Home stories: immigrant narratives of place and identity in contemporary Ireland

This paper discusses immigrant identity and place in contemporary Ireland. It draws from a longitudinal research project that involved recent immigrants to Ireland. Participants in the project came from 18 different countries, and ranged in age from 22 to 68. Their reasons for moving to Ireland were varied, and included work, adventure, and personal relationships. Combining insights from sociolinguistics and human geography, the paper first considers the different ways in which immigrants to Ireland narrate place and identity, paying particular attention to content and linguistic strategies. It then provides a more detailed discussion of the relationship between immigrant identity and place through a focus on the concept of “home,” highlighting the linguistic strategies and means that immigrants used to discursively construct notions of home and identity in their interviews. The paper concludes by arguing that detailed discourse level analysis of people's narratives of place offers new insights into the relationship between immigrant identity and place.     

梨花凄凄

<正>清明,我想去寻找一座坟茔,那坟茔里,睡着你——我姐姐的同学。你和姐姐一样,比我大两岁。前年春节回咱家乡,我妈妈在没有任何语言环境的情况下突然告诉我,你在     

Identity predicaments and the music metaphor in contemporary Irish fiction

Abstract

Ever since Jimmy Rabbitte proffered his oft-quoted “niggers of Europe” line in Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments (1987), contemporary Irish culture, especially during the boom years, was characterised by an insistent revisiting of popular music as a metaphor for interracial and/or intercultural connection or understanding. Cross-cultural identification through music may be seen, in Werner Sollors’s memorable terms, as an eschewing of “descent” relations in favour of “consensual” relations. This essay revisits the music metaphor as it has manifested itself in Irish fiction since it was announced officially that Ireland had entered recession in 2008. Specifically, it explores Kevin Curran’s Beatsploitation (2012) and Joseph O’Connor’s The Thrill of It All (2014) arguing that, through their deployment of the music metaphor, the novels stage the murky politics of contemporary Irish iterations of consent and descent. By exposing the extent to which the rhetoric of Irish economic recovery is yoked to paradoxical invocations of volitional and ancestral Irishness, the novels urge their readers to consider the ways in which discourses of economic recovery work to reinforce and perpetuate patterns of exclusion and marginalisation established during the Celtic Tiger years.     

The sound of music heritage: curating popular music in music museums and exhibitions

A significant amount of previous academic research into popular music museums centres on critiques of the content, design and layout of predominantly authorised institutions. Throughout much of this research, authors consistently criticise the use, or rather, the perceived misuse, of music played within music museums, arguing that the music itself, rather than artefacts, constitutes the most significant part of popular music exhibition. This article seeks to counter this trend by exploring the challenges of incorporating recorded sound into popular music exhibits as understood by curators and exhibit designers. Utilising interviews conducted within 14 authorised and DIY museums devoted to popular music, the researchers demonstrate a distinct contrast between current academic critiques of music use in these museums and the attitudes of the people who create them. The result is a varied discussion surrounding sound in the museal space, including issues of sound bleed, technology and the creation of balance between artefacts and sound. This account draws attention to curators’ intentions of telling the story of popular music history by engaging with both the visual and aural memories of museum patrons, and suggests a new understanding of the purpose underpinning popular music museums in modern contexts.     

Roots,rock, Breizh: music and the politics of nationhood in contemporary Brittany*

Abstract. The three terms Roots, Rock and Breizh (or ‘Brittany’) seem to make unlikely companions: their meeting looks more like a collision than a confluence. However, these disparate forces have fashioned a unique cultural dynamic in Brittany. This paper analyses this cultural‐nationalist movement. It considers its socio‐cultural context, presents some case studies of particular singers and festivals, and evaluates the movement's significance.     

