This book examines the ethnic, gendered and embodied `hybrid' identities of `half-Japanese' girls in Japan. The girls struggle to positively construct their identities into positions of control over ...disempowering discourses of `otherness' as they negotiate their constructed identities of `Japaneseness', `whiteness' and `halfness/doubleness'.
Muslims have been shaping the Americas and the Caribbean for
more than five hundred years, yet this interplay is frequently
overlooked or misconstrued. Brimming with revelations that
synthesize area ...and ethnic studies, Crescent over Another
Horizon presents a portrait of Islam's unity as it evolved
through plural formulations of identity, power, and belonging.
Offering a Latino American perspective on a wider Islamic world,
the editors overturn the conventional perception of Muslim
communities in the New World, arguing that their characterization
as "minorities" obscures the interplay of ethnicity and religion
that continues to foster transnational ties.
Bringing together studies of Iberian colonists, enslaved
Africans, indentured South Asians, migrant Arabs, and Latino and
Latin American converts, the volume captures the power-laden
processes at work in religious conversion or resistance. Throughout
each analysis-spanning times of inquisition, conquest, repressive
nationalism, and anti-terror security protocols-the authors offer
innovative frameworks to probe the ways in which racialized Islam
has facilitated the building of new national identities while
fostering a double-edged marginalization. The subjects of the
essays transition from imperialism (with studies of
morisco converts to Christianity, West African slave
uprisings, and Muslim and Hindu South Asian indentured laborers in
Dutch Suriname) to the contemporary Muslim presence in Argentina,
Brazil, Mexico, and Trinidad, completed by a timely examination of
the United States, including Muslim communities in "Hispanicized"
South Florida and the agency of Latina conversion. The result is a
fresh perspective that opens new horizons for a vibrant range of
fields.
In the late 1960s identity politics emerged on the political landscape and challenged prevailing ideas about social justice. These politics brought forth a new attention to social identity, an ...attention that continues to divide people today. While previous studies have focused on the political movements of this period, they have neglected the conceptual prehistory of this political turn. Linda Nicholson's engaging book situates this critical moment in its historical framework, analyzing the concepts and traditions of racial and gender identity that can be traced back to late eighteenth-century Europe and America. She examines how changing ideas about social identity over the last several centuries both helped and hindered successive social movements, and explores the consequences of this historical legacy for the women's and black movements of the 1960s. This insightful study will be of particular interest to students and scholars of political history, identity politics and US history.
Drawing from a rich array of visual and literary material from nineteenth-century Iran, this groundbreaking book rereads and rewrites the history of Iranian modernity through the lens of gender and ...sexuality. Peeling away notions of a rigid pre-modern Islamic gender system, Afsaneh Najmabadi provides a compelling demonstration of the centrality of gender and sexuality to the shaping of modern culture and politics in Iran and of how changes in ideas about gender and sexuality affected conceptions of beauty, love, homeland, marriage, education, and citizenship. She concludes with a provocative discussion of Iranian feminism and its role in that country's current culture wars. In addition to providing an important new perspective on Iranian history, Najmabadi skillfully demonstrates how using gender as an analytic category can provide insight into structures of hierarchy and power and thus into the organization of politics and social life.
This book investigates how varying practices of gender shaped people's lives and experiences across the societies of ancient Greece and Rome. Exploring how gender was linked with other ...socio-political characteristics such as wealth, status, age and life-stage, as well as with individual choices, in the very different world of classical antiquity is fascinating in its own right. But later perceptions of ancient literature and art have profoundly influenced the development of gendered ideologies and hierarchies in the West, and influenced the study of gender itself. Questioning how best to untangle and interpret difficult sources is a key aim. This book exploits a wide range of archaeological, material cultural, visual, spatial, demographic, epigraphical and literary evidence to consider households, families, life-cycles and the engendering of time, legal and political institutions, beliefs about bodies, sex and sexuality, gender and space, the economic implications of engendered practices, and gender in religion and magic.
Deep China Kleinman, Arthur; Yan, Yunxiang; Jun, Jing ...
2011., 2011-09-26
eBook
Deep China investigates the emotional and moral lives of the Chinese people as they adjust to the challenges of modernity. Sharing a medical anthropology and cultural psychiatry perspective, Arthur ...Kleinman, Yunxiang Yan, Jing Jun, Sing Lee, Everett Zhang, Pan Tianshu, Wu Fei, and Guo Jinhua delve into intimate and sometimes hidden areas of personal life and social practice to observe and narrate the drama of Chinese individualization. The essays explore the remaking of the moral person during China's profound social and economic transformation, unraveling the shifting practices and struggles of contemporary life.
What do we know about early modern sex? And how do we know it? How, when, and why does sex become history? InThinking Sex with the Early Moderns, Valerie Traub addresses these questions and, in doing ...so, reorients the ways in which historians and literary critics, feminists and queer theorists approach sexuality and its history. Her answers offer interdisciplinary strategies for confronting the difficulties of making sexual knowledge.
Based on the premise that producing sexual knowledge is difficult because sex itself is often inscrutable,Thinking Sex with the Early Modernsleverages the notions of opacity and impasse to explore barriers to knowledge about sex in the past. Traub argues that the obstacles in making sexual history can illuminate the difficulty of knowing sexuality. She also argues that these impediments themselves can be adopted as a guiding principle of historiography: sex may be good to think with, not because it permits us access but because it doesn't.
Over the last decades, the concept of identity has become increasingly central in the social psychology of protest. Collective identity, politicized collective identity, dual identity, and multiple ...identities are concepts that help to understand and describe the social psychological dynamics of protest. In this article, I theorize about identity processes in the context of protest participation: how group identification establishes the link between social identity and collective identity, how multiple identities and dual identities influence protest participation, and how collective identity politicizes and radicalizes. I will illustrate my argument with results from research into collective action participation among farmers in the Netherlands and Spain, Turkish, and Moroccan immigrants in the Netherlands and New York, South African citizens, and participants in street demonstrations conducted by my research group at VU-University.
InViolence and Belief in Late Antiquity, Thomas Sizgorich seeks to understand why and how violent expressions of religious devotion became central to the self-understandings of both Christian and ...Muslim communities between the fourth and ninth centuries. Sizgorich argues that the cultivation of violent martyrdom as a path to holiness was in no way particular to Islam; rather, it emerged from a matrix put into place by the Christians of late antiquity. Paying close attention to the role of memory and narrative in the formation of individual and communal selves, Sizgorich identifies a common pool of late ancient narrative forms upon which both Christian and Muslim communities drew. In the process of recollecting the past, Sizgorich explains, Christian and Muslim communities alike elaborated iterations of Christianity or Islam that demanded of each believer a willingness to endure or inflict violence on God's behalf and thereby created militant local pieties that claimed to represent the one "real" Christianity or the only "pure" form of Islam. These militant communities used a shared system of signs, symbols, and stories, stories in which the faithful manifested their purity in conflict with the imperial powers of the world.