Showing papers in "Social Identities in 2009"
TL;DR: The authors investigates the significance of everyday intercultural social practice enacted in the mundane sites of young people's daily life to the development of new research directions for multicultural youth studies, and explores the idea of everyday multiculturalism as an appropriate analytical approach for understanding the ways that young people deal with cultural difference.
Abstract: This paper investigates the significance of everyday intercultural social practice enacted in the mundane sites of young people's daily life to the development of new research directions for multicultural youth studies. It explores the idea of everyday multiculturalism as an appropriate analytical approach for understanding the ways that young people deal with cultural difference in conditions of super-diversity. It considers how this approach gives descriptive and explanatory priority to sites and literacies such as everyday neighbourhood locales, vernacular expressions and popular culture that form an important part of young people's ‘habitus’, and provides insight into how struggles over the decentring of whiteness from the national imaginary occur in quotidian ways.
96 citations
TL;DR: A question left unanswered by this work yet begged by Washington’s optimism about minority participation in biomedical research is what developments make it conceivable that readers of this daunting account of experimental maltreatment might feel compelled to enlist in clinical studies.
Abstract: Inclusion: the politics of difference in medical research, by Steven Epstein, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2009, 432 pp., US$19.00 Paper. ISBN 9780226213101 In Medical Apartheid, journalis...
48 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, a counter-story to make sense of race as it manifests in one teacher education program in the Midwest in particular, and in teacher education programs more broadly is presented.
Abstract: Critical race theory (CRT) has been a framework used to better understand practice and research in education. Leading scholarship in CRT has called upon researchers and practitioners interested in CRT for education to attend to the tenets of CRT beyond counter-storytelling. The article begins with a counterstory to make sense of race as it manifests in one teacher education program in the Midwest in particular, and in teacher education programs more broadly. Analysis of the counterstory moves beyond the story itself, exploring ‘holes’ that implicate the ‘institution’ and the ‘author’ as contributing to racism. Using the CRT tenets of whiteness as property, and an expansive versus restrictive view of anti-discrimination, the author interrogates the way in which racism manifests in pre-service teacher education, and how his behavior has been complacent in institutional racism and maintaining white privilege. Finally, thoughts are offered that speak to how educators might approach anti-racist stances.
38 citations
TL;DR: The assassination of Theo van Gogh: From social drama to cultural trauma, by Ron Eyerman, Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2008, 213 pp., US$ 22.95 (paperback) as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: The assassination of Theo van Gogh: From social drama to cultural trauma, by Ron Eyerman, Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2008, 213 pp., US$ 22.95 (paperback). ISBN 978-0-8223-4406-3 In t...
32 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue that this nostalgic longing is constructed as a response to racial relationships in the United States that identifies non-white, in this instance South Asian Americans, as aliens and others who should go back home.
Abstract: The conversations surrounding an ephemeral home – left behind decades ago or perhaps never even visited – always and continually begs the question: why? Why do we constantly talk about geographies to which we have little or no connection with such nostalgia and fervor? Why do immigrants pick a distant space and mark that territory as home, even as we settle into the spaces we presently occupy and slowly begin the journey toward some form of assimilation? Framed by these questions, this essay attempts to articulate – through a multi-site analysis including interviews, literary and media texts – how identities are shaped through – and in relation – to the nostalgic longings of non-white immigrant experiences. The essay contends that this nostalgic longing is constructed as a response to racial relationships in the United States that identifies non-white, in this instance South Asian Americans, as aliens and others who should go back home.
30 citations
TL;DR: For example, the authors proposes the category of digital nostalgia as a critical tool for analysing the experience of displacement within the contradictory discourses of globalization, which relentlessly sell the erasure of space, distance and borders, while encouraging legal and territorial barriers that prevent the free circulation of people.
Abstract: Focusing on the recent phenomenon of massive Ecuadorian migration to the United States and Europe, this essay explores how digital technologies are changing the experience of displacement, and how nostalgia – the longing for a home and a time left behind – may feel different in this era of global capitalism when, as advertisements posted on immigrant-oriented web sites claim, home is ‘just a click away’. Due to the encounter with new technologies intent upon shrinking space and time, nostalgia might be becoming digital – a quest for continuity of space and time through the simultaneity offered by digital technologies. This essay, then, proposes the category of digital nostalgia as a critical tool for analysing the experience of displacement within the contradictory discourses of globalization, which relentlessly sell the erasure of space, distance and borders, while encouraging legal and territorial barriers that prevent the free circulation of people. For Ecuadorian migrant workers, digital technologies ...
