Shakespeare and the Re/Vision of Indian Heritage in the Postcolonial British Context

As part of the 2012 World Shakespeare Festival, the Royal Shakespeare Company staged a production of Much Ado About Nothing set in India. Shakespeare’s Messina in sixteenth century Italy was transposed to twenty-first century Delhi and with a company of actors who were all of Indian heritage. The casting of individual British Asian actors in mainstream UK productions of Shakespeare is no longer unusual. What was unprecedented here, however, was that not only was the entire cast ‘Asian’ but the director was not, as is standard practice, a leading member of the white British theatrical establishment. Instead the director, Iqbal Khan, is the son of a Pakistani father who migrated to England in the 1960s. I use the term ‘Indian heritage’ with great caution conscious that what began under the British Raj in nineteenth century India led through subsequent economic imperatives and exigencies, and political schism to a history of migratory patterns which means that today’s British Asian population is a complex demographic construct representing numerous different languages and cultural and religious affiliations. The routes which brought those actors to play imagined Indian Shakespeare in Stratford-upon-Avon in July 2012 were many and various. I explore in this chapter the way in which that complexity of heritage has been brought to bear on the revisioning of Shakespeare by British Asian theatre makers operating outside the theatrical mainstream. In general because of the social, economic and institutional challenges facing British Asian theatre artists, the number of independent professional companies is comparatively small and for the most part, their work has focused on creating drama which interrogates thorny questions of identity formation and contemporary cultural practices within the ‘new’ British Asian communities. Nevertheless for artists born and/or educated in the UK the Western classical canon, including of course Shakespeare, is as much part of their heritage as the classical Indian narratives and performance traditions which so powerfully evoke collective memories of the lost ‘home’ of their elders. By far the most consistent engagement with Shakespeare has been seen in the work of Tara Arts which was the first British Asian theatre company set up in 1977. The artistic director Jatinder Verma brings his own ‘transformed and translated’ heritage as an East African-born, Punjabi-speaking, English-educated, Indian migrant to the UK to plays as diverse as A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Troilus and Cressida , The Tempest and The Merchant of Venice. I discuss examples of Tara productions in the light of the way Shakespeare’s plays have been used to forge both creative synergies between parallel cultures and provide a means of addressing the ontological ruptures and dislocations associated with the colonial past.

Pytanie o pamięć. Relacje autobiograficzne więźniów obozów koncentracyjnych

This book consists of two main parts. The first part offers a basic methodological introduction, presenting a concise but multifaceted overview of current problems of collective memory. The second part contains a set of interviews with former prisoners of concentration camps carried out by the authors. The research was conducted by Paweł Greń and Łukasz Posłuszny and focuses on issues of collective and cultural memory illustrated by individual life experiences of concentration camps prisoners. The field of oral history serves as the framework of analysis and narrative inquiry as its research tool. Interviews and additional research materials were collected by the authors and are not available in previous publications, making this work a precious supplement to the current scholarly body of knowledge and achievements in the discipline of memory studies. According to the authors, current historical and literary publications provide an incomplete picture of the WWII and its aftermaths for survivors, because descriptions of the war and imprisonment in the camp play still a dominate role in narratives. The importance of these issues in autobiographies is unquestionable and highly needed to create a common identity among generation of prisoners, though authors often wanted to perceive the fate of individuals in a broader perspective – including the periods before and after the war. Hence, interviews stressed personal experiences and their understanding over time by former prisoners. The interviews covered many topics on life before, during and after the camp – among them daily and neutral routines, but also difficult matters. The latter were connected on the one hand with traumatic events or harsh memories and emotions, and on the other hand with less extensively highlighted threads of prisoners’ lives - such as issues of the body and sexuality – and their dependence on particular representation or narrative. The authors are convinced that the book serves not only as a record of past remembered by eyewitnesses, but it also depicts their accounts in wider contexts and discourses, which expose specific dimensions of told and written stories. In the book Questions for Memory one examine the approach proposed by young scholars. Interviews were conducted from 2009-2011, seventy years after the end of the second world war, and this initiative was the result of questions and doubts of the authors from the existing literature. They also wanted to use the unique opportunity to meet with eyewitnesses and record their stories, because when they pass away we will irretrievably lose the possibility to listen to them and to pose sensitive questions. The majority of the interviewees were prisoners of KL Auschwitz-Birkenau, and their experiences differed greatly from each other based on social background and specific experience in the camps as well as their post-camp and postwar life. Aside from persons whose stories are already well known and open, readers will hear the stories of those who spoke only reluctantly and very rarely, or who had remained silent until the present author’s research. Qualitative differences between interviews occurred on the level of established relationship and atmosphere of trust, which varied according to circumstances and individual character and personality. For P. Greń and Ł. Posłuszny, each interviewed person is equally and highly valued due to the collected material and the personal experience of the meetings. Among the ten interviews placed in the book, seven of them are the stories told by women. Their testimonies exemplify realities of everyday prisoners’ existence and gravitate towards mirroring specifically feminine perspectives of imprisonment. For women, crucial problems stemmed from experiences of body that intertwine with suffering, feeling of shame and humiliation. Early discussions on holocaust literature and issues of representation that shaped the Polish narrative and collective memory imposed imperatives of silence on certain topics. A solution for reconciling heroic and inhuman deeds in stories with completely human physiology was impossible and improper for many years. There were also questions about life after, ways of dealing with a trauma or reflections on the present time. During conversations the authors attempted to come closer to something distant and incomprehensible for their generation and for people who did not experience the camps. Despite the fact that there have been seventy years of dealing with these events in literature, art, drama, film, memoirs and scientific works, the past still breeds more questions than answers. The book Questions for Memory serves as an example of this phenomenon.

