Brave spirits on new paths : toward a globally relevant paradigm of Indigenous entrepreneurship research

This is the first study in a series aimed at strengthening research in the emerging field of Indigenous entrepreneurship. A literature survey revealed two dominant themes: the need to reconcile tradition with innovation and the need to understand how Indigenous world-views and values impact upon enterprise. Four relevant theoretical contexts guided an empirical investigation employing depth interviews with 40 selected opinion leaders representing two cultures: Indigenous Australian and American Indian. Data evaluation culminated in the formal articulation of a paradigm for Indigenous entrepreneurship research. Discussion focused on utility of the paradigm and future research directions.

Brave spirits on new paths : toward a globally relevant paradigm of indigenous entrepreneurship research

This is the first study in a series aimed at strengthening research in the emerging field of Indigenous entrepreneurship. A literature survey revealed two dominant themes: the need to reconcile tradition with innovation and the need to understand how Indigenous world-views and values impact upon enterprise. Four relevant theoretical contexts guided an empirical investigation employing depth interviews with 40 selected opinion leaders representing two cultures: Indigenous Australian and American Indian. Data evaluation culminated in the formal articulation of a paradigm for Indigenous entrepreneurship research. Discussion focused on utility of the paradigm and future research directions.

Mothering siblings: Diaspora, desire and identity in American born confused Desi

In this essay we consider the construction of cultural identity, motherhood and the family in ABCD, a film of the Indian diaspora that had its world premiere at the 2001 London Film Festival. This film reads family, apparently within familiar narrative structures such as the U.S.-immigrant story, as portrayed in films like Goodbye, Columbus and My Big Fat Greek Wedding, and the "leaving home" story, as classically portrayed in Pride and Prejudice, where a young person needs to escape from her clueless family. The irritating presence of the mother in the film, and the quickness with which her two children appear to make life-determining decisions following her death, seem to invite discussions of plot and character organized around ideas of individual development, self-improvement and understanding. This is the territory of the desire plot, an account of family history captured for the twentieth century by Freudian-Lacanian readings which position sexual desire within the unconscious history of familial fantasies, understood as vertical and Oedipal. In this territory, mothers and old ladies become, as Mary Jacobus memorably phrased it, little more than "the waste products" of a system in which marriageable women are objects of exchange between men (142) and a mother's death would be expected to grease the wheels of narrative. Identity and narrative are inextricably linked here: a certain understanding of narrative as developmental and teleological paves the way for an understanding of identity as either/or. There are problems, however, in trying to read ABCD as a bildüngsroman structured by what Susan Freidman calls "the temporal plots of the family romance, its repetitions and discontents" (137), rendering the "Indian" characteristics of the plot unreadable, and the apparently self-defeating nature of the characters' choices and behavior, rather pointless. A central [End Page 16] difficulty is that the film both responds to and resists readings based on the Oedipal model of the bildüngsroman with its focus on linear development through time.