Identity politics

This article studies Cypriot LGBs' identity construction processes and understandings of politics amidst the sociopolitical environment within which they are articulated. It does so by addressing a question that is central to gender and sexuality research: How are gender and sexual identities formed, and how do these formations inform gender and sexuality politics in contexts caught between tradition and modernity? Employing a qualitative research design, it thematically analyzes data from interviews with Greek-Cypriot and Turkish-Cypriot LGBs. It marks intra-ethnic and interethnic in-group exclusions. It argues that these exclusions are reinforced by local notions about modernity, expressed through the “Europe/west–versus the–rest” opposition. Nonetheless, it also finds that the successes of the Cypriot LGBTI movement have been based on opportunities created by Europeanization. Therefore, it helps develop our understanding of the implications of conceptions of nationhood, gender, and sexuality on gender and sexuality politics where the “rest” meets the “west.”

KEYWORDS: Gender, Sexuality, Identity, Politics, Modernity, Cyprus

The dislocated, deterritorialized discourse produced by repatriates from formerly European colonies has remained overlooked in academic scholarship. One such group is the Eurasian “Indo” community that has its roots in the former Dutch East Indies, today’s Indonesia. This article focuses on Tjalie Robinson, the intellectual leader of this community from the 1950s to the mid-1970s. The son of a Dutch father and a British-Javanese mother, Robinson became the leading voice of the diasporic Indo community in the Netherlands and later also in the United States. His engagement resulted in the foundation of the Indo magazine Tong Tong and the annual Pasar Malam Besar, what was to become the world’s biggest Eurasian festival. Robinson played an essential role in the cultural awareness and self-pride of the eventually global Indo community through his elaboration of a hybrid and transnational identity concept. By placing his focus “tussen twee werelden” (in-between two worlds) and identifying “mixties-schap” (mestizaje) as the essential characteristic of Indo identity, Robinson anticipated debates on hybridity, transnationalism, and creolism that only much later would draw attention from scholars in the field of postcolonial studies. This article highlights Robinson’s pioneering role in framing a deterritorialized hybrid alternative to nationalist essentialism in the postcolonial era.

Iris Ruiz is a Lecturer in the Merritt Writing Program at UC, Merced, which is located in the heart of the Central Valley and is a designated Hispanic Serving Institution. She teaches courses in advanced composition, journal editing, first and second year composition and Chicanx Studies. She recently published Reclaiming Composition for Chicano/as and other Ethnic Minorities: A Critical History and Pedagogy and an edited collection, Decolonizing Rhetoric and Composition Studies: New Latinx Keywords for Theory and Pedagogy, which Raúl Sánchez and she are co-editing and includes many CCCC Latinx Caucus gente. Iris has been a member of the NCTE/CCCC Latinx Caucus since 2000, contributing to Writing and Working for Change projects, Reflections, the formation of the People Of Color caucus for the WPA, and she is currently working on a statement for the Caucus to consider in support of Ethnic Studies nationwide to be release soon by NCTE. She has recently been elected to the position of Co-Chair for the NCTE/CCCC Latinx Caucus. Her indigenous roots stem from her great-grandmother, Angelita Treviño, who is pure-blooded indigenous. Iris has gleaned much of what she knows about Curanderismo, indigenous spirituality, and natural healing practices from Angelita's memory. She hopes to continue to " Indigenize " Western epistemology as the world continues to go through a decolonial paradigm shift that has no due date, but that is currently in process.

The book is devoted to the analysis of ethno-linguistic and socio-cultural foundations of the identity of Dagestanis. The author discribres
particularities of  ethno-linguistic situation in the Mountainous and Lowland districts of Dageston, the influence of migration, urbanization, ethnic mixations on the cultural and language identity,  as well as the correlation of ethnic and religious identitues,  forms of actualization of ethnic and civil  consciousness,  ethnic stereotypes and other components of consciousness of Dagestanis. Special attention is paid to the problem of preserving the language diversity and cultural identity of the peoples of Dagestan.The book is intended for anthropologists, historians, philologists.
culture and a wide range of readers interested in Etnea-
takovymi and ethno-cultural problems.