Carbon reduction activism in the UK: lexical creativity and lexical framing in the context of climate change

This article examines discourses associated with a new environmental movement, “Carbon Rationing Action Groups” (CRAGs). This case study is intended to contribute to a wider investigation of the emergence of a new type of language used to debate climate change mitigation. Advice on how to reduce one's “carbon footprint,” for example, is provided almost daily. Much of this advice is framed by the use of metaphors and “carbon compounds”—lexical combinations of at least two roots—such as “carbon finance” or “low carbon diet.” The study uses a combination of tools from frame analysis and lexical pragmatics within the general framework of ecolinguistics to compare and contrast language use on the CRAGs' website with press coverage reporting on them. The analysis shows how the use of such lexical carbon compounds enables and facilitates different types of metaphorical frames such as dieting, finance and tax paying, war time rationing, and religious imperatives in the two corpora.

La famille nucléaire au 21e siècle : quelle place pour le père?

Depuis les débuts de la deuxième vague féministe, la participation quasi-universelle des femmes au marché du travail a causé la perte, pour les pères de famille, du rôle de pourvoyeur exclusif que ces derniers avaient tenu depuis si longtemps. Les femmes hétérosexuelles de la société contemporaine sont dorénavant plus scolarisées et atteignent des carrières plus avancées que leurs contreparties masculines. Alors que les femmes soutiennent davantage la famille par leurs emplois, les hommes doivent proportionnellement assumer des rôles plus actifs et participatifs à la maison. En cette période de transition, de transformation et de redéfinition rapides des rôles genrés à l’intérieur de l’économie familiale hétérosexuelle, les pères participent de manière plus équitable à l’éducation des enfants et à l’entretien du domicile, ces rôles ayant longtemps été attribués presque exclusivement aux femmes. Ces nouvelles responsabilités détonnent avec les représentations stéréotypées des hommes dans la culture populaire, ainsi qu’avec les modèles d’identification de la masculinité normative que les hommes ont requis et requièrent toujours sous l’égide de l’hétérosexualité imposée. De ce fait, les hommes occidentaux de moins de cinquante ans se trouvent souvent à cheval entre deux mondes d’exigences concurrentes. La place que peuvent et doivent prendre les pères au sein de leurs familles requiert un questionnement critique. L’ironie de la place du père peut être comprise comme la tension entre les normes du genre rétrogrades ou conservatrices et les exigences – à la fois politiques et pragmatiques – de la masculinité de la classe moyenne contemporaine. Cette tension fondamentale et structurante de la masculinité contemporaine est vécue par l’anxiété d’association au genre, ainsi qu’à travers des difficultés filiales, paternelles et intergénérationnelles. Ce mémoire de maîtrise adopte une approche déconstructiviste envers l’analyse de constructions contemporaines de la masculinité reproductive. À travers les gender studies, la théorie queer ainsi que la psychanalyse, le mémoire offre des lectures analytiques du discours de croissance personnelle de John Stoltenberg, de la fiction autobiographique de Karl Ove Knausgaard, ainsi que de la série télévisée américaine Dexter.

