The Pasts and Futures of Latina/o Indigeneities

Author(s):  
Simón Ventura Trujillo

The question of indigeneity in the study of Latina/o literature and culture points toward conflictive histories of colonization and invigorates a set of global directions for the future of Latina/o studies. The pairing of the two terms—Latina/o and Indigeneity—appears initially counterintuitive. Conventionally understood as an ancestral relation of Latina/o communities that has been vanished or lost over the duration of the European colonization of the Americas, Indigeneity opens a set of insuperable problematics that continue to pattern and shape multiple and incommensurate iterations of Latina/o politics and culture. While “Latina/o” in some instances denotes ancestral relation with Native tribes in the Americas, for many the term has also come to signify decidedly non-indigenous mestiza/o, settler, or migrant identities, imaginaries, and belongings. The literary, cultural, and intellectual production of Latina/o Indigeneity offers a unique window into the ways in which Native politics continue to compete with, accommodate, and challenge multiple regimes of colonial occupation and periods of modern state formation. Indigeneity illuminates places of Latina/o literary and cultural production through which to engage the historic ascendance of a number of fundaments of modern life across the globe, including capitalism, nation-state sovereignty, and the transnational social structures of race, sex, citizenship, and gender.

Author(s):  
Mary Youssef

This book examines questions of identity, nationalism, and marginalization in the contemporary Egyptian novel from a postcolonial lens. Under colonial rule, the Egyptian novel invoked a sovereign nation-state by basking in its perceived unity. After independence, the novel professed disenchantment with state practices and unequal class and gender relations, without disrupting the nation’s imagined racial and ethno-religious homogeneity. This book identifies a trend in the twenty-first-century Egyptian novel that shatters this singular view, with the rise of a new consciousness that presents Egypt as fundamentally heterogeneous. Through a robust analysis of “new-consciousness” novels by authors like Idris ᶜAli, Bahaᵓ Tahir, Miral al-Tahawi, and Yusuf Zaydan, the author argues that this new consciousness does not only respond to predominant discourses of difference and practices of differentiation along the axes of race, ethno-religion, class, and gender by bringing the experiences of Nubian, Amazigh, Bedouin, Coptic, Jewish, and women minorities to the fore of Egypt’s literary imaginary, but also heralds the cacophony of voices that collectively cried for social justice from Tahrir Square in Egypt’s 2011-uprising. This study responds to the changing iconographic, semiotic, and formal features of the Egyptian novel. It fulfills the critical task of identifying an emergent novelistic genre and develops historically reflexive methodologies that interpret new-consciousness novels and their mediatory role in formalizing and articulating their historical moment. By adopting this context-specific approach to studying novelistic evolution, this book locates some of the strands that have been missing from the complex whole of Egypt’s culture and literary history.


Sexualities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 516-529 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Toft ◽  
Anita Franklin ◽  
Emma Langley

Contemporary discourse on sexuality presents a picture of fluidity and malleability, with research continuing to frame sexuality as negotiable, within certain parameters and social structures. Such investigation is fraught with difficulties, due in part to the fact that as one explores how identity shifts, language terms such as ‘phase’ emerge conjuring images of a definitive path towards an end-goal, as young people battle through a period of confusion and emerge at their true or authentic identity. Seeing sexuality and gender identity as a phase can delegitimise and prevent access to support, which is not offered due to the misconception that it is not relevant and that one can grow out of being LGBT+. This article explores the lives of disabled LGBT + young people from their perspective, using their experiences and stories to explore their identities and examine how this links to the misconception of their sexuality and gender as a phase. Taking inspiration from the work of scholars exploring sexual and gender identity, and sexual storytelling; the article is framed by intersectionality which allows for a detailed analysis of how identities interact and inform, when used as an analytic tool. The article calls for a more nuanced understanding of sexuality and gender in the lives of disabled LGBT + young people, which will help to reduce inequality and exclusion.


