Colonizing Language: Cultural Production and Language Politics in Modern Japan and Korea

This article deals with the identity construction of Latin American immigrants in Israel through their food practices. Food is a basic symbolic element connecting cultural perceptions and experiences. For immigrants, food is also an important element in the maintenance of personal ties with their home countries and a cohesive factor in the construction of a new identity in Israel, their adopted homeland. Food practices encode tacit information and non-verbal cues that are integral parts of an individual’s relationship with different social groups. In this case, I recruited participants from an online group formed within social media platforms of Latin American women living in Israel. The basic assumption of this study posits that certain communication systems are set in motion around food events in various social contexts pertaining to different national or local cuisines and culinary customs. Their meaning, significance and modifications and how they are framed. This article focuses on the adaptation and acculturation processes because it is at that point that immigrants are faced with an interesting duality of reconstructing their unique cultural perceptions to either fit the existing national collective ethos or create a new reality. In this study, the main objective is to compare two different immigrant groups: Jewish and non-Jewish women from Latin America who came to Israel during the last ten years. The comparative nature of the research revealed marked differences between ethnic, religious and cultural elements that reflect coping strategies manifested in the cultural production of food and its representation in two distinct domains: private and public. In the former, it is illustrated within the family and home and how they connect or clash with the latter in the form of consumption in public. Combining cultural studies and discourse analysis, this article offers fresh insight into new models of food practices and reproductions. The article’s contribution to new food research lies in its ability to shed light on how inter-generational and inter-religious discourses are melded while food practices and traditions are embedded in a new Israeli identity.

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Language, Politics and Society in the Middle East

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474421539.001.0001 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Abeer AlNajjar

Keyword(s):

Middle East ◽

Linguistic Landscape ◽

Language Politics ◽

Road Signs ◽

Grassroots Initiatives ◽

Language And Politics ◽

Development Of Language ◽

Core Questions ◽

The Relationship ◽

Shed Light

This book aims to shed light on core questions relating to language and society, language and conflict, and language and politics, in relation to a changing Middle East. While the book focuses on Arabic, it goes way beyond a purely linguistic analysis by bringing to the fore a set of pressing questions about the relationship between Arabic and society. For example, it touches on the development of language policy via an examination of administrative mandates (top-down) in contrast to grassroots initiatives (bottom-up); the deeper layers of the linguistic landscape that highlight the connection between politics, conflict, identity, road signs and street names; Arabic studies and Arabic identity and the myriad ways countries deal simultaneously with globalisation while also seeking to strengthen local and national identity, and more.

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Edward Said, Postcolonialism and Palestine's Contested Spaces

Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies ◽

10.3366/hlps.2017.0150 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 16 (1) ◽

pp. 7-25 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Tahrir Hamdi

Keyword(s):

Cultural Production ◽

Edward Said ◽

Contested Spaces ◽

Olive Trees ◽

Call To Prayer

Postcolonialism, profoundly influenced by the Palestinian scholar Edward Said, has until recently been oddly silent on Palestine, a topic that not only preoccupied Said's thinking and writing, but also inspired his theoretical ideas on imperialism, anti-colonial struggle and the worldliness and affiliations of the text and the critic. This theoretical silence on Palestine was, in fact, preceded by a historical, political, geographical, social and cultural contestation of all forms of Palestinian spaces that include not only dispossessing Palestinians of their land, but also building apartheid walls, destroying hundreds of thousands of olive trees, appropriating/stealing traditional Palestinian dishes and clothes, silencing Palestinian narratives and the Muslim call to prayer. This paper will argue that these contested spaces necessarily become sites of Palestinian cultural production, struggle and sumud.

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World-Ecological Satire: Peat, Brian O'Nolan, and the Irish Free State's Energy Regime

Irish University Review ◽

10.3366/iur.2019.0382 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 49 (1) ◽

pp. 90-104

Author(s):

Robert Kiely

Keyword(s):

Cultural Production ◽

Ecological Perspective ◽

Energy Regime ◽

Energy History ◽

History Of ◽

External Site ◽

Ecological Relations ◽

Nature And Society ◽

Human Actors ◽

The Relationship

A world-ecological perspective of cultural production refuses a dualist conception of nature and society – which imagines nature as an external site of static outputs – and instead foregrounds the fact that human and extra-human natures are completely intertwined. This essay seeks to reinterpret the satirical writing of a canonical figure within the Irish literary tradition, Brian O'Nolan, in light of the energy history of Ireland, understood as co-produced by both human actors and biophysical nature. How does the energy imaginary of O'Nolan's work refract and mediate the Irish environment and the socio-ecological relations shaping the fuel supply-chains that power the Irish energy regime dominant under the Irish Free State? I discuss the relationship between peat as fuel and Brian O'Nolan's pseudonymous newspaper columns, and indicate how questions about energy regimes and ecology can lead us to read his Irish language novel An Béal Bocht [The Poor Mouth] (1941) in a new light. The moments I select and analyze from O'Nolan's output feature a kind of satire that exposes the folly of separating society from nature, by presenting an exaggerated form of the myth of nature as an infinite resource.

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