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The article focuses on the exploration of reflective nostalgia in Kazuo Ishiguro's speculative fiction, particularly in "Never Let Me Go" and Klara and the Sun. Topics include the dual nature of nostalgia as both beneficial and potentially obsessive, the contrasting experiences of characters with restorative versus reflective nostalgia, and how these narratives illustrate the value of memory and storytelling in coping with trauma and loss.

Childhood is a universal trope in literature, where the figure of the child engenders feelings of pity, affection or horror in readers. This article will examine two novels — A Strange and Sublime Address by Amit Chaudhuri ([1991] 2016) and The Blue Bedspread by Raj Kamal Jha ([1995] 2009) — in order to explore how narratives about childhood in the city of Calcutta, one nostalgic and the other traumatic, deploy the figure of the child within the bhadralok milieu, to convey a nostalgic mood for the idea of Bengali middle class identity. This article engages with the possibility of how nostalgia for an apparently declining middle class is glossed by a seemingly interiorized reflection of bhadralok domesticity juxtaposed with a bleaker self-aware representation, seen through the eyes of children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Pasado y Memoria. Revista de Historia Contemporánea is the property of Pasado y Memoria and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article explores how a Powellite form of nostalgia – named for the anti-immigration politics of former British MP Enoch Powell – connects seemingly contradictory nationalist narratives known as Global Britain and Little England. While the former is typically aligned with an expansive and buccaneering national biography, the latter is held to operate via a more defensive and exclusionary imaginary. This article challenges such a binary distinction by demonstrating how the two discursive strands are intimately connected by nostalgic views about white English racial dominance, cultivated during Britain's pursuit of empire. Drawing on a qualitative analysis of verbal and visual sources from the Brexit referendum, plus 13 interviews with Leave campaigners, the article shows how Powellite nostalgia reproduces gendered and racialised colonial images of the nation amid immigration 'crisis'. Despite the detoxifying effects of much post-referendum Brexit analysis, the article also demonstrates how Powellite nostalgia is shared across the Eurosceptic spectrum and within broader English culture, persisting into the post-Brexit era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we examine the first season of HBO's TV show Westworld (2016-present) to analyse whether and how it imagines the American West nostalgically. From the perspective of (American) literary and cultural studies, we introduce a concept of nostalgia as a cultural style that understands nostalgia as situated on a continuum, as potentially located on a cultural artefact or text's (audio)visual, narrative, and ideological levels, and as detectable in what we call that text's 'nostalgic affordances.' This conceptualisation then allows us to argue for Westworld's first season as visually more nostalgic and narratively less so, which culminates in an ideologically ambivalent sentiment towards nostalgia for the West(ern). Overall, our approach moves away from generalised, binary judgements of texts as either nostalgic or not and instead suggests a more complex perspective on the minute details of how exactly an artefact can exhibit (a specific kind of) nostalgia, a framework that can be extended to analyses of other pop-cultural imaginations of the West as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an argument for the need to reconceptualise ecocritical concepts that have naively been regarded as central, and thus global, scholarly concepts. Focusing in particular on ecofascism, the paper argues that if forms of ecocriticism are to be explored in a Global South context, certain concepts associated with ecofascism and anti-progress in the Global North, such as nostalgia, need to be revisited. Such an attempt is made in this paper by introducing the concept of solastalgia to explain the intense dis-ease experienced by a loss of place (caused by, for instance, environmental destruction), and the consequent necessity for different kinds of responses and actions. By situating this study within the paradigm of critical ecosemiotics, focus is placed on the significance of locality (rather than globality) in understanding the relationship between nature and culture, and thereby re-addressing Western ecofascist critique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Signa is the property of Editorial UNED and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In her biography entitled La détresse et l’enchantement, published posthumously, Gabrielle Roy openly reveals the ambiguous situation that she experienced as a French Canadian born outside of Québec. Although her parents’ native province is rarely mentioned in her novels and short stories, she refers to it in auto fictional narratives about her youth in Manitoba such as Rue Deschambault, La route d’Altamont, and Un jardin au bout du monde. An important component of her inner life, the image of Québec that appears in these writings does not, however, reflect reality per se, but serves to connote the themes of the nostalgia for one’s origins and the impossible return to a state of innocence that are at the core of Gabrielle Roy’s work as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper revisits Philip Roth's 1988 The Facts, an unconventional attempt at public self-exploration / representation. It focuses on the intriguing mixture of inventive confession, nostalgic (re-/de-) construction and critical fictionalization that derives from the writer's belief that "in autobiography you construct a sequence of stories to bind up the facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your history's meaning". