Shared Spaces of Transnational Transit: Filipino Gay Tourists,Labour Migrants,and the Borders of Class Difference

Between 2006 and 2008, I conducted autoethnographic research in what I refer to as Manila's ‘‘bright lights'' gay scene. As part of that research, I collected travel stories from young, urban, middle and upper-class gay men, in an attempt to draw out the relationship between transnational mobility, urban gay life, and dreams of global belonging. This article comes out of those stories as well as out of my own stories of living in, leaving, and returning to Manila. Starting with the international airport as a trope for the shifting boundaries that exist between kinds of travellers based on class identity, the essay moves on to describe the nationalised, gendered and class-specific divisions that cut across the transnational flows of gay Filipino culture globally.     

Narratives in Anecdotes,Memory and Interlocutors: An Early Engagement with Neville Alexander’s Story

In this article, I present a story about South African Marxist and activist-scholar Neville Edward Alexander. As historians, social scientists and intellectuals embedded in the humanities, a part of the job we have awarded ourselves or that we assume to be part of our disciplinary reasoning, our intellectual orbit, is to bring to life the periods that, and the people about whom, we reflect. This we do through writing and telling stories, often constructed with a “moral message” of sorts. In these acts of writing and story-telling, objectivity plays a disputed and a precarious role, and misrepresentations could be conscious or unwitting. The lack of objectivity in bringing to life the period and the people we talk about in our stories, in our exaggeration and our understatement about what we have read, about what we have heard, and then about what we write, is part of an academic’s narrative. These human traits of exaggeration and understatement can lead to historical error. In this early exploration of seeking answers to the questions, “Who is Neville Alexander?” and “What can we learn from his writings?” I offer two anecdotes about the man. My proposition is that overcoming historical error does not rest exclusively with factual verification. It has to factor in an appraisal of the ideological intention or even political wish of the people telling the stories, in written texts and orally, and of the interlocutors’ context that we recover in our historical studies. In writing this preliminary sketch of Alexander, I take a detour into higher education issues, particularly the field of doctoral studies, and I paraphrase some of the concerns that have been raised by Alexander. I conclude this introductory study with some thoughts on Alexander’s contributions to social change, to “race,” and to language policy and multilingualism.     

Moving stories: precarious work and multiple migrations

According to the United Nations over 3% of the global population or 232 million people currently live outside their country of birth. Their significance as a growing proportion of the labour force in many European countries is widely known. It is also evident that women – many of them young – are increasingly represented among economic migrants and asylum seekers. However, the longer term contribution of women, as migrants and as workers, is less well recorded. Here, I explore the connections between migration and employment, through the lens of oral histories undertaken with women who moved to the UK. Their life stories illustrate the growing diversity among female migrants as well as the changing nature of women’s employment. My key focus is, however, not on the work these women migrants undertook in the UK, but on precarious forms of waged work engaged in during the migration journey itself. I also reflect on oral history as a method and the problems of writing difference for feminist scholars working with and on women migrants.     

Anthropology in the news? (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

It is part of our informal culture of anthropology to complain about the way the media portray us, and yet there has been little systematic analysis of media representations of anthropology. I look at stories about anthropologists, stories that quote anthropologists and opinion pieces by anthropologists over a six‐month period in The New York Times. I conclude that biological anthropology and archaeology are over‐represented in these stories, and that the media portrays anthropologists primarily as authorities on exotic others abroad, or ritual behaviour at home. Anthropologists who write about neoliberalism and militarism have had difficulty getting into the high‐end mainstream media, where it is economists rather than anthropologists who are seen as experts on general human nature.     

‘Circulating commodities’: reflections on the movement and meaning of shells and stories in North Australia and Eastern Indonesia1

As Victor Turner (1974) so eloquently argues, symbols have the capacity to move people, in both emotional and physical terms. In this article, I explore the power of certain kinds of symbols, namely shells (trochus shell, Tectus niloticus) and stories, to do just this. Stories, I argue, construct pathways for the movement of people and objects. Shells too also evoke (e)motion through their ability to signify specific spheres of exchange and the relationships, identities and values which circulate within these domains. Importantly, stories and shells not only suggest movement but are themselves entities which are moved between differently valued social and political contexts. As things which are defined in terms of their high exchangeability quotient, shells and stories, at certain times in their biographies, correspond to Appadurai's (1986) notion of a commodity. Through an exploration of the commodity status and circulation of both shells and stories within the broad ethnographic context of Maluku Tenggara, Indonesia, I aim to challenge some of the commonly held beliefs and stories which are transmitted via the Australian media and along other lines of communication about the so-called ‘problem’ of illegal Indonesian fishermen in north Australian waters.     

