Books in the Cultural Identity Studies series

Häd Bouazza is a highly in¿uential and celebrated author in the Netherlands today. In the context of contemporary Dutch literature, Bouazzäs Moroccan background still marks a divergence from the born-and-bred Dutch norm. Authors with a bi- or multicultural background are still often cast in the role of ¿exotic outsider¿. Bouazza both challenges and uses this position to the full. His writing demonstrates that the perceived us-them or self-other positions are questionable ideological constructs. He undermines the concept of a uni¿ed culture and the wholeness of the self. He explores and exploits stereotypical beliefs held on both sides of the East¿West divide. The result is a magical realist setting that both puzzles and enchants. This book offers a reading of Bouazzäs literary prose that responds to the interpretative opportunities offered by an author who skilfully and creatively explores his peculiar freedom in his Homeless Entertainment.

The humanities are under attack, and this book presents an argument for their relevance, leaving behind 'departmentalized' approaches to academic knowledge and embracing the social mission at the heart of humanistic study. The interdisciplinary studies in this volume explore the topics of identity, gender and space/mobility in contemporary Europe

This book offers a new, complex understanding of Indian writing in English by focusing its analysis on both Indo-Pakistani Partition fiction and novels written by women. The author gives a comprehensive outline of Partition novels in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh written in English as well as an overview of the challenges of studying Partition literature, particularly English translations of Partition novels in regional languages. Featured works include Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Bapsi Sidhwa's Ice-Candy-Man, Amitav Ghosh's Shadow Lines, Meena Arora Nayak's About Daddy, and Sujata Sabnis's A Twist in Destiny. The book then moves on to a study of novels by women writers such as Githa Hariharan, Kiran Desai, Anita Desai, and Arundhati Roy, exploring their perspectives on sexuality, the body, and the diaspora.

This book sets out to examine the internal workings of a colonial settler society drawing on aspects of post-colonial theory and whiteness studies. It focuses on the construction of a hierarchical social order in German Southwest Africa in the period 1884-1914. In doing so it explores the historical creation of categories of race and the construction of a concept of whiteness within white settler society in Germany¿s foremost settler colony. In the colonial environment the presence of some settlers was deemed to be more desirable than others. As a consequence policies of exclusion and racial rhetoric were employed to exclude undesirable settlers from white society. What emerged was a pioneer society in which undesirable settlers were socially, politically and economically excluded whilst desirable settlers sought to forge a racially and culturally exclusive utopia. Based on extensive archival material from the Bundesarchiv in Berlin as well as a wide range of printed sources, the book presents an insight into strategies of social control, power, the establishment of social privilege and constructions of whiteness in a settler society.

This book addresses the function of fiction in the creation of an historical myth and the uses of myth over time. The subject of the case study is the popular image of August the Strong (1670-1733), Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, a figure who has frequently been portrayed as possessing extraordinary sexual prowess and ruling over a magnificent, but frivolous, court in Dresden. The author locates the origins of this myth in the art and literature of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century and traces its development up to the twenty-first century in German historiography, fiction, art and media. The study identifies the long-lasting effects of the cultural dominance of Prussia on Saxon historiography in the nineteenth century and the privileged status of particular historical sources over others. It thus sheds light on the challenges facing historians since the early twentieth century when they rely on popular media in recounting and interpreting history. Conversely, it reveals how writers of popular historical fiction employ the methodologies of the historian to bring historical knowledge and self-identity together for the reader.

Sport annually mobilizes millions of people across Europe: as practitioners in a variety of competitive, educational, or recreational contexts, and as spectators, who are physically present or following events through mass media. This book presents research into modern sport funded by Irish Research Council for Humanities and Social Sciences.

Europe and its Others

From Farms to Foundries

Cities are both real and imaginary places whose identity is dependent on their distinctive heritage: a network of historically transmitted cultural resources. In this title, the essays explore the complex and multi-layered identities of European cities.

How does sport shape society? This book seeks to answer this question by examining the meaning of sport in French society and the construction of local, national and, increasingly, global identities through sport. It begins by reassessing modern sport's emergence and consolidation in France in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

This edited volume examines aspects of teaching and learning in situations where community or ethnic diversity may impact negatively on classroom experience and behaviour in tertiary education. Case studies from Northern Ireland, England, France and the United States of America examine how societal divisions influence the student body.

Analyses the concepts of the postnational and the postnationalist in relation to globalisation, as well as the debate that postnationalist discourse has opened in various fields of knowledge, and its definitions and implications in the contemporary Irish historical and literary context.

Born into a German-French bilingual environment, the once renowned German-language author Rene Schickele (1883-1940) grew up in the Alsace region - today located in eastern France - during its annexation to the German Empire when links to French culture were frowned upon. This book deals with this issue.

South Tyrol is a small, mountainous area located in the central Alps. This book provides a fresh analysis of this dynamic and turbulent period of South Tyrolean and European history. It also provides insights into the political and cultural evolution of the understanding of the region and the definition of its role within the European framework.

This book examines the effects of a study abroad experience on students¿ culture and identity and the impact of these effects on their readjustment to their home culture. It explores issues of culture and identity from the perspective of French students studying in Australia. Issues of perceived cultural proximity between France and Australia, a relative lack of prior knowledge of the host country before the period of study and the impact of distance all influence aspects of these students¿ experiences. Employing long-term and cross-sectional studies focusing on culture shock, reverse culture shock and cultural identity issues, the author investigates the cyclical journey of French academic sojourners and examines the impact of the acculturation and repatriation processes and the language experiences on their perceptions of cultural identity. Once the students had traversed the difficult stages of culture shock and reached the stage of full recovery (adjustment), they no longer wished to go home. What impact has this process had on the returnees who faced the insularity of their home society once they returned home? Is the French community beginning to acknowledge the start of a brain-drain of the educated French overseas? What are the implications for borderless higher education? What value should be placed on pre-departure preparation from participating institutions and the individuals themselves, both on a linguistic and a psychological level? This book poses questions relating to these issues.

