Otherness

This text discusses the discursive construction of the body of a woman/witch as a threatening Other under Article 60 of the Criminal Practice, which served both as a criminal law and as a criminal procedure law in Hungary, and thus Croatia and Slavonia, during the period of mass witchcraft trials from 1699 to the mid-18th century. Otherness is approached from a psychoanalytic, Lacanian point of view because it opens up the possibility of understanding the collective affective politics of fear as a reflection of the unconscious in the language that created the witch imaginary, which takes its origin from the register of the imaginary and the mirror stage, i.e., in the psychological economy of structuring of the self/ego. The legal procedures that are analyzed in the text as part of the symbolic register seek to socially channel and discipline fear first by inscribing on and into women’s bodies various deviations and transgressions of the human, which are then entirely annulled through d...

This paper analyzes four reports concerning dog-headed creatures (pasoglavci) published in the late 19th and early 20th century in the Journal of Folk Life and Customs of Southern Slavs (Zbornik za narodni život i običaje Južnih Slavena). In order to determine who the dog-headed creatures represented in the Croatian folk culture of the time and why reports concerning them got published in the first ethnological journal in Croatia, it was necessary to study the concept of dog-headed creatures from the perspective of the process of othering. The conclusion was that the specific historical and cultural circumstances that existed in the area from which the reports originated stimulated the construction of the idea that the dog-headed creatures existed, which was used both to demonize other ethnoreligious groups and to create a positive image of the original group’s own identity.

when we were astronauts in training
we spun around at a breakneck speed
in a shining sphere in the dark
until our eyes ended up
on the other side of everything

when we were cosmonauts in training
we had to endure with a smile
the pin that pricked the left side of our chests
the pin that bore the badge of a hero
combusting in flames
somewhere far away

when we were astronauts in training
our lady friends
our future wives had to smile and
tap their fingers on a burnt down cigarette
their hands, red nails and
the soft arm of a child intertwined

when we were cosmonauts in training
we had to sing with others
eat with the chosen ones and dance as if
we’re already floating in a capsule
through the depths of dark

when we were astronauts in training
we were told we must believe
in ourselves and the future that was already there
that we had to go out there
that we were the best of all of those
who stood around us and now clapped
we climbed the cross alone
that’s how mad we’d gone

when we were cosmonauts in training
good old earth do not cry we said
good old earth do not be afraid
the days passed oh
stay put do not budge
this is between us and the future
between our capsule swirling
along the edge of what
can only mean
you’ll never see us again
when we were in training
we drove in the sun
by the lake where the fishermen cast their
shoulders into the sludge
and muddy waters
through the crowns in which the dry leaves
quivered
when we were in training
we were already dying of boredom and the prospect
of chasms in our lives
we found ourselves beside
a very old dog
it’s Rufus you said
it’s Laika
I tried to cheer you up

and then came a woman strapped with a bomb
stood between us and set herself off
the vacuum sucked up all the bloom
all the sudden future and our running had to stop

when we were astronauts in training
when we were cosmonauts in training
the training lacked something
only the ferns grew around us
as we sat back into the evening splattered
with mud
large concrete blocks crumbling down
and a cloud of dust and ashes rising into a very dark night

and then came a woman strapped with a bomb
with a fair face and a fixed gaze
she set herself off
and so it goes on for this whole afternoon
the night
the uncertain morning in a vacuum
Rufus has lost a leg
Laika is dead
we have to accept it
while on our faces
in the dust the bluish images flash
the flame and great clouds
of ashes rise up in the end
into that vast space
and finally finally

This paper is a critical examination of discursive strategies of othering in three refugee-focused books in Turkish children’s literature written after the onset of Syrian civil war. Drawing upon Van Dijk’s ideological analysis, eliciting the representation of “us vs. them” in a network of semantic and formal structures, the study has two closely related main aims. The first is to show how children’s literature, as a significant conveyor of norms, values, and ideology, provides fertile ground to examine power relations. The second is to identify discursive strategies of othering, which categorize and underscore group-based differences by attributing negative characteristics, in three Turkish children’s books about the Syrian war. Findings demonstrate that negative representation of the Other is foregrounded by actor description, lexicalization, and implicitness within the framework of semantic structures. Formal structures resonate with topoi under the umbrella of argumentation and rhe...

I have never yet written
I’ve only scribbled this or that nor was it ever true
I now can write and can see, what it is.
True.
Such truth as is reality itself, like that which is not like itself
A mathematical dream:
An absolute good. On the cube.
Now I will write no more, I’ll merely jeer.
Jeer even Anatole France himself and I surely can write yet surely more can cry and even more can endure... if someone requires it of me.
It bothers me greatly that there is no reasoner... measurer.
Since I cannot write poetry
I’m trying it more often. Perhaps then it will be beautiful
The way kitsch was, like an alien continent,
Where never before have I walked and yet
Have led there among great dangers... others
And could do it bravely.
And on a little branch I walked there myself.
I’ve just seen it. It was not a joy ride, just
what was shown to me by those fevered, willing friends
Since then I’ve feared having a passion.
Like cocaine. Like this familiar moment (?)...
Hypnotized. Useful. Custom-made.

All narratives of Caryl Phillips present prolific ground for research in spatial literary studies. Phillips’s “Heartland,” the focus of this paper, deals with the mechanics of Britain’s enslaving past. The narrator is an anomalous character who stands at the borderline between two multiplicities and takes part in the social deterritorialization process of the absolute anomalous or, to say, a perpetual outsider, the slave, who loiters without a safe anchorage. The process of social deterritorialization necessitates the eradication of all beacons of geographical, familial, tribal, linguistic, and cultural belonging. The process of social deterritorialization necessitates the eradication of all beacons of geographical, familial, tribal, linguistic, and cultural belonging. This then requires a more stratified understanding and evaluation of the slave-making process as well as a critical reading of narratives of slavery such as “Heartland.” This paper, therefore, aims to construct a multifo...