Questo intervento intende esplorare e problematizzare la rappresentazione delle donne in quanto icone, muse o soggetti passivi, e come esse diventino ricettacolo di proiezioni sociali. Quali strumenti estetici e politici le donne hanno impiegato per riappropriarsi della propria soggettività e autonomia in una cultura visuale patriarcale ed eteronormativa? Attraverso un’analisi critica queer-femminista – e percorrendo le definizioni di sesso, genere e sessualità – questa lectio prende come punto di partenza esempi tratti dai media mainstream per poi allargarsi verso problematiche che riguardano la rappresentazione dei corpi in ambito artistico.

[EN]
'Body, Femininity and Objectification: Queer-Feminist Perspectives'
This presentation explores and problematises how women are usually portrayed as either icons, muses or passive subjects, either way becoming receptacles of social projections. What aesthetic and political tools have women employed to re-frame their own subjectivity and autonomy within a heteronormative and patriarchal visual culture? Through a feminist and queer critical analysis, this lecture will take as its starting point examples drawn from mainstream media, to move towards issues that relate to the representation of bodies in the arts.

-- text available only in Italian --

The following text is a response sent to an email dispatched to me by the Chairman of the exiled Oromo Parliamentarians who struggle for the Independence and Self-determination of the 5 millennia long Kushitic Ethiopian Nation of the Oromos.
The Hamitic - Kushitic Oromo Nation - due to criminal, inhuman and evil persecution conceived by the colonial powers (France, England and America) and executed by the colonially promoted barbaric and incestuous pseudo-Christian Abyssinians - lost their kingdoms and were engulfed within the Cemetery of Nations Fake Ethiopia, which consists in the world's most tyrannical realm and the location of the world's more abhorrent, more enduring, and more multifaceted genocides. There are more than 45 million Oromos in Abyssinia (Fake Ethiopia) and Kenya today, despite the notorious and pathetic falsehood propagated by Wikipedia.
The present text enumerates all the major points of historical distortion and falsification carried out and diffused by the colonial academia, mass media, and diplomats, as well as by their local agents and criminal executioners, i.e. the barbaric, incestuous and Anti-Christian tribes of Amhara and Tigray (: the Abyssinians), who usurped the fair name of Ethiopia, which historically denotes the land of North Sudan and the Kushitic Nation that prospered there either in the Antiquity or in the Christian Era. Both, the Oromos and the Arabic-speaking (but not Arab) populations of Northern-Central Sudan are the descendants of Ancient Sudan's (i.e. Ancient Ethiopia's) Kushitic populations.
Representative photographic documentation was herewith added to the text in order to better illustrate the topic.

Refutation of historical forgeries propagated by European colonials and incestuous Abyssinians
First published here:
https://megalommatiscomments.wordpress.com/2017/07/26/kushitic-oromos-ancestry-in-ethiopia-ancient-sudan-semitic-amharas-tigrays-abyssinians-ancestry-in-yemen/

The book endeavours to show how research based on poststructuralist discourse analysis can yield analytically beneficial and methodologically sound insights. It largely delivers on these promises. Part I provides a lucid explanation of poststructuralist tenets, showing how Otherness drives policymaking as the backdrop against which identities constitute themselves. During the early 1990s, Western identity was so constituted as ‘civilized’ and ‘controlled’ in opposition to the ‘barbarian’ and ‘violent’ Balkans. The elegant presentation of poststructuralist tenets is welcome, given that such writings are often difficult to access for uninitiated readers.