Le sens de l’urgence à l’hôpital

Article

La famille nucléaire au 21e siècle : quelle place pour le père?

Depuis les débuts de la deuxième vague féministe, la participation quasi-universelle des femmes au marché du travail a causé la perte, pour les pères de famille, du rôle de pourvoyeur exclusif que ces derniers avaient tenu depuis si longtemps. Les femmes hétérosexuelles de la société contemporaine sont dorénavant plus scolarisées et atteignent des carrières plus avancées que leurs contreparties masculines. Alors que les femmes soutiennent davantage la famille par leurs emplois, les hommes doivent proportionnellement assumer des rôles plus actifs et participatifs à la maison. En cette période de transition, de transformation et de redéfinition rapides des rôles genrés à l’intérieur de l’économie familiale hétérosexuelle, les pères participent de manière plus équitable à l’éducation des enfants et à l’entretien du domicile, ces rôles ayant longtemps été attribués presque exclusivement aux femmes. Ces nouvelles responsabilités détonnent avec les représentations stéréotypées des hommes dans la culture populaire, ainsi qu’avec les modèles d’identification de la masculinité normative que les hommes ont requis et requièrent toujours sous l’égide de l’hétérosexualité imposée. De ce fait, les hommes occidentaux de moins de cinquante ans se trouvent souvent à cheval entre deux mondes d’exigences concurrentes. La place que peuvent et doivent prendre les pères au sein de leurs familles requiert un questionnement critique. L’ironie de la place du père peut être comprise comme la tension entre les normes du genre rétrogrades ou conservatrices et les exigences – à la fois politiques et pragmatiques – de la masculinité de la classe moyenne contemporaine. Cette tension fondamentale et structurante de la masculinité contemporaine est vécue par l’anxiété d’association au genre, ainsi qu’à travers des difficultés filiales, paternelles et intergénérationnelles. Ce mémoire de maîtrise adopte une approche déconstructiviste envers l’analyse de constructions contemporaines de la masculinité reproductive. À travers les gender studies, la théorie queer ainsi que la psychanalyse, le mémoire offre des lectures analytiques du discours de croissance personnelle de John Stoltenberg, de la fiction autobiographique de Karl Ove Knausgaard, ainsi que de la série télévisée américaine Dexter.

Le sens de l’urgence à l’hôpital

Article

DHEC strategic plan

This short strategic plan explains the agency's vision, mission and core values. It's agency strategies are broken down into five strategic focus areas, the imperatives that unite its teams, align its work, and enable the agency to move forward in our ambitious mission. Those five strategies are: education and engagement, science in action, leadership and contribution, service and accessibility and operational excellence.

El rol de las redes de apoyo transnacional en la evolución del régimen de trata de personas en la región del mekong, 2004-2015

Con el fin de la unipolaridad no sólo se fortalecieron mecanismos de gobernanza global como los Regímenes Internacionales, sino también se fortalecieron actores no estatales. A pesar de la importancia que tomaron estos dos elementos aún no existe una teoría que explique exhaustivamente la relación que existe entre ellos. Es por lo anterior que, la investigación busca responder de qué manera el rol de las Redes de Apoyo Transnacional ha incidido en la evolución del régimen de tráfico de personas en la Región del Mekong. Asimismo tiene como objetivo comprender las relación entre el Régimen y las Redes de Apoyo Transnacional a través de la formulación de un caso de estudio basado en metodologías cualitativas, específicamente, en el análisis teórico-constructivista y el análisis de contenido de documentos producidos por actores estatales y no estatales.

