Identity (Culture)

Quem conhece a prosa de José Eduardo Agualusa, sabe que nas suas obras pode esperar que se debatam as questões da fronteira, da identidade, de alguns problemas do homem angolano contemporâneo tais como "de que forma o seu país é visto no exterior", "onde está o seu lugar," " o que significa hoje em dia ser angolano" e neste sentido as Fronteiras Perdidas não representam nenhuma excepção.
Quer que se trate de uma viagem de jipe, de ónibus no Brasil, de avião, de comboio ou de um simples elevador, o que une estas desassete  narrativas breves é de facto a constante procura de um "lugar de morança", de um ponto de referência, de uma identidade, de um espaço fixo no mundo cada vez mais globalizado em que as noções da fronteira do centro, da margem e da periferia são sempre mais abaladas e menos reconhecíveis. A identidade torna-se cada vez mais traiçoeira e perde o seu significado, ainda que se trate de um nome e apelido à partida inconfundível.

Perspektif poskolonial memberikan cara baru untuk melihat bagaimana bangsa koloni saat kini berupaya mendefinisikan dirinya sendiri. Konteks kekinian bangsa-bangsa terjajah ini kemudian dibaca dalam sudut pandang baru dimana proses-proses sosial dan historis diungkapkan secara mendalam melalui penggambaran mereka melalui pelibatan strategi ideologis yang berbeda pula. Tujuan adalah menelusuri dan membongkar pola-pola pemikiran kelompok orientalis dalam rangka membangun superioritas Barat dan imperioritas Timur.

Hidup umat manusia saat berada pada bayang-bayang ketidakpastian moralitas. Implikasi logis dari perkembangan peradaban manusia dari fase ke fase yang tidak melalui proses dialekyika, tetapi serba instan telah membuat ketidakpastian tadi bersifat niscaya. Masyarakat modern mengalami anomie, yaitu suatu keadaan di mana setiap individu manusia kehilangan ikatan yang memberikan perasaan aman dan kemantapan dengan sesama manusia lainnya, sehingga menyebabkan kehilangan pengertian yang memberi petunjuk tentang tujuan dan arti kehidupan di dunia ini. Masyarakat menderita kecacatan, tapi tidak pernah merasa sakit. Yakni masyarakat yang membiarkan setiap perilaku anomali, keserakahan hidup, intimidasi, dan sebagainya sebagai aktivitas yang lumrah.

The world enter a new phase called the global era. This era brings logical consequence to the weakening or strengthening the identity of a nation. Through globalization, various information flows so easy to get in the middle of our society. Such information brings with various value systems, way of life, and lifestyles of a nation. Gradually, this phenomenon will have implications for the Indonesian national identity. Indonesian society is in the situation between maintaining the old value or takes a new value. The dilemma to preserve locality and obtain globality has important implications for Indonesian national identity. A strategy in the era of global culture becomes a historical necessity for those craving to receive globality while keeping locality with a more expedient way.
Keywords: globalization, identity, Indonesia, locality and globality

Recent studies of peer review underscore that some facets of accepted evaluation methods have serious flaws. Assessments are often burdened by protectionist inclinations against new ideas, unstable editorial demographics, affiliational biases, and occasionally unethical and/or corrupt protocols, or the avoidance of protocols put in place to restrain biases. This article examines a solution to these dilemmas: the open-source peer review. This emerging evaluation system allows the readers of a journal to offer feedback on submissions before they are officially sanctioned by a publication. Thus, the concept allows journal-readers (who are conceivably experts, like the editors) to decide or make recommendations on which articles are appropriate to continue with further revisions and/or to publish. The concept promises to offer a more democratically and demographically stable evaluation system, one that has the potential to avoid some of the problems that are inherent to traditional scholarly reviews.

" Las tecnologías del yo nos dan las bases para reconocer que la búsqueda de nuestra propia identidad está constituida por prácticas de individualización que nos proveen de las categorías y los objetivos con los que nos gobernamos a nosotros mismos de acuerdo con los intereses políticos del orden social dominante”

"As tecnologias do eu nos dão a base para reconhecer que a busca de nossa própria identidade é constituída por práticas de individualização que nos fornecem as categorias e os objetivos com os quais nos governamos de acordo com os interesses políticos da ordem social dominante "

By applying terminology from trauma theory and a methodological approach from comics scholarship, this essay discusses three graphic autobiographies of women. These are A Game for Swallows by Zeina Abirached (trans. Edward Gauvin, 2012), We are on our Own by Miriam Katin (2006), and Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (trans. Anjali Singh, 2004). Two issues are at the centre of the investigation: the strategies by which these works engage in the much-debated issues of representing gendered violence, and the representation of the ways traumatized daughters and their mothers deal with the identity crises caused by war.

