(Dis)placements

This article is about twelve middle-class students, previously studying in elite primary and secondary schools, making another attempt at getting into university in Hong Kong. Despite their failure at a critical educational stage, which contradicts a general pattern of middle-class educational success, they decide to seek a second chance by reading an associate degree in community college, a perceived inferior educational option. Despite feeling determined, they are anxious and uneasy with taking up this option. How the middle class feel about their academic pursuits, especially after a critical failure, is under-researched. This article attempts to fill this gap by referring to Bourdieu’s notions of habitus and field to make sense of the complex or contradictory feelings of 12 students with a self-conscious, high-status, middle-class habitus in encountering a perceived low-status community college. I shall conclude this article with the normative implication of our discussion in makin...

EstagfirullahInna Lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji'unda će plutati. Pa, mislim da me dom ispljunuo, nestanci struje i policijski sat kao jezik uz klimavi zub. Bože, znaš li kako je teško pričati o danu kada te vlastiti grad vukao za kosu, kraj starog zatvora, kraj školskih vrata, kraj gorućih torza nabijenih na stupove kao zastave? Kada upoznam druge nalik sebi, prepoznajem čežnju, nedostajanje, sjećanje na pepeo na njihovim licima. Nitko ne napušta dom osim ako dom nisu usta morskog psa. Nosila sam tu staru himnu u ustima tako dugo da više nije bilo mjesta ni za jednu drugu pjesmu, drugi jezik i drugi govor. Poznajem strah koji te prekriva, u potpunosti guta. Rastrgala sam i pojela svoju putovnicu u hotelu zračne luke. Naduta sam jezikom koji si ne mogu priuštiti da zaboravim.*Znam da je nekoliko stvari istinito. Ne znam kamo idem, a odakle dolazim nestaje, nisam dobrodošla i moja ljepota ovdje nije ljepota. Moje tijelo gori sramom nepripadanja, moje tijelo žudi. Ja sam grijeh sjećanja i o...

She looked loathingly at the spoon. It was a metal spoon, dark, with a small engraving on its handle – a sharp taste. “Open your mouth, slowly, eaaaasy, like a little birdie in its nest,” he said, bringing the spoon to her mouth. He hated spoons; they had seemed despicable little things since he was small. Why did he now find himself having to wield it, full of soup, having to usher it now into this young child’s mouth, as his parents had done to him, as surely as his parents’ parents had also done? If they even had spoons then, if some fool had already invented them. He had to find himself an encyclopedia and figure out when the first spoon had been forged; he had to get his hands on an encyclopedia, a source of infinite knowledge by which he might survive. Spoon: A piece of silverware with a concave scoop at its end; typically used for carrying liquids to the mouth.

Transgressivity, in a broad sense, denotes a state of movement from one distinct position, mode, or territory to another, be it spatial, geographical, mental, spiritual, or even narrative. Transgression occurs when one crosses boundaries, in other words, limes of different entities. Geocritical transgressivity, which is a multifaceted concept, may lead to a variety of interpretations at many different strata. Transgressivity finds echoes in Caryl Phillips’s narratives, at times in geographical forms, where a deterritorialized character crosses borders without ever gaining reterritorialization, at other times, in his fragmented narration where the reader stands at a threshold. Our paper uses Phillips’s A New World Order (2001) in particular as a key text through this geocritical lens of transgressivity to see to what extent it functions as the author’s map legend that presents a cartographic pattern of his writing in general. Our discussion also focuses on Phillips’s distinct analyses i...

The boy was playing alone on a dusty road, not far from the big door of the courtyard of his house. On a day other than a market day or a holiday, the road would be peaceful, almost deserted, but the boy would always harbor a hidden hope that the road might produce something new, rare, and exciting. On that day the road brought nothing for quite a long time. At one moment the boy raised his eyes. High overhead he saw someone coming down the hill.The slopes of that unusually steep hill rose above the town almost perpendicularly, evoking in the boy’s mind the image of a school blackboard. The precipitous surface of the hill was streaked by a dusty white road that disappeared behind low, rocky and sparsely vegetated mounds with a well-trodden shortcut the color of clay stretching between them. High above on the hill the traveller emerged as a tiny figure whose clothes or age could not yet be discerned. The boy saw him disappear behind the rocky mounds and then appear again, coming out of ...

Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume One opens with the claim that “It should not be surprising that Marx remains as inexhaustible as capital itself, and that with every adaptation or mutation of the latter his texts and his thought resonate in new ways and with fresh accents … rich with new meanings” (Jameson 1). Together with Valences of the Dialectic (2009), this is Fredric Jameson's latest chapter in a life-long project of actualization and affirmation of different categories of Marx’s dialectic, from alienation to commodity fetishism, all thoroughly criticized and somewhat abandoned after the (post)structuralist turn of Marxism in the late 1960s and early 1970s. By positing the category of representation in the center of his reading of Capital, Jameson is moving against the current of those appropriations of Marx that amidst the unprecedented global financial crisis of 2008, aimed to find their foothold in the supposed objectivity of the economy – projecting onto the economy ...