In a series of ten historical and literary studies, this volume analyses the complex narrative of changing political identities in early modern Europe and maps out some of the dominant ways in which ¿European-ness¿ was articulated in documents of the period. As the collection unfolds, its contributors explore these themes from a whole range of geographical perspectives, including not only accounts of British culture, but also those describing cultural relations and political identities with regard to Italy, Spain, France, the Papacy, the Netherlands, Bohemia and the Americas, for example. Concentrating upon early modern nations at a time when they were just beginning to formulate recognizable collective identities, the studies contained in this volume offer a clear picture of the ways in which current literary and historical scholarship may yield penetrating insights into the broader question of how the very idea of Europe evolved amongst its native inhabitants during the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

This volume presents selected papers from the conference ¿Violence, Culture and Identity¿ held at St Andrews University in 2003. It seeks to explore the ways in which French writing since 1920 has registered and reflected on the violent national traumas of the World Wars, the Occupation and decolonisation. The essays consider how these crises have led French writers to a critical, often painful reassessment of national, cultural and individual identity. Contributors trace the different challenges offered to any comfortable consensual notions of Frenchness, and to the structures of authority which invest in such a consensus. A recurrent preoccupation is the problematic issue of ¿memory culture¿, especially of how a post-conflict generation copes with an avowed or concealed inheritance of violence and guilt. The thematics, ethics, rhetoric and imagery of violence are charted through debates around surrealism and in writings by major figures, such as Malraux, Sartre, Camus, Genet and Modiano, while a final group of essays looks closely at how a new wave within the popular roman noir genre (the ¿néo-polar¿) engages emphatically and controversially with these issues and their political implications.

Rethinking 'Identities' offers a hyper-contemporary and wide-ranging analysis of questions of identity based on nation and region, language, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion or even 'the human'. This volume presents a fresh perspective on identity studies in the twenty-first century and in the age of globalization.

Since the Reformation, Catholics in Britain have been faced with an outsider status that has often given rise to conflict between their British national and Catholic religious identities. This study examines the ways in which this problematic history is addressed by three twentieth-century British authors: David Jones, Evelyn Waugh and Muriel Spark. Focusing on works by these writers, in which issues of national and religious identity are particularly prominent, the author argues that they share a reconciliatory approach to the matter of British and Catholic identity, an approach derived from the Catholic tradition and inspired by ideas such as those of Newman. This allows the writers to see ostensibly conflicting identities in the light of their contribution towards ultimate harmony in the life of the individual or community. The theory of reconciliation espoused by Jones, Waugh and Spark is contrasted with the views expressed by G. K. Chesterton and Graham Greene, who also write from a British and Catholic perspective, but arrive at very different conclusions.

This study explores the issue of gender and immigration in the national contexts of Germany and France, where the largest minority populations are from Turkey and North Africa. Works by OEzdamar, Senocak and Mokeddem and interviews with young Muslim women are considered in response to the demonization of the Islamic 'other' within Europe.

This study focuses on the five most prominent Swiss writers of the last thirty-five years whose work features ecological crisis. It is an analysis of five narratologically divergent styles, ranging from the eco-parables of Franz Hohler to the hermeneutically defiant work of Gertrud Leutenegger. Between these poles, the author also explores works by Walther Kauer, Max Frisch and Beat Sterchi. Previously unpublished material from interviews with three of the authors is included. These writers are not only the most widely read and respected ecologically committed authors in Switzerland but also present a wide range of approaches to ecological problems in terms of both form and content. The study's purpose is not merely to provide a survey of fictional, ecological discourse in Switzerland but to analyse the literary strategies used: how well do the ways the authors tell their tales support their critical thrust? This question is posed within the proposition of the theoretical framework of an 'ecological voice'.

Today, cosmopolitanism can be identified with ideas, practices and representations that are among our important resources as we grapple with the pressures of a globalized world. This book places a decisive emphasis on the symbolic dimension of intimations of the cosmopolitan in modern and contemporary literature and film.

The essays collected here are responses to books of poetry and prose published during the transition period from the apartheid regime of the mid-1980s to the first democratic election in South Africa in 1994. The volume comprises a variety of texts written during the crucial mid-1980s - the time of the Emergency and the height of oppression - up to and including the installation of the first freely elected South African government in 1994. In the years of anti-apartheid struggle, the immediate political conflict was pre-eminent in the minds of many poets but extended to broader concerns about race, writing and colonialism, such as the debate about the imbongi (African praise singer) as the true antecedent of the contemporary African poet. After the end of apartheid new challenges came to the South African book publishing industry and, thus, to South African writers, as they tried to make sense of the past and draw tentative lines into the future. The works of J. M. Coetzee, Njabulo Ndebele, Kelwyn Sole, Sandile Dikeni, Vincent Swart, Heather Robertson, Patrick Cullinan, Seitlhamo Motsapi, W. P. B. Botha and more are read against this changing social and political landscape.

Contains a selection of the proceedings of a conference on European problems of identity titled Europe and its Others, which was held in St Andrews in July 2007.

How have Anglo-Celtic Australians installed themselves as locals? Where do Indigenous Australians stand in this local politics of identity? What are the ethical considerations for how we connect our identities to places while also relating to others in a time of intensifying migration? This book explores these questions.