Lost boys,invisible girls: stories of Sudanese marriages across borders

Forced migration challenges and changes gender relations. The transnational activities of refugees resettled in the West create gender asymmetries among those who stay behind. This article explores the transnational marriages of young southern Sudanese women (‘invisible girls’), who either stayed in Sudan or remained in refugee camps in Kenya, to Sudanese men who were resettled to America, Canada or Australia (‘lost boys’). Incorporating gender as a relational category into the analysis of transnational practices that migrants and refugees engage in is important. The article argues that there is a need to put feminist analysis at the centre of transnational processes resulting from (forced) migration. It looks at the connections between different geographical locations, the impacts of the migration of young refugee men on bridewealth and marriage negotiations and the gender consequences for young women, men and their families. It is argued that transnational activities, such as marriage, contest, reconfigure and reinforce the culturally inscribed gender norms and practices in and across places. Transnational marriage results in ambiguous benefits for women (and men) in accessing greater freedoms. Anthropological analyses of marriage need a geographical focus on the transnational fields in which they occur. The article seeks to deepen understanding of the nuanced gendered consequences of transnationalism. It shows how gender analysis of actions taken across different locations can contribute to the theorisation of transnational studies of refugees and migrants.     

Interventions against forced marriage: contesting hegemonic narratives and minority practices in Europe

Muslims in western countries are routinely depicted as non-liberal minorities through representations of homophobia, honour killings and forced marriage within their communities. This presents a practical challenge to face up to non-liberal practices where they do exist, but without demonising an entire faith community. It also raises conceptual questions about mainstream western values. In the context of forced marriage, liberal principles (such as an individual's right to choose their own marriage partner and to decide whether to marry) appear to clash with postcolonial sensibilities including a valorisation of multiculturalism (which might recognise the rights of minorities to practice different marriage customs). These questions are examined through a case study involving Stichting Platform Islamitische Organisaties Rijnmond (SPIOR), a Muslim-identified organisation that works against forced marriage. Based in the Netherlands and active in six other European countries, SPIOR has worked with people potentially affected by forced marriage and also communicated its projects – and the progressive vision of Islam they advance – to wider audiences. Its experiences suggest that tensions between secular majorities and Muslim minorities, and between liberal and postcolonial values and sensibilities, are less fundamental than they sometimes appear, and more navigable.     

From rural life to transnational wife: agrarian transition,gender mobility,and intimate globalization in transnational marriages in northeast Thailand

Popular and academic discourses of globalization are often gender biased, focusing on formal and impersonal realms of the market, politics, and technologies. This article explores an intimate dimension of globalization by analyzing the transnational marriage trend among women in northeast Thailand (Isan's) villages. The phua farang (foreign husband) phenomenon in Isan epitomizes the intimate link between the global political economy and individuals' desires, aspirations, and imagination in the private realm of personal and marital relationships. The phua farang phenomenon is embedded in a context of spatial and economic inequalities at the local, national, and global levels, and manifests classed and gendered strategies by which marginalized subjects attempt to transcend the limited opportunities for upward social mobility available to these women.     

Eating,serving, and self-realisation: food and modern identities in contemporary Indian women's writing

The ‘new Indian woman’ is often invoked in popular and academic discourse as the embodiment of a modern nation—the ‘new India’. Feminist studies of this figure typically focus on the body of the imagined ‘new woman’ as a site upon which modernity is inscribed, allowing little room for the agency of women who actively contest imposed identities and roles in the quintessentially modern project of self-determination. In this article I argue that narratives of food in contemporary fiction and fictionalised autobiographical writing by Indian women challenge both dominant feminist critiques of the ‘new woman’, and influential accounts of modernity as ‘rupture’ in masculinist theoretical literature. In these texts food, and particularly the practice of serving food to others, is used by women as a tool for gaining independence, as a weapon to combat oppression, and as a means of negotiating migrant identities, among other things. The texts thus demonstrate the importance of appreciating the gendered nature of modernity, recognising women's modernities to be genuinely transformative of the individual, as well as continuous with traditional and conventionally feminine practices rather than necessarily opposed to them.     

