scholarly journals REVITALIZING AREA STUDIES: BUILDING THEMATIC RESONANCE THROUGH RECONCILIATION

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nila Ayu Utami

Area Studies has garnered a lot of criticisms over the past several decades. This, of course, is to be expected as the initial foundation of the study itself is polemical, and very much colonial. Many have seen area studies as antiquated, unable to rise to the challenges of globalization. Indeed, as a project that relies upon “areas” conventionally demarcated, globalization poses as the threat/potential double-bind that can make or break area studies. Stepping up to the challenge, area studies have been in dialogue with other disciplines such as diaspora studies, postcolonial studies and cultural studies that have become prominent critics of area studies. These flirtations have been fruitful for more alternatives and possibilities come to fore. In the same vein, the nature of this writing is to build a dialogue between area-based knowledge and the travelling ideas spurred by globalization, and in doing so, hoping that such dialogue will produce thematic issue that connects localities, history, and knowledge production. This paper proposes the discourse of reconciliation as a thematic issue to reconnect and re-integrate different “areas” in the larger project of Area Studies.

Derrida Today ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Morris

Over the past thirty years, academic debate over pornography in the discourses of feminism and cultural studies has foundered on questions of the performative and of the word's definition. In the polylogue of Droit de regards, pornography is defined as la mise en vente that is taking place in the act of exegesis in progress. (Wills's idiomatic English translation includes an ‘it’ that is absent in the French original). The definition in Droit de regards alludes to the word's etymology (writing by or about prostitutes) but leaves the referent of the ‘sale’ suspended. Pornography as la mise en vente boldly restates the necessary iterability of the sign and anticipates two of Derrida's late arguments: that there is no ‘the’ body and that performatives may be powerless. Deriving a definition of pornography from a truncated etymology exemplifies the prosthesis of origin and challenges other critical discourses to explain how pornography can be understood as anything more than ‘putting (it) up for sale’.


2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 532-552 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Cristina Mendes

The process of screen adaptation is an act of ventriloquism insofar as it gives voice to contemporary anxieties and desires through its trans-temporal use of a source text. Screen adaptations that propose to negotiate meanings about the past, particularly a conflicted past, are acts of ‘trans-temporal ventriloquism’: they adapt and reinscribe pre-existing source texts to animate contemporary concerns and anxieties. I focus on the acts of trans-temporal ventriloquism in Ian Iqbal Rashid's Surviving Sabu (1998), a postcolonial, turn-of-the-twenty-first century short film that adapts Zoltan and Alexander Korda's film The Jungle Book (1942), itself an adaptation of Rudyard Kipling's collection of short stories by the same name. Surviving Sabu is about the survival and appropriation of orientalist films as a means of self-expression in a postcolonial present. Inherent in this is the idea of cinema as a potentially redemptive force that can help to balance global power inequalities. Surviving Sabu's return to The Jungle Book becomes a means both of tracing the genealogy of specific orientalist discourses and for ventriloquising contemporary concerns. This article demonstrates how trans-temporal ventriloquism becomes a strategy of political intervention that enables the film-maker to take ownership over existing media and narratives. My argument examines Surviving Sabu as an exemplar of cultural studies of the 1980s and 1990s: a postcolonial remediation built on fantasy and desire, used as a strategy of writing within rather than back to empire.


2019 ◽  
pp. 446-461
Author(s):  
Ekaterina Baydalova

The postcolonial studies have been under discussion in the Ukrainian historiography, social science, culture studies and literary criticism since 1990 years. They have originated from American, European, and Australian academic studies and became more and more popular in modern Ukrainian culture recently. The nation and the nationalism, Orientalism, multicultural and ambivalent individuality self-presentation, the search of cultural identity, the problem of ambivalent attitude to the past are in the paradigm of postcolonial studies. The problems of national identity, the totalitarian past, the interactions with neighboring countries especially Russia and Poland, the instable Ukrainian society’s condition are analyzed under the postcolonial ideas in the Ukrainian intellectual discourse. The postcolonial theory has become the main interpretative strategy of the Ukrainian researchers lately. Nevertheless, there is no unconditional modus vivendi in the Ukrainian academia about postcolonial conceptions, strategies and principles. One of the most important unsolved issues is the question of correlation of postcolonial and postmodern components of the Ukrainian national literature. The inclusion of the studies of trauma and anticolonial and posttotalitarian discourses into the framework of the postcolonial studies is the most distinguishing feature of postcolonial studies in the Ukraine.


Author(s):  
Rima Majed

This chapter offers an overview of the study of sectarianism in the Middle East. It argues that, because it has often been treated as an area studies topic, the study of sectarianism has long been absent from the mainstream sociological literature. By bridging between disciplinary knowledge production and the area-specific research agenda, this chapter proposes some conceptual and methodological notes to advance our understanding of the sectarian phenomenon in the Middle East. This chapter is a call for the development of a “sociology of sectarianism,” one that moves beyond Middle East exceptionalism to study the phenomenon of sectarianism in its complexity by locating it historically and analyzing it globally within the broader interlocking systems of social stratification.