There are more types of borders today than ever before in history. Borders of all kinds define every aspect of social life in the twenty-first century. From the biometric data that divides the smallest aspects of our bodies to the aerial drones that patrol the immense expanse of our domestic and international airspace, we are defined by borders. They can no longer simply be understood as the geographical divisions between nation-states. Today, their form and function has become too complex, too hybrid. What we need now is a theory of the border that can make sense of this hybridity across multiple domains of social life.

Rather than viewing borders as the result or outcome of pre-established social entities like states, Thomas Nail reinterprets social history from the perspective of the continual and constitutive movement of the borders that organize and divide society in the first place. Societies and states are the products of bordering, Nail argues, not the other way around. Applying his original movement-oriented theoretical framework "kinopolitics" to several major historical border regimes (fences, walls, cells, and checkpoints), Theory of the Border pioneers a new methodology of "critical limology," that provides fresh tools for the analysis of contemporary border politics.

“Power is war, the continuation of war by other means”: Foucault’s reversal of Clausewitz’s formula has become a staple of critical theory — but it remains highly problematic on a conceptual level. Elaborated during Foucault’s 1976 lectures (“Society Must Be Defended”), this work-hypothesis theorises “basic warfare” [la guerre fondamentale] as the teleological horizon of socio-political relations. Following Boulainvilliers, Foucault champions this polemological approach, conceived as a purely descriptive discourse on “real” politics and war, against the philosophico-juridical conceptuality attached to liberal society (Hobbes’s Leviathan being here the prime example).
However, in doing so, Foucault did not interrogate the conceptual validity of notions such as power and war, therefore interlinking them without questioning their ontological status. This problematic conflation was partly rectified in 1982, as Foucault proposed a more dynamic definition of power relations: “actions over potential actions”.
I argue, somewhat polemically, that Foucault’s hermeneutics of power still involves a teleological violence, dependent on a polemological representation of human relations as essentially instrumental: this resembles what Derrida names, in “Heidegger’s Ear”, an “anthropolemology”. However, I show that all conceptualisation of power implies its self-deconstruction. This self-deconstructive (or autoimmune) structure supposes an archi-originary unpower prior to power: power presupposes an excess within power, an excessive force, another violence making it both possible and impossible. There is something within power located “beyond the power principle” (Derrida). This (self-)excess signifies a limitless resistantiality co-extensive with power-relationality. It also allows the reversal of pólemos into its opposite, as unpower opens politics and warfare to the messianic call of a pre-political, pre-ontological disruption: the archi-originary force of différance. This force, unconditional, challenges Foucault’s conceptualisations of power, suggesting an originary performativity located before or beyond hermeneutics of power-knowledge, disrupting theoreticity as well as empiricity by pointing to their ontological complicity.
The bulk of this essay is dedicated to sketching the theoretical implications of this deconstructive reading of Foucault with respect to the methodology and conceptuality of political science and social theory.

Available now from Penn State University Press, with a foreword by Pat J. Gehrke. Order here: https://www.amazon.com/Metanoia-Rhetoric-Authenticity-Transformation-Self/dp/0271085924/ref=sr_1_1?crid=DL9ENJNF09HO&keywords=ellwanger+metanoia&qid=1581529316&sprefix=ellwanger%2Caps%2C150&sr=8-1

This PhD thesis engenders new approaches to the understanding, appreciation, and experience of modern and contemporary ceramic art. It focusses on two recent outputs. The initial, Scorched Earth: 100 Years of Southern African Potteries (2016), a scholarly publication, and the latter, Post-colonialism? (2016/2017), a socially-engaged international exhibition, held at the Benyamini Contemporary Ceramics Centre in Tel Aviv, Israel. The moral philosophy ubuntu was proposed as a component of self-reflexive methodology for research and curatorial projects. The term cryrator was advanced as constituting an approach to curatorial praxis in conflict zones. These concepts make an original contribution to existing methodologies and research that historicise, de-westernise, and decolonise knowledge.

Available now from Penn State University Press, with a foreword by Pat J. Gehrke.

