Both black and symbolically white: The 'Bajan-Brit' return migrant as post-colonial hybrid

The research presented in this article centres on an under-researched demographic group of young return migrants, namely, second-generation Barbadians, or 'Bajan-Brits', who have decided to 'return' to the birthplace of their parents. Based on 51 in-depth interviews, the essay examines the experiences of second-generation return migrants from an interpretative perspective framed within post-colonial discourse. The article first considers the Bajan-Brits and issues of race in the UK before their decision to migrate. It is then demonstrated that on 'return', in certain respects, these young, black English migrants occupy a liminal position of cultural, racial and economic privilege, based on their 'symbolic' or 'token' whiteness within the post-colonial context of Barbados. But this very hybridity and inbetweeness means that they also face difficulties and associated feelings of social alienation and discrimination. The ambivalent status of this transnational group of migrants serves to challenge traditional notions of Barbadian racial identity.

Marguerite Duras and colonialist discourse: an intertextual reading of 'L'Empire français' and 'Un barrage contre le Pacifique'

This article examines the intertextual relationship between Marguerite Duras' pro-colonialist, propagandist text, L'Empire français (1943), and her seemingly anti-colonialist novel, Un barrage contre le Pacifique (1950). It explores both the transformative and the emulative uses to which descriptive elements, borrowed from the precursor text, are put in the novel's depictions of colonial Indochina. Going against prevalent critical readings of Barrage, the article highlights the ambivalent and ultimately only partial nature of Duras' apparent ideological volte-face

The spectacle of modernity: blood, microscopes and mirrors in Colonial Tanganyika

The chapter focuses on attempts to change and improve the subjects of the colonial regime in what was the British Protectorate of Tanganyika, contemporary Tanzania. The colonial project in Africa was surrounded by technology, ideology, and representations of modernity based on the application of instrumental rationality. Through the example of colonial practices to control sleeping sickness, it examines how local forms of knowledge and livelihoods were negated and counter-tendencies people generated, offering explanations for the predicament of the human condition consequent upon the colonial experience.

A comparative corpus-assisted discourse study of the representations of hosts in promotional tourism discourse

Most studies concerned with the representations of local people in tourism discourse point to the prevalence of stereotypic images asserting that contemporary tourism perpetuates colonial legacy and gendered discursive practices. This claim has been, to some extent, contested in research that explores representations of hosts in local tourism materials claiming that tourism can also discursively resist the dominant Western imagery. While the evidence for the existence of hegemonic and diverging discourses about the local ‘Other’ seems compelling, the empirical basis of this research is rather small and often limited to one geographic context. The present study addresses these shortcomings by examining representations of hosts in a larger corpus of promotional tourism materials including texts produced by Western and local tourism industries. The data is investigated using the methodology of Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS). By comparing external with internal (self) representations, this study verifies and refines some of the claims on the subject and offers a much more nuanced picture of representations that defies the black and white scenarios proposed in previous research

What is poverty? A diachronic exploration of the discourse on poverty from the 1970s to the 2000s

Poverty is central to the concept of development. However, the relevance given to particular aspects of poverty has changed over the years and with it the manner in which poverty has been represented. The following paper explores how concepts of poverty within the 'poverty discourse' have altered over a 30-year period. A diachronic analysis is performed to explore changes in the topical and thematic composition of the definitions, in addition to the manner in which poverty has been 'framed'. The results illustrated that poverty was variably framed across the decades ranging from a 'neutral' fact to a highly contested state with little agreement over causes and consequences. Nevertheless, the relational analysis revealed the de-problematization of poverty over time. The finding has clear implications for development praxis: poverty needs to be 'attacked', but the root causes, at least from a discursive perspective, may be ignored.

Endoparasitism in colonial hosts: patterns and processes

This study begins to redress our lack of knowledge of the interactions between colonial hosts and their parasites by focusing on a novel host-parasite system. Investigations of freshwater bryozoan populations revealed that infection by myxozoan parasites is widespread. Covert infections were detected in all 5 populations studied and were often at high prevalence while overt infections were observed in only 1. Infections were persistent in populations subject to temporal sampling. Negative effects of infection were identified but virulence was low. Infection did not induce mortality in the environmental conditions studied. However, the production of statoblasts (dormant propagules) was greatly reduced in bryozoans with overt infections in comparison to uninfected bryozoans. Overtly-infected bryozoans also grew more slowly and had low fission rates relative to colonies lacking overt infection. Bryozoans with covert infections were smaller than uninfected bryozoans. High levels of vertical transmission were achieved through colony fission and the infection of statoblasts. Increased fission rates may be a strategy for hosts to escape from parasites but the parasite can also exploit the fragmentation of colonial hosts to gain vertical transmission and dispersal. Our study provides evidence that opportunities and constraints for host-parasite co-evolution can be highly dependent on organismal body plans and that low virulence may be associated with exploitation of colonial hosts by endoparasites.

Dilettantes, discipline and discourse: requirements management for construction

Requirements management (RM), as practised in the aerospace and defence sectors, attracts interest from construction researchers in response to longstanding problems of project definition. Doubts are expressed whether RM offers a new discipline for construction practitioners or whether it repeats previous exhortations to adopt a more disciplined way of working. Whilst systems engineering has an established track record of addressing complex technical problems, its extension to socially complex problems has been challenged. The dominant storyline of RM is one of procedural rationality and RM is commonly presented as a means of controlling dilettante behaviour. Interviews with RM practitioners suggest a considerable gulf between the dominant storyline in the literature and how practitioners operate in practice. The paper challenges construction researchers interested in RM to reflect more upon the theoretical debates that underpin current equivalent practices in construction and the disparity between espoused and enacted practice.