The neighbor as mirror: Representations of the Korean March First Movement in modern Chinese discourses of nationalism

Abstract

The outbreak of the Korean March First Movement in 1919 was followed by intensive reporting and commentary in Chinese media, presenting striking images of the brutality of the Japanese colonizers, the resolve for independence among the Korean people, and the concept of national self-determination. The March First Movement provided the Chinese people with a vivid example of the transformation of the abstract concept of “universal principles” into the practice of “national self-determination,” and strengthened consciousness of “national independence” among the Chinese people. Over the ensuing two or three decades, the “March First Movement” gradually seeped into the Chinese nationalist movement and discourses on national liberation, playing the role of “the neighbor as mirror,” and continuing to provide both positive inspiration and negative reference points for the Chinese people following the path of national independence. This linkage and interaction between “weak nations” aids in understanding the modern Chinese nationalist movement, as well as the mechanisms for development of the national independence movements among colonized peoples which swept across the globe in the early 20th century.     

Empires ancient and modern: strength,modernity and power in imperial ideology from the Liberal period to Fascism

This article examines the image of Empire developed in public discourse in Italy during the late Liberal period and Fascism by placing it in the context of representations of the British Empire, with which Italian imperial ambitions were compared. There is a continuity in seeing the British Empire as the expression of industrial and commercial modernity and its resultant strength, but what in the Liberal period was seen as an unparalleled superiority became under Fascism a supremacy acquired in a particular period but now exhibiting signs of decline, which Fascism should contest and surpass. Admiration of the British was mixed with disparagement: key figures expressed a competitive resentment towards Britain and its dominant international position, seeing it as the epitome of ‘modern’ imperial power against which Fascism was destined to be measured. In the 1930s signs of the British Empire's decline were sought, developing the idea in Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that British domination would also rise and fall, and announcing the replacement of the ‘British order’, founded on commercial modernity and the strength of money and capital, by Fascism's new civilisation, with its authentic heritage of imperial romanità. This competitiveness towards Britain, which historiography has principally seen as a component of foreign policy (as was clear over Ethiopia), has additional significance when seen as an element of political culture that relates to the concept of the State. The autonomy and strength of the State were an important feature of Fascism's self-representation and of its legal culture, and in this light the possession of an empire came to be seen as an essential aspect of statehood and power.     

The Construction of Gender in Modern Chinese Law: Discrepant Gender Meanings in the Republican Civil Code

This article examines the intersection of law, gender, and modernity during the transitional Republican era (1912–49). It approaches the topic through a critical reading of the Republican Civil Code of 1929–30, and related commentary on the code by Chinese legal experts. By analyzing the gender assumptions embodied in several newly emergent categories of legal regulation, including legal personhood, minimum marriage age, consent, domicile, surnames, marital property, and child custody, the article’s line of questioning reveals how gender meanings helped to shape modern concepts like universality, equality, and freedom. The findings illustrate the ways in which Republican civil law broke with late imperial legal and gender norms tied to Confucian patrilineal ideology and in addition established new legal and gender meanings that helped to consolidate Chinese politics on a republican basis and to reconfigure modern gender difference on a conjugal basis.     

Becoming Smaller: Autobiographical Spaces of Weight Loss

Abstract: This research focuses on the spaces and politics of weight loss. It is informed by “fat studies”, critical geographical scholarship on fat, and two contrasting feminist readings of Michel Foucault's notion of “care of the self”. Using autobiography as a method of inquiry I share my experience of “becoming smaller” through weight loss dieting. I argue that losing weight for me has been paradoxical on at least three counts: first, by being a feminist scholar who critiques discourses around women and slimness while at the same time desiring to be slim; second, by my new eating patterns marking me simultaneously as both a disciplined and a disordered subject; and third, by publically and politically supporting the Health at Every Size movement but privately in my “quest” to recreate myself emphasizing shedding kilos over fitness. The article concludes that understanding these paradoxes that surround weight loss is useful for furthering understanding of a complex embodied, gendered and spatialized process.     

Fieldwork and disabled students: discourses of exclusion and inclusion

Disabled students form a significant but under represented minority in higher education in the UK. Participation appears to be particularly low in disciplines that contain a fieldwork component. Fieldwork has been recognized as a barrier to the participation of disabled students. This paper emphasizes a critical perspective on fieldwork, highlighting the way in which fieldcourses as currently conceived, enacted and experienced, can exclude disabled students. It discusses a survey of the experiences of providing learning support to disabled students undertaking fieldwork in geography, earth and environmental science departments in the UK. It also considers the various ways in which the images, spaces, practices and cultures of fieldwork may exclude or marginalize disabled students and the different ways in which fieldwork may be made more inclusive.     