30 citations
TL;DR: The authors argued that the state of exception is fundamentally race-based and argued that this change of attitude is connected with the ongoing reconstruction of Australia as a neoliberal state. And they argued that there is a direct relation between the assumptions of neoliberalism and Giorgio Agamben's theorization of the state-of-the-art.
Abstract: Over the last twenty years or so there has been a greatly increased anxiety in Australia over those people now often identified as asylum seekers. In this article I argue that this change of attitude is connected with the ongoing reconstruction of Australia as a neoliberal state. I link the importance of the border of the nation-state with the development of capitalism and go on to argue that there is a direct relation between the assumptions of neoliberalism and Giorgio Agamben's theorization of the state of exception. With this argument I suggest that the state of exception is fundamentally raced. I discuss the Australian relationship between migrants, race and capitalism, which historically worked in terms of the White Australia policy, and think about how asylum seekers are understood to threaten the racialized, neoliberal order of Australian capitalism.
29 citations
TL;DR: The authors look at how the refugee settlement process has taken place in Calcutta in the aftermath of the 1947 partition, and how that process has very much been influenced by the trauma of losing social position in their ancestral country and the desire to regain it and belong to a new land.
Abstract: In the aftermath of conflicts, refugees are often treated as helpless victims of trauma in need of international aid and intervention. Refugees can and do however move beyond the culture of dependency to create sustainable existences within their new environments. While much attention is given to the politics of displacement, humanitarian intervention and human rights of refugees, little is written about the ways in which refugees actually live, particularly those who have chosen to settle themselves rather than allow outside powers to intervene in their settlement choices. This article looks at how the refugee settlement process has taken place in Calcutta in the aftermath of the 1947 partition, and how that process has very much been influenced by the trauma of losing social position in their ancestral country and the desire to regain it and belong to a new land.
24 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors analyse the overlapping forms of identity attributed to this apparently model transnational citizen and conclude that this case study raises important questions about the multiplicity of identities in a globalised world.
Abstract: The increasingly global dispersion of elite athletes pursuing sporting careers is an important aspect of the global flow of sport-capital. Such sport migration lends itself to theorising that considers questions about attachment to place, particularly in relation to citizenship, identity and nationalism. Yet only recently have theoretically valuable concepts such as transnationalism, cosmopolitanism and diaspora been foregrounded in studies of sporting migrants. Based on an analysis of British and New Zealand media coverage of international yachtsman Sir Peter Blake's death, we analyse the overlapping forms of identity attributed to this apparently model transnational citizen. We conclude that this case study raises important questions about the multiplicity of identities in a globalised world and expands our understandings of diaspora beyond the classic focus on forced dispersal and non-dominant racial groups.
23 citations
TL;DR: The case of the Chilean diaspora in Sweden and its transformation from an exile context to a post-exile context facing a drastically altered historical situation is discussed in this article.
Abstract: The main focus of this article is how a set of practices revolve around the formation of an imagined community in dispersion – diasporisation. The study discusses the case of the Chilean diaspora in Sweden and its transformation from an exile context to a post-exile context facing a drastically altered historical situation. This transformation is analysed as a matter of agency where practices are framed differently as a response to the demand perceived in the context. The outcome of this argument speaks in favour of a diaspora concept that focuses on practices and how these are framed in order to mobilise a putative dispersed population.
19 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue that once these civil sites and technologies are situated within geopolitical relations of biopower, they become instrumental in the production of refugee trauma and death, and argue that what is in fact operative is a type of bi-political power predicated on the exercise of civil penality.
Abstract: In this essay, I focus on seemingly benign and innocuous civil sites, spaces and technologies – such as hotel rooms, demountables and shipping containers – and proceed to argue that, once these civil sites and technologies are situated within geopolitical relations of biopower, they become instrumental in the production of refugee trauma and death. I term the trauma and violence that refugees experience in the context of everyday civilian life ‘vernacular violence’. In the process of examining how hotel rooms and containers are instrumentalised by western governments into prisons, I question the line of demarcation between the civil and the penal. I argue that what is in fact operative is a type of biopolitical power predicated on the exercise of ‘civil penality’. In the latter part of the essay, I track the manner in which civil penality and vernacular violence inscribe, for refugees from the Global South, such technologies of civil transport as planes, ships and trucks. Situated within violently unequal...