Un aporte a la comprensión de las estrategias emergentes en las organizaciones a través del concepto de improvisación y la metáfora musical

Este trabajo se inscribe en uno de los grandes campos de los estudios organizacionales: la estrategia. La perspectiva clásica en este campo promovió la idea de que proyectarse hacia el futuro implica diseñar un plan (una serie de acciones deliberadas). Avances posteriores mostraron que la estrategia podía ser comprendida de otras formas. Sin embargo, la evolución del campo privilegió en alguna medida la mirada clásica estableciendo, por ejemplo, múltiples modelos para ‘formular’ una estrategia, pero dejando en segundo lugar la manera en la que esta puede ‘emerger’. El propósito de esta investigación es, entonces, aportar al actual nivel de comprensión respecto a las estrategias emergentes en las organizaciones. Para hacerlo, se consideró un concepto opuesto —aunque complementario— al de ‘planeación’ y, de hecho, muy cercano en su naturaleza a ese tipo de estrategias: la improvisación. Dado que este se ha nutrido de valiosos aportes del mundo de la música, se acudió al saber propio de este dominio, recurriendo al uso de ‘la metáfora’ como recurso teórico para entenderlo y alcanzar el objetivo propuesto. Los resultados muestran que 1) las estrategias deliberadas y las emergentes coexisten y se complementan, 2) la improvisación está siempre presente en el contexto organizacional, 3) existe una mayor intensidad de la improvisación en el ‘como’ de la estrategia que en el ‘qué’ y, en oposición a la idea convencional al respecto, 4) se requiere cierta preparación para poder improvisar de manera adecuada.

La construcción de sentido (‘sensemaking’) de un entorno estratégico turbulento por parte de los altos directivos: un estudio en una multinacional automotriz

Este artículo presenta los resultados de una investigación realizada al interior de dos contextos. Por un lado, el teórico, en el marco de uno de los discursos más relevantes en los campos de la estrategia organizacional, de la managerial and organizational cognition (MOC) y, en general, de los estudios organizacionales (organization studies): la construcción de sentido (sensemaking). Por el otro, el empírico, en una de las grandes compañías multinacionales del sector automotriz con presencia global. Esta corporación enfrenta una permanente tensión entre lo que dicta la casa matriz, en relación con el cumplimiento de metas y estándares específicos, considerando el mundo entero, y los retos que, teniendo en cuenta lo regional y lo local, experimentan los altos directivos encargados de hacer prosperar la empresa en estos lugares. La aproximación implementada fue cualitativa. Esto en atención a la naturaleza de la problemática abordada y la tradición del campo. Los resultados permiten ampliar el actual nivel de comprensión acerca de los procesos de sensemaking de los altos directivos al enfrentar un entorno estratégico turbulento.

Évènement: The Tragic Hero (Immortal) Under Lacanian Materialism Bias

Alain Badiou (1994) argues that the failure of the discourses that govern the society is the result of a misplaced ethics. The preservation of human rights and respect for diversity are among the imperatives that naturalize the dominant ideology as a mainstay of the status quo. To supplant the values ​​of a generalization that leads to the subjection and omission, the philosopher presents the "ethics of truths", in which the subject dispenses with the attitude of victimization, increasing in its subjectivity. In this way, it’s put in the forefront the recognition of the Same and the ability to pursue a truth process. Moving away from the passive behavior and unanimity, comes the immortal subject, which resists to the conduct of "animal-to-death", becoming faithful to an Event, occurrence that will transform many lives and will lead to single completeness as possible. In Greek myth, Prometheus rises to the rank of immortal at the time that gives us the human race with the freedom, through the gift of fire. This event is the appointment to which Prometheus listens and by which he gives up the advantages of the gods world, overcoming the limits of a typical lifetime to build the character of transcendence, the immortality. Despite the punishment that is suffering, Prometheus remains faithful to the disruption that it introduces, personifying an authentic warrior against the high-handed Olympic power.