Order here: https://www.amazon.com/Metanoia-Rhetoric-Authenticity-Transformation-Self/dp/0271085924/ref=sr_1_1?crid=DL9ENJNF09HO&keywords=ellwanger+metanoia&qid=1581529316&sprefix=ellwanger%2Caps%2C150&sr=8-1

African and African American communities have faced pressures of
marginalization and racism in the South Carolina Lowcountry since their arrival with Europeans in the seventeenth century. These pressures have been felt physically, socially, economically, politically, and even academically, through misrepresentations in historical portrayals. The field of historic archaeology is uniquely situated with access to informative sources from both the past and the present, and as such exhibits great potential in taking strides to replace the limiting presentation of a static and homogeneous single African American culture with views that instead emphasize a focus on unique
cultures and identities. This thesis attempts to contribute to conversations on the archaeology of identity by investigating the site of an African American family’s occupation in coastal South Carolina. In looking to the material evidence of occupation at the Ferguson Road Tract uncovered through archaeological endeavors, historical
documentary records spanning the time of local occupation, and oral accounts of
descendants and current occupants of the property, this thesis will demonstrate the
potential for interpreting the interactions of place and the identity of its occupants within
the local social environment in the form of a multidisciplinary framework for researching
African American archaeological sites in the South Carolina coastal region that may be
used as a template for future African American Lowcountry sites.

https://journalistethics.com/
Download free at this link.

This publication is about the Deep State and pursues four core objectives.

This book: 

• Defines the notion of the so-called ‘Deep State’;
• Outlines 101 tools that the Deep State uses to achieve short-term objectives;
• Analyzes the mechanisms that the Deep State uses to pursue its arch objective;
• Synthesizes an original diagram that summarizes the Deep State’s modus operandi.

This book is written for those with zero to little knowledge of the ‘Deep State’. It analyzes credible sources that claim a Deep State apparatus exists. Much discussion is cutting-edge. The Deep State’s existence has not mainstreamed in public knowledge during pre- or recorded history.

This book synthesizes the consensus that appears in various public sources. Examples include mainstream and alternative media reports, scholarly publications and institutional documents. Discussions are Western-centric. They focus on power structures in Europe, the Near East (e.g. Israel) and the United States of America (USA). These are the core locations of Deep State bases.

This book aims to arm readers with the tools required to form their own opinions. Much language in this book unambiguously informs the audience of the author’s informed opinions. May critical readers conduct their own independent research and always draw their own conclusions.

Il saggio descrive i rapporti di Giuseppe Mazzini con la massoneria e analizza poi l'uso pubblico che la massoneria fece di Mazzini dopo la sua morte (1872) e il contributo che essa dette alla costruzione del suo mito e alla diffusione delle sue idee politiche.

International Relations and Identity International Relations and Identity examines the issue of collective political identity formation and expands the concept of the international beyond the notion of states. Providing a dialogical approach to questions of identity and alterity in ...

In late September 2016 former Prime Minister, respected legal scholar and constitutional law reformer, Rt. Hon Sir Geoffrey Palmer QC and public law specialist Andrew Butler released, as part of a New Zealand Law Foundation funded study Constitution Aotearoa, their proposed constitution in a book entitled, “A Written Constitution for Aotearoa New Zealand.” This paper seeks to provide a critical
Kaupapa Māori critique of their proposed constitution grounded in Aboriginal
academic Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s White Possessive Doctrine and Veracini’s
commentary of “On Settling.” It will look to explain how this proposed constitution is a missed opportunity and how it can be seen as a continuation of white possessive nature of the state while outlining the conflict between the need of the state to retain to retain power and the need of Māori to have constitutional transformation.

The main purpose of this paper is to survey the origins of educational policies during the colonial period. The emphasis on elite English education, and its displacement from traditional instructional models, resulted in a break with the everyday experiences of the "illiterate masses," and thus reified the gap between the classes. The educated elites' perception of "the uneducated population as an object of moral improvement"  is mirrored in the Utilitarian, Evangelical, Victorian educational models. Though British rule was cast off with relish, the educational models inherited from the colonizers continue to create paradoxical curricular paradigms in post-independence India.