TL;DR: In this paper, a young woman negotiates shifting and conflicting discourses about what a good life might consist of for a highly educated and high caste Hindu woman living at the margins of a nonetheless globalized world.
Abstract: Drawing on ethnographic research and employing a micro-historical approach that recognizes not only the transnational but also the culturally specific manifestations of modernity, this article centers on the efforts of a young woman to negotiate shifting and conflicting discourses about what a good life might consist of for a highly educated and high caste Hindu woman living at the margins of a nonetheless globalized world. Newly imaginable worlds in contemporary Mithila, South Asia, structure feeling and action in particularly gendered and classed ways, even as the capacity of individuals to actualize those worlds and the ‘modern’ selves envisioned within them are constrained by both overt and subtle means. In the context of shifting cultural anchors, new practices of silence, literacy, and even behaviors interpreted as ‘mental illness’ may become tactics in an individual's negotiation of conflicting self-representations. The confluence of forces at play in contemporary Mithila, moreover, is creating new...
TL;DR: In this article, a comparative electronic survey of some 900 journals reveals that when scholars referred to these individuals collectively during the last 200 years they employed some twenty different signifiers, and the signifier "Arabized-Jews" exhibits explanatory properties that outweigh those of its alternatives both quantitatively and qualitatively.
Abstract: Until the conclusion of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, there were roughly 750,000 Jews living in Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Syria, Tunisia, Yemen, Algeria and Palestine/Israel. A comparative electronic survey of some 900 journals reveals that when scholars referred to these individuals collectively during the last 200 years they employed some twenty different signifiers. The question I address is simple yet potentially foundational: which collective signifier can define and capture most productively, inclusively and comprehensively the socio-political and cultural experiences of those who comprised the Arab Middle East's ten indigenous Jewish minority communities prior to their dispersal (in the post-1949 armistice period)? I propose that the signifier ‘Arabized-Jews’ exhibits explanatory properties that outweigh those of its alternatives both quantitatively and qualitatively. As such, ‘Arabized-Jews’ denotes Jews who were culturally and/or linguistically Arab yet who did not self-define primarily ...
TL;DR: The authors discusses processes through which African Canadian youth construct their identities as well as form friendships within and across ethnic boundaries, and presents how, through these processes, youth use resources in history that help them construct and negotiate diaspora identities and friendships while simultaneously distancing themselves from the core group of white Canadian peers.
Abstract: This paper discusses processes through which African Canadian youth construct their identities as well as form friendships within and across ethnic boundaries. The paper presents how, through these processes, youth use resources in history that help them construct and negotiate diaspora identities and friendships while simultaneously distancing themselves from the core group of white Canadian peers.
TL;DR: In this paper, an experimental format is employed to explore what it means to combine a camera and a cell phone in a single portable device, and how the camera can alter the way tourist sites and events are experienced, recorded and shared.
Abstract: After its introduction in 2000, the cameraphone (a cell phone with digital camera functionality) rapidly became a ubiquitous presence in Japan, part of an increase in non-voice modalities associated with mobile telephony. This essay employs an experimental format to explore what it means to combine cell phone and camera in a single portable device. Particular attention is paid to how cameraphones, within the broader context of cell phone (keitai) culture in Japan, alter the way tourist sites and events are experienced, recorded, and shared. Ultimately, the ease with which the cameraphone facilitates capture, narrativization, sharing, and deletion of photos, causes a blurring of traditional distinctions between the touristic and the everyday. Furthermore, these changes are imbricated in a broader cultural shift in perception and consciousness engendered by the continued interplay between producers of digital technologies and creative use of these technologies by consumers.
TL;DR: This paper found that first generation immigrant interviewees perceived the Middle East conflict as a major anchor for their life stories, and they organized their recollected memories around the conflict, as well as their understandings of self and other.
Abstract: This article explores how Palestinian and Israeli emigres to the United States understand their sense of collective identity and belonging. Our qualitative study found that these immigrants ‘belong’ to the conflict and that the violence between the two peoples continues to impact them, even years after their emigration. All of the first generation immigrant interviewees perceived the Middle East conflict as a major anchor for their life stories. The participants organized their recollected memories around the conflict, as well as their understandings of self and ‘other’. We present one example from a Palestinian and one from an Israeli which demonstrate this tendency, and offer ideas for conceptualizing collective identity among these and other immigrant groups who have escaped war-torn regions.