Jane Eyre's ‘Arabian Tales’: Reading and Remembering the Arabian Nights

This article considers the significance of the Arabian Nights in nineteenth-century memoirs and accounts of childhood. Taking Jane Eyre (1847) as my chief example, I investigate the nature of the childhood encounter with the stories and the intensity of the child's emotional and sensory engagement with the work. I then consider how these stories and books function not only as childhood souvenirs, but also as stand-ins for childhood itself in the construction of an autobiographical subject. Finally, I offer a reading of the presence of the Arabian Nights within the narrative of Jane Eyre and its role in structuring the memories of its eponymous heroine.     

Editorial: Culture matters

In this paper, I examine the notion of privilege as it relates to whiteness. The argument that racial privilege is actively constructed in the micro-geographies of everyday life is based on a case study conducted in Buffalo, New York. In this study, I analyze the narrated experiences of white elderly, primarily female, residents of a changing urban neighborhood. To capture the interrelationships between racial privilege and place, I used multi-methods research which included surveys, mental maps, travel diaries, interviews, and participation observation. The stories told are detailed accounts of the ways in which these white elderly residents cope with a slipping away of their white privilege through learning new boundaries of privilege, devising strategies for coping with their changed neighborhood, and reclaiming, in part, their previously held privileges. I propose that whiteness and its attendant privilege is not just about who you are, but where you are.     

The Feasibility of Teaching Scientific and Technical Russian without the Prerequisite of a General Russian Language Course

The plot of the short novel La mano en la trampa (Beatriz Guido, 1961) is about a young woman who becomes a heroine while trying to find out the truth about a family secret known as “El Opa.” Her work as a spy needs to be done in complete secrecy. Her family is behind her and she needs to escape from censorship. Her family story is similar to Argentina's context at that time when many people had to avoid the control and excessive power of Peron's government. Everything seems to be double in this novel: spaces, characters, life stories, ghosts, vampires, haunting and repressive atmospheres. All of these elements contribute to the gothic spirit in La mano en la trampa that I explore in this article.     

Circulating sadness: witnessing Filipina mothers' stories of family separation

I reflect upon a collaborative research project with activist groups at the Kalayaan Centre in Vancouver, in which we collected stories of family separation, loss, grief and traumatic returns to more fully trace the impacts of the Canadian temporary work visa program (the Live-in Caregiver Program), which brings mostly Filipino women to Canada as live-in domestic workers. Our hope is that these stories of maternal loss will find an audience and evoke an affective response among policy-makers and a wide public beyond the Filipino community in ways that earlier critiques of the program have not. The article draws upon critical literatures on trauma and testimony to consider some of the risks of circulating these kinds of testimonials, and the possibilities of moving the audience from the position of spectator to witness. I then work closely with two mothers' testimonies to experiment with ways of establishing a ‘more difficult contract’ between those who give testimony and those who receive it, one that creates a complex ethical and political space in which the audience is required to register their own complicity in the other's loss or grief. I consider of the possibilities of assembling stories that tell a collective history without reducing the complexity of individual's lives into the same sad story of victimization, and of telling these stories so that the categories of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ mother are exhausted and the listener/reader is forced to listen/read more closely, just beyond the expected story line or cultural cliché.     

Forging Manhood and Nationhood Together: American Sailors’ Accounts of their Exploits,Sufferings, and Resistance in the Antebellum United States

This essay will focus on sailor narratives, published between 1815 and 1860, to explore how the authors remembered their seafaring experiences during the first half of the nineteenth century. I am particularly interested in discussing how notions of national identity, patriotism, and manliness shaped these memoirists’ interpretation of their experiences during the War of 1812. I pay particular attention to how sailor authors dealt with the following topics: their impressment and incarceration as prisoners of war, their participation in naval battles, and their experiences with punishment, especially flogging, on the high seas. The essay views antebellum sailor narratives as part of a democratization of literature that popularized the stories of ordinary men and women in antebellum America (slaves, soldiers, artisans, and other working‐class people). It also explores how works of seafaring adventure by such popular writers as James Fenimore Cooper provided a market for memoirs by career sailors. The essay utilizes various kinds of sources to document the stories sailors told in their antebellum narratives. These include: pension, impressment, and prisoner‐of‐war records, ships’ muster books, and other institutional sources. It also builds on the historiography of antebellum seafaring life, especially works by Paul Gilje, Marcus Rediker, Margaret Creighton, and other scholars. The essay also utilizes works by both literary and historical scholars as well as cognitive psychologists to examine the legitimacy of using autobiographies as historical documents.     

