Suchergebnisse

Abstract
Lauren Berlant, Moishe Postone, and Michael Silverstein were colleagues at the University of Chicago for over thirty years. Postone was one of the leading Marxist thinkers in the world; Silverstein was the leading linguistic anthropologist of his generation; and Berlant was the most influential literary theorist of her generation. This article examines whether Marxism, semiotic linguistics, and literary studies are compatible. However, the author will go back to the "linguistic turn" and revisit some older debates about the role of rhetoric. But a revitalized rhetoric of temporality will answer the questions that Benedict Anderson raised almost forty years ago: How do the temporalities of capital and narration interact to create new social affects and emotions? What would a Marxist approach to a semiotic linguistics of affect and subjectivity look like?

'Vor dem Hintergrund der konstruktivistischen Wende, die weite Teile der Methodendiskussion bestimmt, wird die spezifische, als interaktiv zu bezeichnende Plausibilisierung der autobiographischen Erzählung rekonstruiert. Der Fokus wird dabei auf jene Sequenzen gesetzt, in denen die Erzählerin ihre Spracherwerbsprozesse darstellt. Verhaltensdaten (ihre gut ausgebauten Deutschkenntnisse, die im Interview offensichtlich sind) werden mit der Schilderung ihrer Schlüsselerlebnisse kontrastiert, bei der sie angibt, Deutsch v.a. über das Fernsehen erworben zu haben. Die spezifische Rolle des Leidens wird hervorgehoben und mit Erkenntnissen aus der Spracherwerbsforschung in Beziehung gesetzt, wo immer deutlicher wird, wie erfolgreicher Erwerb und Emotion in enger Beziehung zueinander stehen.' (Autorenreferat)

Vor dem Hintergrund der konstruktivistischen Wende, die weite Teile der Methodendiskussion bestimmt, wird die spezifische, als interaktiv zu bezeichnende Plausibilisierung der autobiographischen Erzählung rekonstruiert. Der Fokus wird dabei auf jene Sequenzen gesetzt, in denen die Erzählerin ihre Spracherwerbsprozesse darstellt. Verhaltensdaten (ihre gut ausgebauten Deutschkenntnisse, die im Interview offensichtlich sind) werden mit der Schilderung ihrer Schlüssererlebnisse kontrastiert, bei der sie angibt, Deutsch v.a. über das Fernsehen erworben zu haben. Die spezifische Rolle des Leidens wird hervorgehoben und mit Erkenntnissen aus der Spracherwerbsforschung in Beziehung gesetzt, wo immer deutlicher wird, wie erfolgreicher Erwerb und Emotion in enger Beziehung zueinander stehen.

Introduces this issue on genocide & ethnic cleansing in Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia, & East Timor, focusing on moral & political issues that distinguish these modern forms of holocaust from the Shoah. After lamenting the major powers' failure to intervene in minimizing or preventing these tragedies, it is suggested that honest reporting on the new killing fields must construct a descriptively simple narration, eschew easy moralizing, & mandate governments' role in stopping the slaughter. An in-depth analysis of the "language of slaughter" reveals that, while earlier authors such as Joseph Conrad & Ernest Hemingway could capture the horrors of combat in direct & simple rhetoric, chroniclers of contemporary genocide reflect spontaneity, immediacy, & self-reflection. J. Sadler

Embodiment of apocalyptic imagination has been a major theme in which many writers have pointed it out especially from the midst of twentieth century onwards. Earth today is vulnerable and would be so dangerous for future generation from now on. Although, J. G. Ballard's narrations do not create an ordinary apocalyptic apprehension of human abolition, but he enters the core of the apocalyptic theme by intertwining our world with an altering people's psyche who try to develop a new relationship with nature. This paper examines Ballard's The Drowned World (1962) from the view of the human psyche in an apocalyptic setting. It follows and analyzes the characters of Dr. Robert Kerans (a biologist) and his team in which they are transformed in the story - both mentally and physically.

Time and Fantasy in Narratives of Jihad: The Case of the Islami Jamiat-I-Tuleba in Karachi
This article proposes an analytical framework for thinking about violence in the Islami Jamiat-i-Tuleba (IJT), the student organization of Jamaat e Islami (JI), Pakistan's longstanding Islamist party. It prioritises the intersection of the psychic and the social, and the role of politics, history and biography in mediating the modalities, narration and praxis of violence in the city of Karachi. The dominant explanations tend to emphasise political instrumentalism, and structural and ideological factors, and to "Islamicise" the violence, collapsing Islamic rhetoric into an extemporization of conditions, ignoring the deep affective appeal of violence to individuals, and leaving unelaborated the role of intersecting national, local and individual contexts and temporalities in structuring political subjectivity and violent action.