TL;DR: In this paper, the author traces the process that goes from direct experience of violence to emotional healing as a spiritual journey of understanding the conditions for a sustainable, embodied peace, and considers how international and local responses to violence can be better integrated from the survivor's points of view.
Abstract: Rather than subordinating the author's lived experience and embodied knowledge of violence to a dialogue with a ‘rule of experts’, the essay considers how international and local responses to violence can be better integrated from the survivor's points of view. The essay traces the process that goes from the direct experience of violence to emotional healing as a spiritual journey of understanding the conditions for a sustainable, embodied peace. The essay was written over a period of two years, starting in March 2006 when the author returned to Aceh to conduct research on forced displacement after a six-year absence. In April 2006 the security situation in Timor Leste worsened and the author found herself writing the first draft in a gudang (storage room) in Gleno, Ermera, where she and her family were forcibly displaced for several months. In May 26 the author's home in Delta I, Dili, was burnt down, and, subsequently, in the space of one to two months more than two thousand homes were burnt down throug...
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present three challenges associated with studying short-term events, and potential solutions to each: gaining entree and finding a productive position from which to observe the scene; the hazards posed by immediately available informants and pre-existing roles; and finally the effect of short, intense field seasons on the refinement of research questions and analysis of data.
Abstract: Ethnographic research is an iterative process in which layers of knowledge gradually accumulate as we spend time in a setting. The information that presents itself most immediately may be fascinating, but is rarely the type of truth that distinguishes good scholarship. How, then, do we come to understand settings and interactions that are of short durations, where our first-hand observations may be limited to a few hours or days? I present three challenges associated with studying short-term events, and potential solutions to each: gaining entree and finding a productive position from which to observe the scene; the hazards posed by immediately available informants and pre-existing roles; and finally the effect of short, intense field seasons on the refinement of research questions and analysis of data. Insights are drawn from an independent, multi-year study on county fairs, and a collaborative study of the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada – a four-day event that draws over 100,000 a...
TL;DR: The authors argue that US nationalism evolved from ethnic, to white racial nationalism in the interwar years, in which the political establishment has opted for civic nationalism that is based upon white assimilationism.
Abstract: Much of the discussion surrounding nationalism still revolves around the ethnic versus civic nation divide. For purposes of this paper it is more useful to view the United States from the tri-modal perspective offered by Anderson, in which the United States is a creole (or settler) nation. All of Anderson's types can be seen as variants of ethnic nationalism. Kaufmann argues that the US evolved from ethnic to civic nationalism by the 1960s. This argument overlooks the importance of phenotype-based racism in the evolution of creole, or white settler colonial nationalism. We want to argue that US nationalism evolved from ethnic, to white racial nationalism in the interwar years. Since the 1920s, the political establishment has opted for civic nationalism that is based upon ‘white assimilationism’. This civic nationalism has been challenged by multiculturalism since the 1960s. In the context of a democratic political culture, the content of American nationalism has become ‘populist’ in the sense that it has ...
TL;DR: In remote Australian Aboriginal communities, medical interactions between non-Aboriginal nurses and Aboriginal patients often use health narratives to enact and contest social identities.
Abstract: In remote Australian Aboriginal communities, medical interactions between non-Aboriginal nurses and Aboriginal patients often use health narratives to enact and contest social identities. Nursing staff complain that Aboriginal patients do not comply with their prescribed medication nor attend the clinic appropriately. Nurses often blame these behaviours on irresponsibility and laziness. Conversely, Aboriginal people complain that nursing staff are racist and state that foods and medicines from the bush are more efficacious than biomedical treatment. Through medical interactions and discourse, non-Aboriginal and Aboriginal residents seek to circumscribe and challenge notions of Aboriginality.
TL;DR: This article explored the gendering of race, colonialism and anti colonial nationalism in selected novels from the Zimbabwean literary canon with the view of showing how this gendage affected different facets of colonial life and, by implication, post independence life.