I also briefly trace their appropriation and application by the nationalist movement and the persistence of these pedagogical paradigms in post-independence India. This discussion is situated within a critique of textbook-centered instruction. At the end of this paper I discuss a controversy that arose in the representation of history and the production of textbooks during the Janata government in the late seventies. The central question driving the writing of this paper asks, "Can a modern/traditional multi-ethnic political nation-state such as India, build a democratic entity through the schools, using textbooks as resources?" This paper thus discusses the influences of colonialism and nationalism on curriculum and textbook design in India, and offer a conclusion that raises more questions than answers.

It is often said that Finland’s European Union (EU) membership in 1995 finally made it a ‘purely Western’ nation. This article theorises upon the membership debate by studying the geopolitical rhetoric used for and against EU membership from 1990 to 1994. It is argued that political studies of this kind should address arguments used in situations where competing actors try to persuade the public to support their own political goals and to increase their political power. In this context, national identity (i.e., competing interpretations of national history,
geographical affiliation, the national future and national interests) becomes a rhetorical resource for political elites. The EU membership debate that took place in Finland reveals how important geography was in the context of this identitypolitical dispute and emphasises the importance of political recognition in legitimising crucial political decisions*in this case, joining the Western European integration process.

This article deals with identity political discourse in situations of cultural movements, precisely in situations of migration. It addresses the question of migration through the interpretation of past and in the making events. In this context, it focuses on the perception of Other, and on its representation. As such, it observes spatiotypies in their discursive specificities. Spatiotypies are attributions of power and discourse. They state, mentally and politically, the social life of individuals. The corpus is composed of French newspaper articles, from the middle of 2015 to the end of 2016. This period saw the dismantling of the "Camps de Calais" and the distribution of migrants to other locations on the French territory.

This module explores a variety of especially timely topics in political philosophy. In its 2019 iteration, the module explores questions about the origins, dangers, and subversion of democracy – including worries about populism, fascism, and the tyranny of the majority. Alongside this, the module examines questions about structural injustice, identity politics, the nature of the “modern” condition, and the role of anger, civility, and hope in politics.

Many of the assigned readings lie outside the confines of philosophy. They include works of history, sociology, cultural anthropology, and psychology. Interdisciplinarity presents its challenges, but it also brings benefits: a chance to think about the real world, in its baffling complexity. Tackling “timely” topics does not mean ignoring the past. On the contrary, one of the main ambitions of the module is to show how history, and historical sources, can shed important light on the politics of the present day.

Kult nieznanego żołnierza jest szczególnym przykładem kultu bohaterów narodowych. Narodził się na Zachodzie i rozpowszechnił na całym świecie, przyjmując w poszczególnych regionach lokalny charakter. Stało się tak również w Europie Środkowo-Wschodniej. W niniejszym szkicu skupię się na konkretnym momencie historycznym i na tym, jakie znalazł odbicie w kulcie nieznanego żołnierza, a szerzej: w narodowych narracjach heroicznych. Momentem tym jest okres stalinizmu i odwilży połowy lat pięćdziesiątych – czas przełomowy w rozwoju środkowoeuropejskiego kultu. To wtedy uległa podziałowi spójna, powstała w dwudziestoleciu międzywojennym, narracja heroiczna, a władze w każdym z krajów wybrały różne strategie narracyjne względem kultu, odpowiadające bieżącym potrzebom legitymizacyjnym. W latach sześćdziesiątych doszło jednak do jego ponownej uniformizacji, gdy kult nieznanego żołnierza wszędzie uzyskał nowy, komunistyczny kształt. Ten krótki esej może stać się przyczynkiem do refleksji nad kultem bohaterów narodowych, nad jego wymiarem środkowoeuropejskim i specyfiką narodową. Jako że punktem wyjścia do analizy będą topograficzne miejsca pamięci, groby nieznanego żołnierza, tekst jest również próbą uchwycenia różnych metod ideologizacji przestrzeni miejskiej. Dokładniej przyjrzę się trzem grobom: bukareszteńskiemu, warszawskiemu i budapeszteńskiemu.