The rise of populist movements across the globe has instigated considerable research interest into populism, predominantly in Western democracies. Non-democratic Russia, however, is not exempt from this populist trend, and distinguishable populist rhetoric can be observed both inside and outside the establishment. Alexey Navalny, who regularly organises mass protests in Russia, is considered to be an outsider of systemic politics. Despite several unsuccessful attempts to be elected, his popularity continues to grow, largely due to digital instruments such as YouTube. In light of limited press freedom, YouTube has become one of the most trustworthy platforms for Navalny to publish his investigative documentaries about Russian corruption. In his videos, Navalny adopts a populist communication style to oppose himself to Putin's 'corrupt' elite. Different investigative journalism practices help Navalny to discredit the establishment, whereas his activist appeals may motivate his supporters to engage in political action. In this article, I explore how Navalny combines the practices of investigative journalism and civic activism in his populist communication on YouTube. Using the method of content analysis, I explore a case study of Navalny's YouTube communication and reveal four types of populism which play a special role in his narration. These are 'superficial,' 'investigative,' 'radical,' and 'advocacy' populisms. Advocacy populism, for instance, provides evidence of corruption elite crimes through journalism practices and in calling people to political action. The most visible concentration of these parts of narration was observed in YouTube videos released by the activist before and during anti-corruption protests of 2017.

In this article, we discuss the use of language portraits (LP) as a research method to investigate the embodied multilingual repertoires of people who use both spoken and signed languages. Our discussion is based on two studies in which most participants were deaf (one study also included hearing participants). We primarily offer a methodological contribution to the discussion around LP, since we argue that the study of linguistic repertoires of signers takes the multimodal aspect of the method to a new level. Indeed, by separating modalities (speech, signing, writing), grouping languages in different ways, and mapping them on the LP, the LP discussed in this article represent multimodal languaging more explicitly than in previous studies. Furthermore, by locating particular signs on the LP, several participants literally mapped their body when signing and gesturing in their narratives, thus performing and becoming their language portrait. We suggest that the study of body language (signing/gesturing/pointing) in the verbal narrations accompanying the LP thus expands the multimodal aspect of the analysis of LP.

This contribution discusses the pragmatic effects of different rhetoric strategies conveying evidence of past ingroup violence after a long lasting social denial (Cohen, 2001). In particular, a case study is presented on the making of a civic discourse on controversial historical past: war crimes committed by the Italian Army during the colonial invasion of Ethiopia (1935-36). Although very well proved (Del Boca, 2005), these facts were only recently inserted in Italian history textbooks (Leone & Mastrovito, 2010; Cajani, 2013). In this same period, evidence of these crimes was officially presented during discussions of the Italian Parliament. In spite of these recent acknowledgments of the Italian responsibilities for these crimes, a social myth is still widely shared by the public opinion, representing Italians as good fellows (Italiani, brava gente: cfr. Del Boca, 2005), unable to be cruel both in everyday life and in wartimes (Volpato et al., 2012). This specific situation, denying even the reality of facts happened, has been defined literal social denial, i.e. the deepest among the three possible states of denial (literal, interpretive, implicative: cfr. Cohen, 2001). The issue of literal social denial of past ingroup violence is at the intersection among theories on narratives on national past (László, 2003), social representations of history (Liu et al., 2014), conflict ethos (Bar-Tal et al., 2012; Kelman, 2008), group-based emotions (Allpress et al., 2010; Leone, 2000) and intergroup reconciliation processes (Nadler et al., 2008). Namely, understanding how a social denial could break down implies the theorization of human mind's reflexivity as grounded on historical awareness (Ortega y Gasset, 1930), and the notion of social change as primarily rooted in natality, i.e. the fact that each birth represents a new beginning (Arendt, 1958). Drawing on this theoretical background, we will present an ongoing research program (Leone, in press) on the literal social denial (Cohen, 2001) of war crimes committed by the Italian army during colonial period and on the pragmatic effects of different kinds of communication on this controversial past. In order to address this issue, we will particularly focus on the concept of parrhesia as defined by Foucault (1983): the communicative choice of «frankness instead of persuasion, truth instead of falsehood or silence, [...] the moral duty instead of self-interest and moral apathy » (Foucault, 2001, p.19). Studies we conducted in this line tested the change in beliefs and the emotional reactions of young citizens confronted with mild or parrhesiastic descriptions of socially denied war crimes (Leone & Sarrica, 2014, 2012). Empirical evidence will be discussed in order to reflect on our core idea: that a parrhesiastic communication is a risky tough necessary pragmatic move to break long lasting denial of ingroup wrongdoings, to trigger critical civic discourse in the place of social myths and to start reconciliation processes.