Abstract: This article aims to explore the gendering of race, colonialism and anti colonial nationalism in selected novels from the Zimbabwean literary canon with the view of showing how this gendering affected different facets of colonial life and, by implication, post independence life. It relies on the Gramscian concept of hegemony in terms of how it refers to gender, particularly masculinities. The selected texts, A Son of the Soil by Wilson Katiyo, The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing and Bones by Chenjerai Hove, cover the colonial period from the moment of contact to the early post independence period. The article links the gendered nature of colonialism to the gendered aspects of anti colonial nationalism and shows how the two existed in an oppositional yet ambivalent relationship. This is also manifest in the schizophrenia of the post independence state in modeling itself after its predecessor, its anti colonial rhetoric notwithstanding.
TL;DR: In this article, the relationship between ageing, gender, cultural norms, and the constitution of gendered body-subjects is discussed, and three conceptual approaches are discussed: postmodernist/social constructionist, psychoanalytic, and poststructuralist feminist.
Abstract: This paper addresses the relationship between ageing, gender, cultural norms, and the constitution of gendered body-subjects. It briefly discusses three conceptual approaches which have been used to understand ageing, gendered body-subjects: postmodernist/social constructionist, psychoanalytic, and poststructuralist feminist. It is argued that the first two approaches are entrenched in dualistic modes of thinking, and therefore can never construct ageing gendered body subjects as other than through the dualistic discourse of decline and cultural devaluation in Western consumer cultures. The third, however, appears to hold some promise for a more just and flexible way of accounting for the integrity of, and culturally valuing, the gendered body-subject in old age. Examples from writings on dance are used to illustrate this argument.
TL;DR: The authors contextualized the function of labor within two contrasting historical traditions/tendencies of art and cultural production and developed a detailed case study of a recent exchange between two contemporary media/video artists in Los Angeles that demonstrates the complexities of how the market val...
Abstract: It is increasingly evident that advanced forms of speculative value that have become the driving engine behind the inflated global art market are nonetheless inextricably bound to and dependent upon more informal market systems that operate through the spontaneous organization of exploitable, precarious, marginalized, and ultimately undervalued forms of labor. This fact makes labor a pivotal site where the linkages between these two purportedly independent markets (and their respective systems of value and exchange) come into focus and can be more tangibly assessed and critiqued. This paper will follow this current by first contextualizing the function of labor within two contrasting historical traditions/tendencies of art and cultural production that explicitly reference labor as an essential structuring condition of the work. It will then develop a detailed case study of a recent exchange between two contemporary media/video artists in Los Angeles that demonstrates the complexities of how the market val...
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explored the growing popularity of Latin music as a specific contemporary expression of global popular culture and its impact on young Latina women's everyday lives and identity work in Sweden.
Abstract: In recent years US-based Latin culture has gained worldwide popularity through artists such as Jennifer Lopez, Shakira and Ricky Martin. Taking the national context as an emerging vantage point from which to consider globalization processes, this article explores the growing popularity of ‘Latin music’ as a specific contemporary expression of global popular culture and its impact on young Latina women's everyday lives and identity work in Sweden. Based on interviews and focus group discussions with 29 high school young Latina women between 14–20 years of age, born and/or brought up in Sweden, the article examines how musical arenas and their appeal to hybrid identities are construed in contemporary articulations of commodity cultures and representations. In the particular context of Sweden, the article looks at how young Latina women negotiate popular representations of latinidad through an intentional and unintentional embodiment of these images. It is argued that while visual discourses and representati...
TL;DR: A recent debate on nationality acquisition among postcolonial Koreans in Japan has been characterized by a tension between assimilative and transnational orientations as discussed by the authors, and the issues of citizenship rights and collective memory are central to Koreans' political identifications.
Abstract: Political identifications among postcolonial Koreans in Japan have been characterized by a tension between assimilative and transnational orientations. The tension has been reshaped in the course of a recent debate on nationality acquisition, which Korean activists and commentators started in response to Japanese policymakers’ move in the 2001 National Diet to simplify the naturalization process for postcolonial Koreans. At the heart of the debate stand the issues of citizenship rights and collective memory, which are central to Koreans’ political identifications. Advocates of nationality acquisition accept the reality of cultural and socioeconomic assimilation and are ready to become ethnic minority members of the Japanese state in return for getting full citizenship rights. Guided by the collective memory of the colonial past and social discrimination against Koreans in postcolonial Japan, critics of nationality acquisition refuse incorporation into the Japanese state and seek the possibility of transna...