Co-becoming with angophora: performing more-than-human belongings in Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park

Belonging in Australian national parks has long been associated with universal ideas of nativeness or naturalness. However, these delineations have been critiqued as rooted in western, dualistic understandings of nature and culture that do not allow for other ways of conceptualising the world or for the agency of nonhumans. This paper argues for reconceptualising belonging as an ontological co-becoming where multiple contingent belongings co-emerge with bodies, worlds and place. To show how belonging co-becomes, I examine human–tree relations surrounding a special and sacred tree in Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park, Australia, the Angophora costata. I tell three stories that shed light on the multiple ways performances of belonging are entangled with histories, stories, spirits, and present and absent humans and nonhumans. In doing so, I show how belonging is a more-than-human practice where ideas of native and natural are questioned.     

Quaker Dreaming: The “Lost” Cotton Archive and the Aborigines of Van Diemen's Land

This article explores interactions between Tasmanian Aborigines and residents of a Quaker settler property in documented actuality and familial, regional, and scholarly memory. Debunking a recent suggestion that authentic Tasmanian Aboriginal religious rituals and mythologies were kept secret by these settlers for a century and a half, I argue that such “mythologies,” and stories of their transmission, are post‐colonial inventions that attempt to render this part of the narrative of Quaker colonialism in Van Diemen's Land as principally humanitarian, with Quakers acting as a benignly aberrant exception to the wider phenomenon of settlers dispossessing Indigenous peoples. Demonstrating that these settlers colluded in wider colonial practices and policies, and were active participants in networks of scientific study of the Tasmanian Aborigines, this article serves as a case study of the multi‐layered nature of colonial action and post‐colonial historicism, and also points to a self‐referential tendency in historiographies of colonial Tasmania. I suggest that the stories presented as an authentic body of Tasmanian mythology in Land of the Sleeping Gods (2013) unconvincingly attempts to reinscribe Quaker colonialism as pacifist and humanitarian, and I argue that in fact Quakers demonstrably contributed to the dispossessing of Tasmanian Aboriginal peoples from their traditional lands.     

The Actions of Abraham: A Life of Ethical Contradictions

ABSTRACT

Taking my point of departure in questions of ethnogenesis within the regions of Yehud and Idumea in the pre-Hasmonean period, I analyze the interrelationship of the themes of conflict and reconciliation in the composition of Genesis. I pay particular attention to perceptions of Idumea in narrative reiterations which tie the Cain story to the narratives about the destruction of Sodom and the Jacob-Esau conflict story in order to raise the question of whether the narrative strategy reflected in these stories might justify a further analysis of the Jacob and Joseph stories as contributions to a larger mnemonic discourse, bearing a utopian trajectory aimed at a realization of Ezekiel 16's reconciliation between Idumea, Yehud and Samaria.     

Some Eexamples of Folklore in the Old Testament (Paper read before the Society at Exeter College,Oxford, February 23rd, 1944)

The present paper analyses humorous stories circulating among Ethiopian immigrants now living in Israel. Typically told at community gatherings, these narratives articulate the drama of dislocation and the traumatic encounter with life in Israel, by focusing on the embarrassing clash of the quintessential “traditional” Ethiopian, with a new land-scape, time-scape, and body-scape. Characterised by an easy spirit, the revelation of innocence met with forgiving and accepting laughter, these stories enable internalisation and mediation of common ambivalences and vulnerabilities, converting them into elements of pleasure.     

Email my heart: remediation and romantic break-ups

For the past year, I have been collecting people's stories about how they break-up using new social technologies - text-messaging, instant messaging, Facebook, email, voicemail, and so on. These are narratives about how changes in media create new possibilities for disconnecting with others. In telling these stories, people are also being explicit about their media ideologies surrounding what constitutes proper and improper use of new technologies. They are also imagining anew how different and newly introduced media interact with each other, that is, they are re-evaluating remediation. This article addresses the role media ideologies play in contemporary remediation.     

