Displacement and Emplacement in Narratives of Relocation by Romanian Women Authors

The present paper analyses recent Romanian accounts of women's uprooting from a communist regime, foregrounding manners in which the migrants' transnational itineraries are punctuated by instances of groundedness that temporary anchor the protagonists in their translocal settings. More specifically, the article discusses the segmented itineraries of women migrants from Romania via different European countries to their final destination, the United States. I have chosen the syntagm "accounts of uprooting" instead of "migration literature", as the primary corpus of this analysis is made up of different literary genres: a novel, Train to Trieste by Domnica Radulescu and a memoir, The Gypsy Saw Two Lives, by Rodica Mihalis. The analysis of these creations introduces a comparative perspective on the shaping of translocal perceptions in the context of transnational migration. Consequently, the body of the paper investigates the migrant characters' relation to the European spaces where they settle before preparing their relocation to the USA. By adopting this approach, the discussion blends the axes of embeddedness and disembeddedness in order to provide a more comprehensive account of the intersections between gender and migration placed in a transnational context. Therefore, the discussion considers both the transgressive, fluid connotations of transnational processes and the individuals' need for stable structures despite their discontinuous itineraries

Knothole October 5, 1994 Vol 47 No 4

The mission of The Knothole publication is to provide its readers with writings that are both stimulating and contemporary; to inform its students of clubs, events, and off-campus happenings; to challenge a world driven by progress to uncover the truth about current environmental policies and innovations; and to express such ideas, ingeniously and collectively.https://digitalcommons.esf.edu/knothole/1617/thumbnail.jp

Stories Told and Untold: Post-Colonial London in Bernardine Evaristo\u27s Lara

The voice, drunk and defiant, is that of Lara, about half-way through Bcrnardine Evaristo\u27s novel of the same name. It is at this point that Lara begins to discover, or rather produce, her own version of post-colonial London; a new, hybrid identity that challenges the inevitability of a divided and racist national capital to suggest, instead, a positive diasporic space. Many other voices contribute to the telling of this history, their varying, often disembodied, tones adding to the multilayered nature of the writing which moves backwards and forwards in time in an attempt to piece together stories that have not always been passed on. Laid out as a series of prose poems, complete with an index of first lines, Evaristo utilizes oral and dramatic, as well as lyrical and poetic, storytelling modes. This concern with form, together with the sense of \u27 performing\u27 identity which is enacted, reminded me of recent work by Pauline Melville and Mciling Jin,2 also writers who have been (and are) actors and performers, writing out of their complex post-colonial inheritance, and located in London. Of course, these writers must be read according to the various allegiances and connections that mark their writing,3 but their presence (and that of a growing number of exciting Black British writers) gives weight to Lara\u27s cross-Atlantic clarion call

A Global Perspective on Ethical Consumerism: A Study of Advertisements from Social Enterprises to Identify the Ethical Consumer

This paper explores ethical consumerism in the United States and Latin America. I examined ethical consumerism in these two settings by identifying social enterprises from different countries in each setting to identify the ideal ethical consumer. After comparing and contrasting the ethical consumer in each context, I determined that ethical consumerism does exist in Latin America. According to scholarship, a country must be postmaterialist in order for ethical consumerism to exist. Through my research, I concluded that Latin America is postmaterialist, therefore ethical consumerism does exist

Concientious Cinema: Senegalese Cineastes as Preservers of Cultural Identity and Promoters of Social Change

Senegalese cinema was born with a conscience. From its earliest days, Senegalese films have been marked by tendencies to preserve cultural identity and promote social change. Using background research, film screenings, discussions, and interviews, this study categories these trends into a movement of “Conscientious Cinema,” and identifies the development of both of these objectives. This study first traces the trend of cultural identity preservation from the films of the founding generation to their evolution in the projects of young filmmakers today, and similarly explores the development of the trend of social-change promotion from between these generations. In the analysis, I examine why these trends have developed and how they are important today. Finally, this study identifies the future potential of Conscientious Cinema and the ways in which the movement can reach this potential

From Integration to Solidarity: Insights from Civil Society Organisations in Three European Cities

This article sheds light on the lack of cohesion in asylum approaches between EU member states and questions the dominance of the ‘integration’ paradigm. It argues that civil society organisations (CSOs) have, through solidarity, challenged the bias ‘integration’ involves and the exclusion it generates. To do this, it examines three case-based practices led by CSOs that operate in three European capital cities—Rome, Brussels and Berlin—and that embrace mobility in the context of front-line, transit and destination countries, respectively. With the ‘refugee crisis’ of 2015 acting as a threshold moment, the cases navigate a complex web of relationships amidst a fragmented debate about asylum, and varying national and local frameworks in Europe. Through the comparison of cases, the article argues that the political possibilities of such practices and their enduring engagements with the urban, remain limited. However, the shift in discourse from ‘stasis’ and ‘integration’ to ‘mobility’ and ‘solidarity’ that the three cases embody, represent a critique that fundamentally challenges urban planning and its role for asylum

How to do things with things

Humans have always done things with things. It’s at the very origin of who we are as a species: we’ve gone from being bipedal homonins to people who live in complex societies by making rocks into tools. Things can serve a practical function, but they also carry cultural and symbolic meaning: they can tell our personal stories, allow us to connect with each other, and be the outer manifestations of our inner lives. The things we use in our every day lives, by implying a set of actions we can take when interacting with them, participate in shaping our reality: all things contain a set of implied behaviors, rules, customs, morals and beliefs. How to do things with things is an invitation to look at things as clues with which to investigate reality, and to then go ahead and make new things to invent new realities. If our culture, norms and sense of self are embedded in our things, there’s good news: they are all malleable. We can take things apart and put them back together to look at ourselves from a new perspective. We can (literally) objectify any concept or idea to try it on for size. We can make things that allow people to try entirely new and unexpected behaviors and ideas. Doing things with things is a practice of performativity; it looks at everything around us—from the clothes we wear, to the tools we use and the spaces we inhabit—as a set of messages, stories, and behaviors. In doing so, it’s an invitation to experience and engage with complex ideas and concepts in a way that is not abstract but, instead, embodied. If we can wrestle with the inter-personal, behavioral, socio-psychological and historical aspects of being human by literally interacting with them, we can actively participate in making new versions of all of them and maybe, in the process, become new more-multidimensional humans

Therefore - December 1987/February 1988 - Vol. 16, No. 1

Editor, Grace Hollan

Adapting & Appropriating Art from Afar: Negotiating a Global Identity Through Popular Culture, A Study of Salsa in the Senegalese Context

The following study is essentially an attempt to explore cross-cultural exchange and the resulting (re)creation of different forms of cultural expression. In its broadest sense it aims to explore the quotidian, cultural sides of globalization. It takes for its focus the re-appropriation of salsa music in Dakar, Senegal. Through interviews and participant observation in a number of salsa venues, I explore the various meanings Senegalese salseros put into salsa music and dance. Senegalese salsa is rooted in a very concrete historical background, while also holding meaning for the present. In short, the appropriation of salsa into the Senegalese context serves as a platform for negotiating local and globalized Senegalese identities