Betwixt and Between Past and Present: Cultural and Generic Hybridity in the Fiction of Mary Yukari Waters

The cosmopolitan make-up of the American society has yielded cultural hybrid offspring and this cultural hybridity features strongly in contemporary American fiction. Amy Tan and Mary Yukari Waters are both Asian-Americans who portray such hybridity in their short stories which depict the shifting identities of the self. But do the internal categories of gender, race and ethnicity help in the coherence or do they add to the fragmentation of diverse identities? It is the dynamics of this critique of multiple identification and hybrid cultures that is being traced here in this study and how all this is reflected in narrative responses to such conditions of the examination of the self and, on a broader scale, community. The fiction of both writers usually ends up with a metaphysical human aspiration that retains the past, holds on to the present and looks forward to the hidden joys of the future. Betwixt and between was a term coined by Victor Turner to describe those who are culturally both and neither, that is, they stand at a liminal (border) stage that should be a temporary state, but, in certain cases has become a permanent one. Waters and Tan fulfill Will Kymlicka\u27s exemplary mode of multiculturalism. Kymlicka does not want ethnic/Americans to separate their conflicting identities in order to fit in. They should not bring their lifestyles to conform to various codes; instead, they should have the freedom of multiple identification in whichever place and with whichever group, be it a minority or mainstream. Multiple identification has been a blessing for both writers as both consider it like two alternate worlds that they can resort to the one when they are fed-up with the other. Two short stories were chosen for each writer: Rationing and Aftermath for Mary Yukari Waters; The Moon Lady and A Pair of Tickets for Amy Tan. Cultural hybridity is clear in their appreciation of their ancestors\u27 stoicism, wisdom and guidance on the one hand, and in their willingness to take in American cultural traits on the other. Generic hybridity is exemplified in the interpenetration of the historic, the mythic and the symbolic. The history of China and Japan during World War II is constantly conjured up and the present and the past are intermingled through the workings of memory. The mythic has a powerful presence in the texts of both writers given the influence of the myth in their Eastern spiritual cultures. Names and actions acquire a symbolic significance which adds richness in meaning to the texts. The two writers, moreover, add a touch of folklore to stress their Asian origin and to prove the fact that (multicultural) society and (hybrid) culture must have their influence apparent in all literary texts

A Critical and Comprehensive Sociological Theory of Race and Racism

This article contests the contention that sociology lacks a sound theoretical approach to the study of race and racism, instead arguing that a comprehensive and critical sociological theory of race and racism exists. This article outlines this theory of race and racism, drawing from the work of key scholars in and around the field. This consideration of the state of race theory in sociology leads to four contentions regarding what a critical and comprehensive theory of race and racism should do: (1) bring race and racism together into the same analytical framework; (2) articulate the connections between racist ideologies and racist structures; (3) lead us towards the elimination of racial oppression; and (4) include an intersectional analysis

The politics of gift-giving and the provocation of Lars Von Trier's Dogville

In what follows, I wish to use the circumstances and dynamics of the nocturnal scene of destruction at the Old Mill and the subsequent scene of carnage at the house of Chuck and Vera in Dogville as a springboard for developing some reflections on the ‘politics of gift-giving’, and the relationship between friendship and hostility in the exchange of social goods. The term ‘springboard’ is no doubt too vague, here, because I intend to approach the two scenes, and the film as a whole, as a radical provocation, thus distinguishing my approach from the traditional methodology of ‘application’, in which a work of art is used in order to exemplify a certain theoretical construction. As it happens, ‘provocation vs. illustration’ in itself constitutes one of the key ‘moral’ antagonisms of von Trier’s film and, as I shall argue, it is the dogged determination of Tom Edison Jr. (Paul Bettany), the town’s amateur-philosopher, moral lecturer and self-crowned “miner of the human soul”, to illustrate the human problem and his failure to be provoked which brings unrest to the township of Dogville and which finally makes it go to the dogs

A symbolic network-based nonlinear theory for dynamical systems observability

EBM and MSB acknowledge the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), grant Ref. EP/I032608/1. ISN acknowledges partial support from the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad of Spain under project FIS2013-41057-P and from the Group of Research Excelence URJC-Banco de Santander.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Joint perceptual decision-making: a case study in explanatory pluralism.

Traditionally different approaches to the study of cognition have been viewed as competing explanatory frameworks. An alternative view, explanatory pluralism, regards different approaches to the study of cognition as complementary ways of studying the same phenomenon, at specific temporal and spatial scales, using appropriate methodological tools. Explanatory pluralism has been often described abstractly, but has rarely been applied to concrete cases. We present a case study of explanatory pluralism. We discuss three separate ways of studying the same phenomenon: a perceptual decision-making task (Bahrami et al., 2010), where pairs of subjects share information to jointly individuate an oddball stimulus among a set of distractors. Each approach analyzed the same corpus but targeted different units of analysis at different levels of description: decision-making at the behavioral level, confidence sharing at the linguistic level, and acoustic energy at the physical level. We discuss the utility of explanatory pluralism for describing this complex, multiscale phenomenon, show ways in which this case study sheds new light on the concept of pluralism, and highlight good practices to critically assess and complement approaches