The Case of Mister X (Formerly Miss X): Intersexuality in Modern Kenya and the Ethics of History Writing (c. 1940-present)

Relying on fragmented archival records, this article examines the life of Mr X – an intersex Kenyan – who was raised as a girl but, after a surgical operation in London in 1968, became a man. With assistance from officials, the wealthy and well-educated Mr X received new identity documents, which recognised him as male and, in turn, preferential land access. Mr X's story makes clear the importance of class in decolonising Kenya and reveals how state power could deeply shape Kenyan lives. Indeed, the state produced most of the archival traces on Mr X's life. This history not only offers rare insight into the life of an intersex Kenyan in the mid-twentieth century, but it also raises questions about biography and historical evidence, how we piece together human stories in spite of the epistemology and erasure of the archives, and how we do so ethically. Given ethical concerns about maintaining Mr X's anonymity to protect his family from stigmatisation and discrimination, I withhold some available information. Where possible, though, I enrich the evidentiary fragments by rendering the context in detail and drawing on comparative contemporaneous accounts of intersex Kenyans. The conclusion explores contemporary Kenya's legal recognition of intersex identity and gestures to the building of a new intersex archive.     

Cryptozoology in the Medieval and Modern Worlds

Historians of rural societies should consider using folklore sources in order to understand rural families in nineteenth-century France. A source like the stories collected from seventy-year-old Nannette Lévesque by the judge Victor Smith offers a very different viewpoint to depictions of such families by historians. Nannette was extremely poor, and spent her life moving between the mountain village where she was born in the Massif Central and the town of Saint-Étienne. Her stories call into question the reality of family “strategies” and the control of women by patriarchal authority, posited by some scholars of rural French family life.     

Why can't you change? Stories of parents and street educators about adolescent girls in street situations

For children and young people in street situations, to give up street life is easier said than done. The study reported in this article aims to contribute to the field of children and young people in street situations by introducing the voices of parents whose daughters live on the streets. In biographical narrative interviews, we asked parents together with street educators from Bolivia to share their stories of girls entering and leaving street life. Our findings showed that a child's act of running away made parents aware about their parenting, leading to new openings and possible renewed social bonds with their children. At the same time, street educators’ stories exposed the importance of the family support during the process of exiting street life. Nevertheless, even though parents no longer want to stand on the sidelines, the stories also revealed that parents are still forgotten throughout interventions with street children in Bolivia.     

"I Didn't Do Anything Important": A Pragmatist Analysis of the Oral History Interview

In the course of gathering oral histories from women who servedin the Navy and Coast Guard during World War II, an unusualconversational pattern has emerged. The women almost invariablydiminish the importance of their wartime contributions; a commonrefrain is "I didn’t do anything important." Their individualexperiences, as revealed during the interviews, belie that assertion.In this paper, I will use the women's words to parse what ismeant by this rhetorical move. Do the women really believe theydid not do anything important? If so, why do they find it necessaryto participate in the very public process of oral history, placingtheir names and life stories within the historical record? Consideringboth the content and the context of the women's words from afeminist pragmatist philosophical base will help explain thisseemingly incongruent act. This article demonstrates that thewomen do not really mean to belittle their life experiences(and military service), but instead are using the phrase asa way to acknowledge society's expectations. The oral historyinterview, meanwhile, is used by the women to not only placetheir experience into the historical record but also to affirmthe importance of their wartime work.     

The End of Queer (as we knew it): Globalization and the making of a gay-friendly South Africa

In J. K. Gibson-Graham's The End of Capitalism (as we knew it), the authors (Julie Graham and Katherine Gibson) provocatively deploy queer theory to further their project of telling non-capitalist stories of globalization. In short, they reject the narrative that globalization is always and only penetrative in the hope that global capital will ‘lose its erection’ and ‘other openings’ in the body of capitalism can be considered. I adopt their strategy of looking at stories of globalization. But, while they are concerned with the homophobia of economic theorizing, I consider the gay-friendly discourse of post-apartheid South Africa. Recent expressions of official tolerance by various nation-states around the globe have been dismissed as the mere appropriation of difference by hegemonic forces. Against such interpretations, I look at the ways in which the inclusion of ‘sexual orientation’ in post-apartheid South Africa's constitutional Equality Clause can instead be read as a queer globalization. Based on this reading, I problematize the presumption that queer globalizations take place beyond the realm of the hegemonic and point to the need for queer theorists to think through the political ramifications of homosexuality's repositioning as saviour rather than scapegoat of certain nation-states.