2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (7) ◽  
pp. 670-685
Author(s):  
Erik Skare

Rapid developments in digital infrastructure have made all-encompassing surveillance all too possible. However, the same infrastructure has simultaneously enabled the use of new possibility spaces that react to, shape, and resist these structures of control and surveillance. The Israel/Palestine conflict is no different, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) has created an electronic unit with hackers to circumvent and resist the Israeli matrix of control and its surveillance. I argue that out of this dialectical relationship in Palestine, between new possibility spaces of resistance and structures of control, new phenomena arise in the gray area between the nation state hacker and the hacktivist as PIJ emulates the features of a modern state army. To understand the nature of its electronic unit, one must take this dialectic into account by introducing the category, “proto-state hacker.”


2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 647-662 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jo Hunt ◽  
Rachel Minto

The United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union (EU) is an assertion of UK nation-state sovereignty. Notwithstanding this state-centrism, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland have distinct interests to protect as part of the Brexit negotiations. This article explores how the interests of one regional case, Wales, were accommodated in the pre-negotiation phase, at a domestic level—through intergovernmental structures—and an EU level through paradiplomacy. We explore the structures for sub-state influence, Wales’ engagement with these structures and what has informed its approach. We argue that Wales’ behaviour reflects its positioning as a ‘Good Unionist’ and a ‘Good European’. Despite the weakness of intra-UK structures, Wales has preferred to pursue policy influence at a UK (not an EU) level. In Brussels, regional interests inform the context for Brexit. Here, Wales has focused on awareness-raising, highlighting that the UK Government does not command the ‘monopoly on perspectives’ towards Brexit in the United Kingdom.


Author(s):  
Martin Hébert

Indigenous peoples’ rights to self-determination and self-government are recognized by several international instances. Deliberation plays a key role in the exercise of these rights, and its forms are as diverse as the cultures and social structures of which it is part. However, efforts to understand commonalities and differences between contexts and experiences have led to discussions of what Rodolfo Stavenhagen has termed the “indigenous situation.” This chapter looks at some ways in which self-identified Indigenous peoples have maintained, repurposed, and developed practices of political deliberation within such contexts of colonialism, nation-state formation, and capitalist expansion. A particular emphasis is put on the various scales at which deliberation takes place, be it in community life, regional organizations, or national and international political movements.


Author(s):  
V. Spike Peterson

State sovereignty and autonomy in the twenty-first century are both under challenge and continually reasserted in diverse ways through gender, sexuality, and race-making. This paradox makes it pertinent to revisit the idea of states as gendered political entities. Bringing together scholars from international relations and postcolonial and development studies, this volume collectively theorizes the modern state and its intricate relationship to security, identity politics, and gender. Drawing on postcolonial and critical feminist approaches, together with empirical case studies, contributors engage with the ontological foundations of the modern state and its capacity to adapt to the global and local contestations of its identity, histories, and purpose. They examine the various ways in which gender explains the construction and interplay of states in global politics today; and how states, be they neoliberal, postcolonial, or religious (or all three together), impact the everyday lives and security of their citizens. Such a rich array of feminist analyses of multiple kinds of states provides crucial insight into gender injustices in relatively stable states, but also into the political, economic, social, and cultural inequalities that produce violent conflicts threatening the sovereignty of some states and even leading to the creation of new states.


2011 ◽  
Vol 37 (5) ◽  
pp. 2107-2120 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER DIETSCH

AbstractThe power to raise taxes is a sine qua non for the functioning of the modern state. Governments frequently defend the independence of their fiscal policy as a matter of sovereignty. This article challenges this defence by demonstrating that it relies on an antiquated conception of sovereignty. Instead of the Westphalian sovereignty centred on non-intervention that has long dominated relations between states, today's fiscal interdependence calls for a conception of sovereignty that assigns duties as well as rights to states. While such a circumscribed conception of sovereignty has emerged in other areas of international law in recent years, it has yet to be extended to fiscal questions. Here, these duties arguably include obligations of transparency, of respect for the fiscal choices of other countries, and of distributive justice. The resulting conception of sovereignty is one that emphasises its instrumental as well as its conditional character. Neither state sovereignty nor self-determination is an end in itself, but a means to promoting individual well-being. It is conditional in the sense that if states do not live up to their fiscal obligations towards other states, their claims to autonomy are void.


