas, permitiendo conocer no solo qué microorganismos están presentes en un organismo dado, sino también conocer sus funciones y roles potenciales. Hasta el momento se cuenta con descripciones de la composición de la microbiota del tracto digestivo de camarones peneidos y del como el manejo de estos microorganimos tiene beneficios en la respuesta productiva y estado de salud; sin embargo, es necesario continuar comprendiendo la relación microbiotahospedero. La presente revisión analiza la situación actual y plantea las perspectivas futuras para el estudio de la microbiota de camarones peneidos.ABSTRACTThe digestive tract microbiota is diverse and can provide great benefits to the host, participating in multiple functions related to its health, nutrition and growth. Recently, the microbiota study of important aquaculture species including penaeid shrimp has gained relevance. The first research efforts in the knowledge of the relationship between microorganisms and penaeid shrimp development used culture-dependent techniques. In spite of the novel findings, this represented only a small fraction of the total population; however, these first approaches allowed knowing the relevant role of microbiota in the biology of these crustaceans. Later, the development of methods based on molecular techniques, increased the panorama with new records of nonculturable bacteria in these environments, elucidating the effect of diverse factors including diet, antibiotics, probiotics, prebiotics, and disease on the digestive tract microbiota modulation. However, the rise of high throughput sequencing, began providing robust datasets, allowing to know not only which microbes are present in a given organism, but reveal their functions and potential roles. So far, descriptions of the microbiota composition of the digestive tract of penaeid shrimp are available, as well as on how the management of these microorganisms benefits the productive response and health status; however, it is necessary to continue comprehending the microbiota-host relationship. The present review analyzes the current situation and future perspectives in the study of penaeid shrimp microbiota


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 00022
Author(s):  
Fauzan Hanif

<p class="Abstract">Such cultural experiences have a possibility to be embedded in a memory of one generation. But there are mostly in form of traumatic experiences. And then, we learn that these memories could be transferred onto their children, or we could say it as “post generation”. In the novel <i>Dora Bruder</i>, such things happen when the author, Patrick Modiano, plays his attribute in composing genres to arrange and transfer his message. The story mainly concerns as the narrator try to find a missing girl named Dora Bruder. She was gone in 1941, or in the moment when Nazi was occupying France. This research aims to discover the relationship between the role of genre on emerging the message, particularly the traumatic ones by using the concept of genre and postmemory. From the analysis we conclude that Modiano use genres to transfer his message traumatic. It exists in form of the impression of absence. From the sensation of absence, he continues to transmit consecutively another impression of hollow, doubt, and also hope. For transferring his message and memory, Modiano mixes real documents and his fiction. He manifest them by constructing a story of another person and narrating it from the first-person point of view. He uses this technique to identify himself, because the “shared idea” of one’s could be related with another’s.</p>


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