Fieldwork and disabled students: discourses of exclusion and inclusion

Disabled students from a significant but under represented minority in higher education in the UK. Participation appears to be particularly low in disciplines that contain a fieldwork component. Fieldwork has been recognized as a barrier to the participation of disabled students. This paper emphasizes a critical perspective on fieldwork, highlighting the way in which fieldcourses as currently conceived, enacted and experienced, can exclude disabled students. It discusses a survey of the experiences of providing learning support to disabled students undertaking fieldwork in geography, earth and environmental science departments in the UK. It also considers the various ways in which the images, spaces, practices and cultures of fieldwork may exclude or marginalize disabled students and the different ways in which fieldwork may be made more inclusive.     

The Capital of Diversity: Neoliberal Development and the Discourse of Difference in Washington,DC

Complicating top‐down analyses of neoliberal development, this article charts how demographically diverse residents in Columbia Heights—a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood in Washington, DC—reinforce and resist dominant narratives of diversity that praise multicultural, mixed urban spaces. These narratives often not only fail to discuss power and equity, they are typically used to market state‐sponsored, upscale development that actively threatens the very diversity appropriated to sell a neighborhood. I argue that many residents initially reproduce this rhetoric of diversity, but discuss power and difference more candidly in their discussion of the neighborhood's history and amenities. Most residents who recently moved to the neighborhood juxtapose praise of diversity with comments that associate crime, litter, and “grime” with that diversity. Residents who grew up in Columbia Heights moved from praising the influx of development and new (largely upper‐middle class) residents to expressing concerns about exclusion, disrespect, and possible displacement.     

Becoming Cleopatra: the forgotten Zionism of Raphael Lemkin

The biography of Raphael Lemkin has emerged of late as a highly contested lieu de memoire in charged political debates in Europe, the United States and the Middle East about the meaning, past and present, of the Holocaust and genocide. At the same time, scholars have attempted to demythologize Lemkin by reinscribing his life into its pre-World War II Polish context. Yet thus far no one has identified the precise political activities and affiliations that shaped Lemkin’s concept of genocide. In this article, I show that Lemkin, far from being a Jewish Bundist, a Polish nationalist or an apolitical cosmopolitan, was an active member of the interwar Polish Zionist movement, from which he drew the ideas that inspired his idea of the crime of genocide. In the first part of this article, I use his published writings from the 1920s and 1930s in Hebrew, Yiddish and Polish to recover a rich Jewish political framework in which his concepts of barbarism and genocide first began to emerge. In the second section, I ask how this crucial dimension of Lemkin’s life and thought vanished from the historical record, and why it has yet to be recovered in spite of the boom in biographical scholarship. Finally, I suggest how the recovery of Lemkin’s Zionism helps to reframe the current political impasse in the historiography of Holocaust and genocide studies.     

Tolerated,but not Preferred: Troubling the Unconscious of Televisual Multiculturalism

Canadian televisual exports make up at least 30 percent of the original content on US cable television. And from many angles, Canadian youth-television series look more diverse, more positive, and more attentive to interracial and interethnic issues than do similar US series. This article explores Canadian representations of interracial relationships and situates them within readings of Canada's official multicultural policy. It argues that much of this surface-level positivism about race reveals unconscious anxieties that ultimately manifest in drastic ways of treating “diversity” or “multicultural” subjects.     

The politics of identity,recognition and multiculturalism: the Kurds in Turkey

The politics of identity and recognition regarding the Kurds in Turkey has gained momentum since 2002 but has never been implemented fully. The rightful critics emphasising the continuity of the State's authoritarian character, however, have not so far analysed if their own normative suggestions are theoretically consistent and sociologically grounded. Based on the Author's fieldwork and contemporary social surveys, this article shows that there are conflicting views within the Kurdish community about the forms that the politics of recognition could take. By exploring the conflicts of interest within the Kurdish community from a bottom‐up approach, the article concludes that the recognition of an authentic Kurdish identity is problematic sociologically. It is also more likely to harm than help the Kurds in the country from a normative perspective. The article explains how the quest for an authentic Kurdish political identity and attempts to generate it actually limit the individual autonomy and exacerbate the disparity between the Turks and the Kurds in the country.     