Author(s):  
Oluwatoyin Oduntan

The case for narrating the history of slavery and emancipation through the biography of enslaved Africans is strongly supported by the life and experiences of Samuel Ajayi Crowther. Kidnapped into slavery in 1821, recaptured and settled in Sierra Leone in 1822, he became a missionary in 1845, founder of the Niger mission in 1857, and Bishop of the Niger Mission in 1864. His life and career covered the span of the 19th century during which revolutionary forces like jihadist revolutions, the abolition of the slave trade, the rise of a new Westernized elite, and European colonization created the roots of the modern state system in West Africa. He was intricately tied to the Christian Missionary Society (CMS), Britain’s antislavery evangelical movement, resulting in Ajayi becoming the poster face of slavery, its acclaimed product of abolitionism, the preeminent advocate of evangelical emancipation, and the organizer of practical emancipation in West Africa. The leader of a very small group of Africans who worked diligently against the slave trade and domestic slavery, Ajayi also became a victim of the use of that agenda by imperialists. Thus, the contrasts of his life (i.e., slavery/freedom, nationalist/hybrid, preacher/investor, leader/weakling, linguist/literalist, etc.) were celebrated by himself, his patrons, and his evangelical followers on one hand, and denounced by his critics on the other. They underline the disagreements over his legacy, and indeed over the understanding of the institution of slavery, abolition, and emancipation in West Africa.


Queer media is not one thing but an ensemble of at least four moving variables: history, gender and sexuality, geography, and medium. Although many scholars would pinpoint the early 1990s as marking the emergence of a cinematic movement in the United States (dubbed by B. Ruby Rich the “new queer cinema”), films and television programs that clearly spoke to LGBTQ themes and viewers existed at many different historical moments and in many different forms: cross-dressing, same-sex attraction, comedic drag performance; at some points, for example, in 1950s television, these were not undercurrents but very prominent aspects of mainstream cultural production. Addressing “history” not as dots on a progressive spectrum but as an uneven story of struggle, the writers in this volume stress that queer cinema did not appear miraculously at one moment but arrived on currents throughout the century-long history of the medium. Likewise, while queer is an Anglophone term that has been widely circulated, it by no means names a unified or complete spectrum of sexuality and gender identity, just as the LGBTQ+ alphabet soup struggles to contain the distinctive histories, politics, and cultural productions of trans artists and genderqueer practices. Across the globe, media-makers have interrogated identity and desire through the medium of cinema through rubrics that sometimes vigorously oppose the Western embrace of the pejorative term queer, foregrounding instead indigenous genders and sexualities or those forged in the Global South or those seeking alternative epistemologies. Finally, though “cinema” is in our title, many scholars in this collection see this term as an encompassing one, referencing cinema and media in a convergent digital environment. The lively and dynamic conversations introduced here aspire to sustain further reflection as “queer cinema” shifts into new configurations.


Author(s):  
Taner Akçam

This chapter discusses how the demise of the Ottoman state led to a succession of ethnic and religious groups playing out their struggles for independence on its shrinking stage against a backdrop of forced population exchanges, deportations, massacres, and ethnic cleansing. As the last of the great early modern empires, the Ottoman state entered its long nineteenth century trailing the heritage of Byzantium but lacking the means of modernization. Without the requisite political and social structures and public consensus of a nation-state, “the Muslim Third Rome” could no longer bind together the diverse groups that peopled its vast territory. The logic of the nation-state utterly contradicts that of empire. Whereas an empire, by definition, encompasses a number of territories and diverse peoples, a nation-state is circumscribed by two clearly defined boundaries: geographical and social.


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