Societies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 6
Author(s):  
Ilyas Mohammed

Decolonisation of knowledge over the past few years has gained much traction among scholars and students in many countries. This situation has led to calls for the decolonisation of knowledge, academia, the university, and university curricula. That said, the knowledge production side of the terrorism industry, which sits inside academia, so far has escaped calls to decolonise. This situation is somewhat surprising because the terrorism industry has had a tremendous impact on many countries, especially Muslim majority ones. The 9/11 terrorist attacks have resulted in a tremendous amount of knowledge being produced and published on terrorism and counterterrorism. However, little is known about “who is publishing on terrorism and where they are based”. To this end, this paper adopts a decolonial approach and addresses the questions of “who is publishing on terrorism and where they are based” by analysing seven terrorism journals. It argues that most of the publications and knowledge on terrorism in the seven terrorism journals are produced by scholars with Western heritage and are based at Western institutions, which is connected to the coloniality of knowledge.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
David Monciardini ◽  
Jukka Tapio Mähönen ◽  
Georgina Tsagas

AbstractThe article introduces the thematic issue of Accounting, Economics, and Law: A Convivium dedicated to the regulation of non-financial reporting. It provides the reader with an overview of the varying approaches and frameworks that have emerged over time in relation to the reporting of non-financial information. In particular, the article focuses on the European Non-Financial Reporting Directive. We maintain that to date this latter initiative has failed to deliver on its intended objectives. In the context of the ongoing revision process of this initiative, the present paper outlines five key areas to be improved drawing on the lessons learnt from the past as well as from key points raised by the papers in the present thematic issue. What emerges from this collective effort is a renewed agenda that highlights some of the structural failures of the current reporting regime and a blueprint for future reforms. The final section summarises the various contributions of articles included in this thematic issue.


2021 ◽  
pp. 136754942199457
Author(s):  
Amanda Lotz

Although Internet-distributed television bears much in common with the television long studied and theorized using cultural studies-based approaches to analysis, several of its features profoundly deviate from earlier television norms and require reassessment and adaptation of theoretical frames. This article focuses on the issue of textual popularity in relation to these services and identifies key challenges to using the same frames of cultural power that have been used for studying television in the past. The underlying problem of audience fragmentation does not originate with streaming services, but this profound contextual change, in concert with industrial aspects that further distinguish internet-distributed television from television’s past norms, must be addressed. The article concludes by identifying several ways the cultural power of streaming services can be investigated despite the challenges that emerging norms of Internet-distributed video provide.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christen Mucher

Before American History examines the project of settler nationalism from the 1780s to the 1840s in two of North America’s republics—the US and Mexico—through an analysis of historical knowledge production. As the US and Mexico transformed from European colonies into independent republics—and before war scarred them both—antiquarians and historians compiled and interpreted archives meant to document America’s Indigenous pasts. Before American History approaches two iconic imaginings of the past—the carved Sun Stone and the mounded earthwork—as archives of nationalist power and Indigenous dispossession as well as objects that are, at their material base, Indigenously-produced but settler-controlled and settler-interpreted. In making the connection between earthworks built by an allegedly vanished people merely peripheral to US citizens and the literal touchstone of Mexicans’ history, Before American History details how Mexican and US nationalists created national histories out of Indigenous pasts and thereby wrote Indigenous pasts out of their national histories and out of national lands. It uncovers how the manipulation of Indigenous pasts and (mis)interpretations of “American Antiquities”—Indigenous documents, objects and monuments—served the purposes of a trans-imperial/transnational network of creole ruling elites, first in New Spain and British America, and later in Mexico and the United States, as they struggled to construct new political, geographic, and historical orders.


Author(s):  
Michael Cuthill

The concept of engaged scholarship, as a 'new' and participatory approach to knowledge production, has received much attention over the past decade. However, the term is clouded in ambiguity. This paper presents some introductory discussion around concepts of engaged scholarship, and then focuses in detail on a methodological case study of participatory action research as an example of engaged scholarship in practice. Discussion revolves around reflections on practice, drawing largely from recent reports on participatory democracy and the role of unversities in society.


2016 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 54-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yifat Gutman

This article examines a strategy of peace activism that gained visibility in the last decades: memory activism. Memory activists manifest a temporal shift in transnational politics: first the past, then the future. Affiliated with the globally-circulating paradigm of historical justice, memory activist groups assume that a new understanding of the past could lead to a new perception of present problems and project alternative solutions for the future. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and discourse analysis among memory activists of the 1948 war in Israel since 2001, the article examines the activist production of counter-memory during active conflict. Using Coy et al.’s typology of oppositional knowledge-production, the article shows how the largest group of memory activism in Israel produced ‘new’ information on the war, critically assessed the dominant historical narrative, offered an alternative shared narrative, and began to envision practical solutions for Palestinian refugees. However, the analysis raises additional concerns that reach beyond the scope of the typology, primarily regarding the unequal power relations that exist not only between the dominant and activist production of oppositional knowledge, but also among activists.


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