Despite ideological rhetoric to the contrary, identity changes and authenticity depend on social experience – the lived interactions of individuals as well as the broad range of political‐economic, historical, and personal factors that shape those interactions. Because governments influence social experience, they can shape identities of their populations. Plains Aborigines in colonial Taiwan became Han Taiwanese after Japanese authorities banned footbinding. Local Han became Tujia, and Prmi became both Pumi and Tibetan in China's nation‐wide ethnic identification project. However, deliberate attempts at manipulation do not always succeed. The social experience of daily discrimination countered colonial authorities' efforts to make Han Taiwanese into Japanese, contrary to the claims of more recent nostalgic narratives. Narratives of unfolding – partisan stories about the development of a people over time – push the notion, useful to contemporary political authorities, that ethnic identities are fixed because they are based on culture and ancestry and that their authenticity is an ontological absolute derived from origins in antiquity. Analytic distinction of ideological rhetoric from the social experience of individuals allows a better understanding of the socially constructed processes of identity formation and authentication.RésuméBien que la rhétorique idéologique soutienne le contraire, les changements d'identité et l'authenticité dépendent de l'expérience sociale, autrement dit des interactions vécues aussi bien que de nombreux facteurs politico‐économiques, sociaux et personnels qui donnent forme à ces relations. En influant sur cette expérience, les gouvernements peuvent modeler l'identité de leurs populations. Les aborigènes des plaines de Taiwan sont devenus des Han quand les autorités coloniales japonaises ont interdit le bandage des pieds. Les Han locaux sont devenus des Tujia, et les Prmi sont devenus aussi bien des Pumi que des Tibétains dans le projet d'identification ethnique national chinois. Les tentatives de manipulation ne sont cependant pas toujours couronnées de succès. L'expérience sociale d'une discrimination quotidienne a battu en brèche les efforts des autorités coloniales de transformer les Han de Taïwan en Japonais, quoi qu'en disent les récits nostalgiques postérieurs. Les récits de déploiement, narrations partisanes du développement d'un peuple dans le temps, avancent la notion (utile pour les autorités politiques contemporaines) que les identités ethniques sont fixées parce qu'elles se fondent sur la culture et les ancêtres et que leur authenticité est une vérité ontologique absolue, liée à leurs origines antiques. En distinguant par l'analyse la rhétorique idéologique et le vécu social des individus, on peut mieux comprendre les processus, socialement construits, de formation et d'authentification de l'identité.

Across European nations, the binary distinction between 'us' and 'them' has been reinforced by right-wing populists seeking to frame global mass migration waves as the backdrop against which increased social fragmentation can be explained. While persisting resentments and continuing ethnicization of different social groups amplify hatred towards migrants, refugees and people of colour, many artistic and cultural institutions have taken a stand against such discriminatory rhetoric, trying to use their programmes as gateways to imagine new forms of solidarity and possibilities of organizing living with difference. This account focuses on developments in the city of Dresden, Germany, one of the hotspots for understanding the impact of racist and right-wing extremist legacies on contemporary responses to migration into Europe. Following the influx of refugees in 2015, Dresden became the centre of right-wing extremist protest, but also a focal point of its resistance in the arts and cultural institutions. In theatre and music, people have organized protests, founded community groups and established recurring programmes that focus on pivotal issues of belonging, citizenship, gender and home to reframe the social imaginary of what life with people of different backgrounds would look like in the city. This article draws on ethnographic work with three music initiatives in the city whose work centres on issues of 'borders' to show how 'borderness', a term used by social anthropologist Sarah Green to describe the sense of border, is experienced through and lived in music, educational practice and political activism. Findings show that collaborations between resident and refugee musicians resulted in narrations of border-experiences and transformed music repertoire. Spaces of music-making could become cultural borderlands themselves. Projects engaged in dismantling 'the everyday construction of borders through ideology, cultural mediation, discourses, political institutions, attitudes and everyday forms of transnationalism […] that create and recreate new social-cultural boundaries and borders' (Yuval-Davis et al. 2018: 229) in music education, which yielded a transcultural dialogue in the classroom in politically heated neighbourhoods. Theatre projects addressed gender-specific needs that provided women with opportunities to participate.