12,438 research outputs found

    Creolization and the collective unconscious: locating the originality of art in Wilson Harris' Jonestown, The Mask of the Beggar and The Ghost of Memory

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    Alongside the essays and fiction of Edouard Glissant, Wilson Harris's writings stand as one of the most important contributions to Caribbean creolization theory. Drawing from the philosophical projects of both authors, this essay argues that while creolization has typically been cast as a process of cultural, linguistic, and racial mixing akin to hybridity, it should, rather, be understood as providing a paradigm for the shifting structural relations necessary for the generation of genuinely original forms. As such, it has great significance for imaginative and literary production, and provides a framework for my readings of Harris's novels, Jonestown (1996), The Mask of the Beggar (2003), and The Ghost of Memory (2006), which explore the creative potential of creolization as a dialogue between consciousness and, what Jung and Harris refer to as, the collective unconsciousness. This essay brings into focus Harris's use of Jungian-inspired concepts, such as archetypes and the collective unconscious, in a development of creolization theory as a imaginative response to historical trauma and the generation of originality in art

    The Rise Of Dz-Manga In Algeria: Glocalization And The Emergence Of A New Transnational Voice

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    This article aims to establish Algerian manga as a new object of study within the field of Francophone studies and the broader field of cartooning in the developing world. To this end, it provides a survey of existing works while answering three main questions: How has manga become part of the cultural habits of young Algerian creators and readers? What status does it hold in local cultural production? Finally, what strategies have artists employed to broaden the readership of Algerian manga and how have they taken advantage of the unique possibilities offered by this new medium

    Eliminating unpredictable variation through iterated learning

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    Human languages may be shaped not only by the (individual psychological) processes of language acquisition, but also by population-level processes arising from repeated language learning and use. One prevalent feature of natural languages is that they avoid unpredictable variation. The current work explores whether linguistic predictability might result from a process of iterated learning in simple diffusion chains of adults. An iterated artificial language learning methodology was used, in which participants were organised into diffusion chains: the first individual in each chain was exposed to an artificial language which exhibited unpredictability in plural marking, and subsequent learners were exposed to the language produced by the previous learner in their chain. Diffusion chains, but not isolate learners, were found to cumulatively increase predictability of plural marking by lexicalising the choice of plural marker. This suggests that such gradual, cumulative population-level processes offer a possible explanation for regularity in language

    Sinophone studies and beyond : an Interview with Shu-mei Shih

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    Micro and macro dimensions in linguistic systems

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    Modeling the emergence of contact languages

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    Contact languages are born out of the non-trivial interaction of two (or more) parent languages. Nowadays, the enhanced possibility of mobility and communication allows for a strong mixing of languages and cultures, thus raising the issue of whether there are any pure languages or cultures that are unaffected by contact with others. As with bacteria or viruses in biological evolution, the evolution of languages is marked by horizontal transmission; but to date no reliable quantitative tools to investigate these phenomena have been available. An interesting and well documented example of contact language is the emergence of creole languages, which originated in the contacts of European colonists and slaves during the 17th and 18th centuries in exogenous plantation colonies of especially the Atlantic and Indian Ocean. Here, we focus on the emergence of creole languages to demonstrate a dynamical process that mimics the process of creole formation in American and Caribbean plantation ecologies. Inspired by the Naming Game (NG), our modeling scheme incorporates demographic information about the colonial population in the framework of a non-trivial interaction network including three populations: Europeans, Mulattos/Creoles, and Bozal slaves. We show how this sole information makes it possible to discriminate territories that produced modern creoles from those that did not, with a surprising accuracy. The generality of our approach provides valuable insights for further studies on the emergence of languages in contact ecologies as well as to test specific hypotheses about the peopling and the population structures of the relevant territories. We submit that these tools could be relevant to addressing problems related to contact phenomena in many cultural domains: e.g., emergence of dialects, language competition and hybridization, globalization phenomena
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