Fostering the emergence of a “European identity” was one of the declared goals of the euro adoption. Now, years after the physical introduction of the common currency, we assess whether there has been an effect on a shared European identity. We use two different datasets in order to assess the impact of the euro adoption on the fostering of a self-declared “European Identity”. We find that the effect of the euro is statistically insignificant although it is precisely estimated. This result holds important implications for European policy makers. It also sheds new light on the formation of social identities.

Everybody is born into a family. Each has its own history, therefore, 'our history' is not made by us, but by previous generations. The rise of International migration and the crumbling of family structures, however, only make it harder for descendants to learn about their family history. Inhibited by language and geographical barriers as well as lost connections to the bearers of knowledge, many offspring of migrant families year for answers to questions such as 'Where do I come from?' or 'How did I get here?' Answering these requires re-establishing lost connections and meeting family one previously did not know. This paper illustrates how the juxtaposition of two generations of Chinese Australian migrants' narrative (a 'pioneer migrant' and an 'overseas born Chinese' are vital to piecing together a segment of family history.

Published in the Winter 2014 issue of C Magazine, this article analyzes how artist Ursula Johnson unsettles and engages non-Aboriginal spectators toward gaining new perspectives on Aboriginal culture and identity and Aboriginal-colonizer relations. In her solo exhibition Mi'kwite'tmn (Do You Remember), both installation and performance work challenge traditional museological display of Aboriginal/Indigenous objects of material culture; in "The Archive Room," for example, Johnson's "o'pltek" (a Mi'kmaw word that can be translated as "it is not right") basket forms reveal the disconnect between Aboriginal cultures and the imposed interpretations on the part of Western museums. Ultimately, such "wrongs" work towards a collective revisioning of identities, both colonizer-settler and Aboriginal.

Winner of 2009 Outstanding Book Award, North American Society for the Sociology of Sport.

In parks and cafes, homes and stadium stands, Cubans talk baseball. I contend that when they are analyzing and debating plays, games, teams, and athletes, Cubans are exchanging ideas not just about baseball but also about Cuba and cubanidad, or what it means to be Cuban. I explore the interconnections between baseball and Cuban identity. Suggesting that baseball is in many ways an apt metaphor for cubanidad, I point out aspects of the sport that resonate with Cuban social and political life: the perpetual tension between risk and security, the interplay between individual style and collective regulation, and the risky journeys undertaken with the intention, but not the guarantee, of returning home.

Chapter One is available below

The Tiger Balm Gardens or Haw Par Villa, built in the 1930s by overseas Chinese pharmaceuticals tycoon Aw Boon Haw, has been and remains a symbol of the positioning of Singapore’s Chineseness. In the colonial era, it marked the success not only of one man but also of the Chinese migrant community. In the later period of nation-building, it was initially considered as a challenge to multiracialism and nationhood. However, as state policy shifted towards an ethnicized cultural identity as prompted by the rise of Asia as a major economic force, especially China, the Villa was renovated first into an orientalized theme park and then resuscitated as the repository of diasporic Chinese entrepreneurship. Amidst these state initiatives, the history of the Villa and its founder were sidelined.

Identity is a necessary way of auto-definition in the process of building any human group. Some societies (not many) with strong political forces need to develop their identity process and to build the most powerful ethnic feelings. The building of ethnicity is not a simply task, as can be seen in the case of Mount Lykaion, in Arcadia. This is a clear example of the ideological force which characterizes the identity definitions and the ethnic building process.