TL;DR: In this article, the authors focus on the tenuous, subversive, almost invisible traces left by crime in South Africa and propose a different agenda, one based not on the false certainties of immediate causation but rather on the very subtle, subversive and almost invisible trace of crime.
Abstract: Violent crime affects every South African resident. How can crime so affect a culture, so inscribe its topographies, that it becomes possible to say these words out loud? Whereas the apartheid state was so inexorably present, reaching deep into individual lives, the post-apartheid state seems now unaccountably absent, abdicating responsibility for safety and security to private companies, the new growth industry of the post-apartheid years. Analyses of the effects of crime in South Africa often draw on government statistics, journalistic accounts, ministers’ statements, and the narratives of victims and criminals, while exploring the political and socio-economic dimensions of a situation which neither communities nor governments have successfully confronted. This essay proposes a different agenda; one based not on the false certainties of immediate causation but rather on the tenuous, subversive, almost invisible traces left by crime. Seeking to read the cultural contexts within which violent crime has fl...
TL;DR: The discourse which constructs women as innocent and vulnerable is an effect of the different ways in which male and female bodies are reduced to bare life, stripped of political status as discussed by the authors, and women with children as innocent, vulnerable non-combatants has helped to determine the ways Australia's war at the borders has been conducted.
Abstract: Australian armed forces, police and customs officials have been waging a war to secure the nation-state's borders. This war peaks in spectacular mediatised incidents of violence at certain moments and, at other times, continues as a low level of surveillance, control and invisible violence. Those who attempt to enter Australian territory in order to seek asylum have been some of the most significant victims of this war's visible and invisible violence. As with other wars, a discourse which links women with children as innocent, vulnerable non-combatants has helped to determine the ways in which Australia's war at the borders has been conducted. The discourse which constructs women as innocent and vulnerable is an effect of the different ways in which male and female bodies are reduced to bare life, stripped of political status. Where male bodies are stripped of political status so that they may be subject to violence, female bodies stripped of political status are constituted as mere reproductive bodies, ...
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examine how Irish advertising practitioners have co-opted the "idiom of identity" enabling them to speak with greater confidence and in more emotionally compelling ways about advertising audiences, to humanize business strategy and to operationalize personal biographical experience in production.
Abstract: This article derives from sociological research examining practitioners in the Irish advertising industry. Drawing from interviews with workers in this field, I examine how Irish advertising practitioners have co-opted the ‘idiom of identity’, enabling them to speak with greater confidence and in more emotionally compelling ways about advertising audiences, to humanize business strategy and to operationalize personal biographical experience in production. This article focuses on the ways Irish advertising practitioners describe their work and their understandings of Irishness in the context of a globalized Ireland and draws attention to what I describe as a ‘discursive affinity’ between cultural identity and professional acumen in the accounts of these workers. In concentrating on their valorizing of innate ‘knowing’, and drawing especially on the work of Foucault, this article attempts to explain why Irish advertising practitioners regard their own life experience as practice.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that the Costa Rican national identity impedes a realistic discussion about the phenomena and their causes, and simultaneously provides a platform for sensationalism and the social construction of fear.
Abstract: Crime, violence, and insecurity are among the most important social topics in contemporary Costa Rica These three issues play a central role in the media, politics, and everyday life, and the impression has emerged that security has changed for the worse and that society is now permanently threatened However, crime statistics do not support this perception The paper thus asks why violence and crime generate such huge fear in society The thesis is that the Costa Rican national identity – with Costa Rica constructed as a nonviolent nation – impedes a realistic discussion about the phenomena and their causes, and simultaneously provides a platform for sensationalism and the social construction of fear
TL;DR: In this paper, the author discusses how a militarised community deploys story-telling against actual military deployment and explains how the author attempts a similar tactical response in writing a novel on the subject, arguing that the military term to deploy is, in fact, overturned by the civilian population as they dream up alternative stories.
Abstract: The essay discusses how a militarised community deploys story-telling against actual military deployment and explains how the author attempts a similar tactical response in writing a novel on the subject. The master narrative of militarism subsumes/shatters the small stories of daily life in the village but these stories are re-instated/re-deployed through subversive modes of narrativising. Using lived and told stories from the total war (1987–1989) waged by the Philippine government against communist insurgency – a war that affected the author's home region – the essay argues that the military term to deploy is, in fact, overturned by the civilian population as they dream up alternative stories.