Islam and the rural landscape: discourses of absence in west Wales

This paper explores the relationship between the presence and absence of Islamic communities in western Wales. Commencing with a discussion of the literatures on the geographies of Islam and rural exclusion, I argue that both sets have neglected research on rural religious communities. Discussion is centred upon the visual absence of Islam in the area, as local mosques are predominantly housed in contingent or non-purpose-built buildings. Using interview data, I examine the implications of these absences for local Muslims' experiences of rural landscapes, and discuss the juxtaposition between the visual absence of cultural indicators of Islam and the contingent strategies these communities employ to meet their religious needs. Adopting Nancy Fraser's concept of a subaltern counterpublic, I argue that the contingent presence in the landscape brings organisational possibilities. However, the lack of visibility of these counterpublics also brings challenges, fragmenting the community and creating difficulties for individuals to access particular services. This subterranean ontology has implications not only for liberal ideas of publicity and privacy, but also for inclusive citizenship in an era when debates about multiculturalism centre on accommodating religious needs.     

Competing discourses of built heritage: lay values in Irish conservation planning

Built heritage conservation has traditionally been shaped by professionals through an ‘authorised heritage discourse’, emphasising expert knowledge and skills, universal value, a hierarchy of significance, and protecting the authenticity of tangible assets. However, while the purpose of built heritage conservation is widely recognised to be broad, encompassing cultural, social and economic benefits, it takes place in the presence, and on behalf, of a wider public whose values and priorities may differ starkly from those of heritage power-players. Drawing on the perspectives of a range of built heritage actors in three small towns in Ireland, this paper contributes to these debates, exploring the competing values and priorities embedded within lay discourses of heritage. Based on critical discourse analysis of interviews with local actors, the paper identifies that collected memory and local place distinctiveness, contributing to a sense of local identity, are of central importance in how non-experts construct their understanding of built heritage. In the Irish context, this is particularly important in understanding social and cultural statutory categories of heritage interest. The paper concludes on the implications for policy and practice and, in particular, the need to more effectively take account of non-expert values and priorities in heritage and conservation decision-making.     

Co-evolution of networks and discourses: a case from North Korean defector-activists

This article uses an eclectic approach of network and discourse analyses to examine symbiotic relations between the formation of professional networks and the constitution of normative discourses in international affairs. Based on more than 2000 English and Korean mixed materials about the five most-mentioned North Korean defector-activists in the media in 1998–2015, and assisted by a computer-based content analysis tool, the author demonstrates how each of those five defector-activists has employed their endogenous identities to join the system of international human rights activism and offered legitimate narratives for the campaigns against North Korea, while forming transnational networks in South Korea, the USA and the UK. She argues that individuals’ endogenous identities and agency are critical for shaping normative discourses in international human rights activism against North Korea in the first instance, which then grow exponentially through transnational networks formed by individuals.     

Working at the ambivalence of race: ethnomimesis and the cancellation of St Paul's Carnival

The ambivalence of race is taken as a starting point in exploring the cancellation of the 2012 St Paul's Carnival, an African-Caribbean arts event in Bristol, England. That race is unstable, that it can be done and undone, has long been a focus of scholarship in social and cultural geography and beyond. This article asks instead how such a fragile state is maintained and with what implications. This necessitates regarding racial ambivalence as an activity; a condition that has to be worked at to be sustained. Ethnomimesis is used to frame these operations of racial ambivalence. Ethnomimesis is the way in which we encounter, stereotype and recognise cultural practices for ourselves and manifest them to others. It demonstrates how different configurations of race are precariously held between the creative possibilities and contingencies of situated cultural practices. Three moments of cancellation are narrated to show how ethnomimetic processes work through multiple formulations of race. This racial ambivalence is central to Carnival's failure. The organisers attempted to produce a performance of African-Caribbean culture that simultaneously denied the histories of racism that motivated the event. Ethnomimesis exposes how the racial ambivalence emergent in these cultural practices both opens and closes the possibilities to belong.