Identity

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April 5, 2010

Negotiations in Performance: The Storytelling Performance of Two Adolescent Afghan Narrators

Posted by folkpub under Central Asia, Identity, Jokes, Performance
1 Comment 

Negotiations in Performance: The Storytelling Performances of Two Adolescent Afghan Narrators

Benjamin Gatling
The Ohio State University

Abstract:

This paper examines the storytelling performance of two adolescent male Afghan narrators.  In the summer of 1976, the two narrators, Jalaludin and Mohammed Asef, sat down with Margaret Mills and her tape recorder in Kabul, Afghanistan.  Their performance encompassed items across the spectrum of oral, Persian fictive genres, from conventional stories similar to those found across the Islamic world to obscene märchen.   During the performance, the narrators repeatedly parsed notions of identity, ethnic, linguistic, and otherwise, within in a joke cycle.  This paper illustrates how their ambiguous handling of issues of identity in the performance is reflective of the boys’ ambiguous relationship to the categories named in real life. (more…)

 

April 24, 2009

Within Their Own Seams: 19th Century Fashion and the Management of the Body in Women’s Literature and Letters

Posted by folkpub under Dress, Europe, Identity, India, Modernity
1 Comment 

Within Their Own Seams: 19th Century Fashion and the Management of the Body in Women’s Literature and Letters

Kristiana Willsey
Indiana University

Abstract:

Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1855 novel, North and South, demonstrates the significant position women’s fashion played in the construction and maintenance of identity and self-expression.  Drawing on Gaskell’s novel as well as excerpts from other 19th century women’s letters, travelogues, and memoirs, we see how through imported fashions, English women participated in Empire making and confronted the problems of establishing English identity abroad. Women simultaneously occupied particular local identities and transcended them, articulating the tensions of maintaining both national and international identities through the feminine medium of fashion. At the same time, the tightly managed, corseted body represented a complex response to the advent of modernism. (more…)