The Isle of Portland: An Iron Age Port-of-trade

The Isle of Portland (Dorset, England) was part of a trading system that involved the circulation of goods in and across the English Channel during the first century BC. This paper assesses the suitability of Portland as an Iron Age port-of-trade, focuses on the exotics found there and discusses evidence for its hill-fort, which was destroyed in the middle of the nineteenth century     

Fiddling for outcomes: traditional music,social capital,and arts policy in Northern Ireland

Arts development policies increasingly tie funding to the potential of arts organisations to effectively deliver an array of extra‐artistic social outcomes. This paper reports on the difficulties of this work in Northern Ireland, where the arts sector, and in particular the so‐called ‘traditional arts’, have been drawn into a politically ambiguous discourse centred on the concepts of ‘mutual understanding’ and, more recently, ‘social capital’. The paper traces the recent history of these policies and the difficulties in evaluating the social outcomes of arts programs. The use of the term ‘social capital’ in the work of Putnam and Bourdieu is considered. The paper argues, through a rereading of Bourdieu’s articulation of the ‘forms’ of capital and Eagleton’s ‘ideology of the aesthetic’, the concept of social capital can be released from its current neoliberal trappings by imagining a reconnection of the concepts of ‘capital’ and ‘the aesthetic’.     

让音乐课堂充满诗情画意

语文教学追求诗意的课堂,音乐更是诗的延伸．是诗的魂灵,音乐课又怎能够不充满诗情画意？在我们的音乐课,那更应是充满诗情画意的,因为教材更多偏重于对音乐的欣赏,那行云流水般的天籁之音,那历史沉淀的经典之作,那流行的时尚元素,无不诉说着心灵最美的诗。而大点的学生已有一定的文学素养,他们年龄就是一首最美的青春之歌,心中荡漾着对未来的美好懂憬与向往,看什么都会在心中吟成一首懵懂的小诗,他们的作文已少了童年的稚气,语言也更成熟,头脑中会有无数色彩绚丽的画面,这是他们的年龄所致,这也是我们音乐课堂更应充满诗情画意的理由之一,理由很多,但如何让音乐课堂充满诗情画意是做音乐教师应不断思考的。     

The unbearable weight of music: The intermezzo

The affordances of musical experience, its capacity to become our mode of being-in-the-world, especially in ritual situations, can be turned against us into an aversive sonic attack that bends the social arc into a liminality without end, a time in between that goes nowhere. And when this happens, we have entered the realm of music torture, a relatively recent innovation in that dark art that was ushered into the world in full force at the beginning of the 21st century. Music became part of a regime of no-touch torture inflicted upon detainees in the ‘global war on terror’, itself a war without end. In this article, the author argues for an ontomusicology that understands music as ritual and ritual as music – in this case, ritual that inverts Victor Turner’s notion of communitas, with all of its attendant modes of being-with, into a solitary mode of existence with no hope of escape, a musical ritual torture, a perpetual intermezzo.     

Fair Isle: half a century of change

ABSTRACT

Fair Isle is one of the best known of the Scottish islands having given its name to a shipping forecast region and to an internationally known style of knitting patterns and also because it has a world renowned bird observatory, and is the most remote of the inhabited British islands. Over the last five decades it has experienced major changes in its economic and social fabric, reflecting the influences of both endogenous and exogenous forces. This paper reviews and interprets those changes, utilising two surveys made fifty years apart using the same survey instrument and the same methodology in order to provide a basis for a consistent comparison. The paper discusses the changes that have taken place in agricultural practices, in infrastructure, in the economic base and the successful stabilisation of population numbers, and in tourism to the island, which reflect changes in ownership of the island and the impacts of North Sea development and local government re-organisation.     

后奥运标地——精神与物质所在 比比皆是旅游“点”

<正>精神"光点"对旅游业的影响最为明亮前不久,河北省委、省政府隆重召开奥运工作总结表彰大会,100个单位获"河北省奥运工作先进集体"称号、50人获"河北省奥运工作先进工作者"称号、150人获"河北省奥运工作先进个人"称号。