Staged Otherness

Staged Otherness PDF Author: Dagnosław Demski
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 9633864402
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages :

Book Description
The cultural phenomenon of exhibiting non-European people in front of the European audiences in the 19th and 20th century was concentrated in the metropolises in the western part of the continent. Nevertheless, traveling ethnic troupes and temporary exhibitions of non-European humans took place also in territories located to the east of the Oder river and Austria. The contributors to this edited volume present practices of ethnographic shows in Russia, Poland, Czechia, Slovenia, Hungary, Germany, Romania, and Austria and discuss the reactions of local audiences. The essays offer critical arguments to rethink narratives of cultural encounters in the context of ethnic shows. By demonstrating the many ways in which the western models and customs were reshaped, developed, and contested in Central and Eastern European contexts, the authors argue that the dominant way of characterizing these performances as “human zoos” is too narrow. The contributors had to tackle the difficult task of finding traces other than faint copies of official press releases by the tour organizers. The original source material was drawn from local archives, museums, and newspapers of the discussed period. A unique feature of the volume is the rich amount of images that complement every single case study of ethnic shows.

Narratives of Statelessness and Political Otherness

Narratives of Statelessness and Political Otherness PDF Author: Barzoo Eliassi
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030766985
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Book Description
This book argues that citizenship is an inadequate solution to the problem of statelessness based on a critical investigation of the lived experiences of Kurdish and Palestinian diasporas in western Europe. It examines how statelessness affects identity formations, homelessness, belonging, non-belonging, otherness, voices, status, (non)recognition, (dis)respect, (in)visibility and presence in the uneven world of nation-states. It also demonstrates that the undoing of non-sovereign identities’ subjection to structural subalternization and everyday inferiorization requires rights in excess of the mere acquisition of juridical citizenship, which tends to assume national sameness. That assumption in turn involves sovereign practices of denial and assimilation of ethnic alterity. The book therefore highlights the necessity of de-ethnicizing and decolonizing unitary nation-states that are based on the politico-cultural supremacy of a single, “core” ethnicity as the sovereign legislator of the rules and regimes of national belonging and un-belonging. It therefore broaches questions of “majority” and “minority,” mobility, nationalism, home-making, equality, difference and universalism in the context of the nation-state and illustrates how stateless peoples such as Kurds and Palestinians endure and challenge their subordinate position in a hierarchical (geo-)political order and how in so doing remain bound by political otherness.

Other worlds and the narrative construction of otherness

Other worlds and the narrative construction of otherness PDF Author: Esterino Adami
Publisher: Mimesis
ISBN: 8869771490
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 343

Book Description
The papers collected in this volume deal with the explorations of Science Fiction, Fantasy and, more generally, the representation of otherness through the narrative construction of fantastic, imaginary, appalling or attractive places, stories and figures. Contributions are arranged in four main sections. The first section (Other spaces, new worlds) deals with Hindi and Arabic Science Fiction. The second section (Constructing forms of otherness) analyses the narrative and psychological mechanisms that give forms to a stereotype or archetypical image of the threatening Other. The third section ((Re)shaping style(s), language(s) and discourse(s) of otherness) is centred on the idea of language as a tool to build up styles, genres and texts, and literature as an escape from disappointing history and a cross-cultural wandering space of narrative ghosts. The fourth section (Circulating fearful otherness) tests the limits and heuristic potential of a philological approach in reconstructing the wide circulation of motifs and characters from antiquity to (post-)modernity.

Horror Film and Otherness

Horror Film and Otherness PDF Author: Adam Lowenstein
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231556152
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 172

Book Description
What do horror films reveal about social difference in the everyday world? Criticism of the genre often relies on a dichotomy between monstrosity and normality, in which unearthly creatures and deranged killers are metaphors for society’s fear of the “others” that threaten the “normal.” The monstrous other might represent women, Jews, or Blacks, as well as Indigenous, queer, poor, elderly, or disabled people. The horror film’s depiction of such minorities can be sympathetic to their exclusion or complicit in their oppression, but ultimately, these images are understood to stand in for the others that the majority dreads and marginalizes. Adam Lowenstein offers a new account of horror and why it matters for understanding social otherness. He argues that horror films reveal how the category of the other is not fixed. Instead, the genre captures ongoing metamorphoses across “normal” self and “monstrous” other. This “transformative otherness” confronts viewers with the other’s experience—and challenges us to recognize that we are all vulnerable to becoming or being seen as the other. Instead of settling into comforting certainties regarding monstrosity and normality, horror exposes the ongoing struggle to acknowledge self and other as fundamentally intertwined. Horror Film and Otherness features new interpretations of landmark films by directors including Tobe Hooper, George A. Romero, John Carpenter, David Cronenberg, Stephanie Rothman, Jennifer Kent, Marina de Van, and Jordan Peele. Through close analysis of their engagement with different forms of otherness, this book provides new perspectives on horror’s significance for culture, politics, and art.