In gender studies considerable attention has been paid to the marginalisation of overweight people (Sujata Moorti & Karen Ross 2005) and their stigmatization in our weight-obsessed society. The empowerment of marginalised groups on various social media sites has also been studied (Ciszek 2013), as well as online community interaction having positive effect on self-image negotiation (Tiidenberg 2014). However, within marginalized consumer groups, fashion and identity from a gender point of view is still an under-researched area (e.g. Downing Peters 2014). Plus-sized women have traditionally been viewed as ‘othered’, displaced, and non-hegemonic objects, as subjects without power. Often, plus-sized women are seen as forming a homogeneous group without paying attention to intra-group diversity. 

Drawing on the gender studies literature, particularly the Butlerian notion of undoing gender as resistance, as well as research on identity and self-presentation in social media (e.g. van Dijck 2013), this paper examines identity construction and the struggles of fatshionistas; fatshionistas are plus-sized fashion bloggers, marginalized among fashion bloggers generally but also within the wider norms of Western beauty ideals. Using Bourdieu’s conceptualisation of different types of capital, we argue that fashion and knowledge thereof is a form of social and cultural capital that can be used to position oneself favourably, thereby attaining a more acceptable social role in our society.

The empirical materials of the study consist of twenty fatshion blogs. These blogs form a representative selection of active blogs belonging to what has been called the fatosphere (Scaraboto & Fischer 2013). The authors also consulted Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest using the #fatshionista hashtag to further establish and validate the self-representations resorted to by the fatshionistas. The methods used to analyse both the visual and verbal meanings in the blogs are based on the tradition of critical discourse analysis. CDA allows the examination of culturally diverse material and helps uncover the underlying power positions and struggles affecting the complex mechanisms of identity construction.

A careful analysis of the empirical material revealed different discursive practices employed by the fatshion bloggers in their identity construction: on the one hand, they separate themselves from other fashion bloggers, but on the other hand seek similarity with and acceptance by mainstream fashionistas. The discursive strategies include, for example, separation from the mainstream by reference to the group as fatshionistas instead of fashionistas, thus underlying a difference based on size, yet similarity-seeking by way of visually mimicking and reproducing assumptions and representations associated with fashion that contribute to the narrow female representations. The analysis shows that in their resistance, the fatshionista bloggers nevertheless conform to the traditional representations of women, and thereby effectively act as social gatekeepers controlling the norms of acceptable femininity in the fatosphere. At the same time, by using this strategy the fatshionistas fail to promote equality for all overweight individuals.

Keywords:
Fashion blogs, fatshionista, identity, gender, social capital, plus-size

Since the early 2000s, zombies have increasingly swarmed the landscape of popular culture, with ever more diverse representations of the undead being imagined. A growing number of zombie narratives have introduced sexual themes, endowing the living dead with their own sexual identity. The unpleasant idea of the sexual zombie is itself provocative, triggering questions about the nature of desire, sex, sexuality, and the politics of our sexual behaviors. However, the notion of zombie sex has been largely unaddressed in scholarship.

This collection addresses that unexamined aspect of zombiedom, with essays engaging a variety of media texts, including graphic novels, films, television, pornography, literature, and internet meme culture. The essayists are scholars from a variety of disciplines, including history, theology, film studies, and gender and queer studies. Covering The Walking Dead, Warm Bodies, and Bruce LaBruce’s zombie-porn movies, this work investigates the cultural, political and philosophical issues raised by undead sex and zombie sexuality.

This article analyses a non-fictional narrative from Nigeria, In the Shadow of a Saint by Ken Wiwa, which thematises, among other things, the discursive negotiation of ethnic and national identity during periods of transition. I interrogate how marginal subjects from peripheral sites of nationalist expression – in this case Ogoniland in Nigeria’s oil-rich Niger Delta – are positioned within dominant national narratives, and how the author uses public memory in (re)imagining Nigerian history and Ogoni identity. The overarching objective of this inquiry is to make evident the specific ways in which Wiwa’s text (as a veritable form of cultural expression and literary historiography) portrays the (re)construction and naturalisation of ethnic and national subjects and their ‘others’ within particular periods of critical socio-political transformation.