Exclusion & Embrace

Exclusion & Embrace PDF Author: Miroslav Volf
Publisher: Abingdon Press
ISBN: 1426712332
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 453

Book Description
Life at the end of the twentieth century presents us with a disturbing reality. Otherness, the simple fact of being different in some way, has come to be defined as in and of itself evil. Miroslav Volf contends that if the healing word of the gospel is to be heard today, Christian theology must find ways of speaking that address the hatred of the other. Reaching back to the New Testament metaphor of salvation as reconciliation, Volf proposes the idea of embrace as a theological response to the problem of exclusion. Increasingly we see that exclusion has become the primary sin, skewing our perceptions of reality and causing us to react out of fear and anger to all those who are not within our (ever-narrowing) circle. In light of this, Christians must learn that salvation comes, not only as we are reconciled to God, and not only as we "learn to live with one another", but as we take the dangerous and costly step of opening ourselves to the other, of enfolding him or her in the same embrace with which we have been enfolded by God.

Spanish New York Narratives 1898-1936

Spanish New York Narratives 1898-1936 PDF Author: David Miranda-Barreiro
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351548115
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 198

Book Description
In the early decades of the twentieth century, New York caught the attention of Spanish writers. Many of them visited the city and returned to tell their experience in the form of a literary text. That is the case of Pruebas de Nueva York (1927) by Jose Moreno Villa (1887-1955), El crisol de las razas (1929) by Teresa de Escoriaza (1891-1968), Anticipolis (1931) by Luis de Oteyza (1883-1961) and La ciudad automatica (1932) by Julio Camba (1882-1962). In tune with similar representations in other European works, the image of New York given in these texts reflects the tensions and anxieties generated by the modernisation embodied by the United States. These authors project onto New York their concerns and expectations about issues of class, gender and ethnicity that were debated at the time, in the context of the crisis of Spanish national identity triggered by the end of the empire in 1898.

Tourism and the Power of Otherness

Tourism and the Power of Otherness PDF Author: David Picard
Publisher: Channel View Publications
ISBN: 1845414187
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 310

Book Description
This book explores the paradoxes of Self–Other relations in the field of tourism. It particularly focuses on the 'power' of different forms of 'Otherness' to seduce and to disrupt, and, eventually, also to renew the social and cosmological orders of 'modern' culture and everyday life. Drawing on a series of ethnographic case studies, the contributors investigate the production, socialisation and symbolic encompassment of different 'Others' as a political and also an economic resource to govern social life in the present. The volume provides a comparative inductive study on the modernist philosophical concepts of time, 'Otherness', and the self in practice, and relates it to contemporary tourism and mobility.

9/11 Fiction, Empathy, and Otherness

9/11 Fiction, Empathy, and Otherness PDF Author: Tim Gauthier
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739193465
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 287

Book Description
9/11 Fiction, Empathy, and Otherness analyzes recent works of fiction whose principal subject is the attacks of September 11, 2001. The readings of the novels question and assess the validity and potential effectiveness of both the subsequent calls for a cosmopolitan outlook and the related, but no less significant, emphasis placed on empathy, and exhibited in such recent studies as Jeremy Rifkin's The Empathic Civilization, Karsten Stueber's Rediscovering Empathy, and Julinna Oxley's The Moral Dimensions of Empathy. As such, this study examines the extent to which "us" and "them" narratives proliferated after 9/11, and the degree to which calls for greater empathy and a renewed emphasis on cosmopolitan values served to counterbalance an apparent movement towards increased polarization, encapsulated in the oft-mentioned "clash of civilizations." A principal objective of the book is thus to examine the ethical and political implications revealed in the exercising or withholding of empathy. For though empathy, in and of itself, may not be sufficient, it is nevertheless a vital component in the generation of actions one might identify as cosmopolitan. In other words, this book examines the responses to 9/11 (in both Western and non-Western novels) in order to uncover what their dramatic renderings might tell us about the possibility of a truly globalized community. The attainability of any cosmopolitan engagement is contingent upon our abilities to understand the other, knowing always that otherness eludes our grasp, and the best we can do is imagine some version of it. It is primarily in this capacity that the novel has a role to play. Whether it is the challenge of connecting with the survivors of trauma and the inhabitants of a traumatized city, or with a hyperpower that has experienced its own vulnerability for the first time, or even with the terrorist who seeks to commit violent acts, these novels afford us the means of examining the complex dynamics involved in any exhibition of fellow-feeling for the other, and the ever-present potential failure of that engagement.

The Origin of Others

The Origin of Others PDF Author: Toni Morrison
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674976452
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 137

Book Description
What is race and why does it matter? Why does the presence of Others make us so afraid? America’s foremost novelist reflects on themes that preoccupy her work and dominate politics: race, fear, borders, mass movement of peoples, desire for belonging. Ta-Nehisi Coates provides a foreword to Toni Morrison’s most personal work of nonfiction to date.

The Matisse Stories

The Matisse Stories PDF Author: A. S. Byatt
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307488047
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 97

Book Description
Three delightful stories inspired by a painting of Henri Matisse—from the Booker Prize-winning author of Possession and “a writer of dazzling inventiveness" (Time). "[An] exquisite triptych.... Richly drawn and touches upon things that matter to people." —People These stories celebrate the eye even as they reveal its unexpected proximity to the heart. For if each of A.S. Byatt's narratives is in some way inspired by a painting of Henri Matisse, each is also about the intimate connection between seeing and feeling—about the ways in which a glance we meant to be casual may suddenly call forth the deepest reserves of our being. Beautifully written, intensely observed, The Matisse Stories is fiction of spellbinding authority. "Full of delight and humor.... The Matisse Stories is studded with brilliantly apt images and a fine sense for subtleties of conversation and emotion." —San Francisco Chronicle