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review article offers a critique of René Arcilla's theory of education as destiny in Wim Wenders's Road Movie Philosophy: Education Without Learning. After exploring Arcilla's long‐standing interest in developing a dramatic approach to educational philosophy, one that avoids both bloodless theorising and melodramatic kitsch, it is contended that Arcilla's own interpretation of Wenders is melodramatic. Life is lived inside the hermeneutic circle. Breakthroughs are dogged by regret and fresh waves of contingency, uncertainty and disorientation. By contrast, in the destiny narrative articulated by Arcilla, we are released from this daily drama, suggesting the philosophical version of a Hollywood ending. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces a series of mnemonic regimes in Philippine electoral politics as a method of capturing current political discourse in the Philippines. The argument is that there are competing strategies being used to legitimize narratives-from the discourse of masa (masses) to one that re-memorializes walang magulo (orderliness) that the Philippine nation once enjoyed. Orderliness has become a new public commons introduced by Duterte. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Review of: Return to Ruin: Iraqi Narratives of Exile and Nostalgia, Zainab Saleh (2020) Stanford: Stanford University Press, 280 pp., ISBN 978-1-50361-411-6, p/bk, $25.00 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Violent conflict forced millions of Syrians to flee their homes to host countries. This study examines Syrian refugee women's experiences from the war's outset through their journey to Jordan. It addresses the toll this journey had on their lives. Methods: Twenty-four in-depth interviews were completed with Syrian refugee women who currently reside in urban areas of Jordan. Researchers translated, transcribed, and analyzed the interviews using group narrative methodology. Results: The Syrian women had unique nostalgic memories of times before the war. They experienced atrocities during the war that forced their decision to escape Syria. Their journey narratives testify of internal displacement, personal and collective traumatic journeys via legal and illegal routes. Almost all the women were placed in refugee camps during their transitions to host country residency. In Jordan, they faced diverse hurdles of displacement and extremely different realities compared to the ones they had in Syria. Despite how very different but difficult each of their journeys were, every single woman longed to return home to Syria. Conclusions: This study presents a new understanding of the role and process of the journeys undertaken and highlights the concept of "return" as the defining element for Syrian refugee women. Regardless of the hardships women endured to escape their homeland to find safety, "return" marks an ending to their horror journey and the beginning of a new journey of hope for a better future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the concept of ruin and abandonment through the accompanying photographic material as through also through the understanding of the reality of the photograph itself. Each ruin has its testimonies, traces, findings, photographic evidence, and more. All these unfold before us its history. The research along with the photographic material, compile the narration of the ruin. The main purpose its recognition in the world. Initially, the research site is located in the wider landscape of Lake Kaiaphas in the Gulf of Kyparissia. The events that contributed to the abandonment are recorded. The ruin of Kazarma on Kaiapha beach, in Ilia, is chosen as the main focus of the research. Then, are analyzed the aspects related with the meaning of the ruin and its value through the borrowing of its traces in the area. The photographic material is proposed as a methodology for understanding the ruins, so we can compose a narrative. Finally, as a result of the above, is presented the progression of the research, revealing facts and findings which... have a story to tel I. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Airing 25 years after its initial run, Twin Peaks' television revival complexified nostalgic fulfillment through its subversive treatment of narrative, character, and temporality. Nowhere was nostalgic attachment challenged more than in The Return's treatment of original series protagonist Special Agent Dale Cooper and his two doppelgangers. Through an analysis of the three representations of Cooper in The Return, we argue that the series' resistant treatment of nostalgia demonstrates a critical mode of theorizing nostalgia as containing inherent multiplicity and duplicitousness. Thus, we argue for a theorizing of nostalgia itself as doppelganger. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the concept of the “acceleration of time” associated with the multiplication of information flows, has become an important subject in the social sciences. In this context, knowledge emerges as an essential component of the productivity of postindustrial societies. These developments influence the role of universities in societies and, therefore, the formation of academic disciplines. This article is based on in-depth interviews, held in 2017, of teachers of social workers in Chile, with the aim of analyzing the temporal dimensions of the current definition of their discipline. This article proposes to conceptualize nostalgia as inter-temporality, so that it can be used as an analytical category for the formation of the approaches of other fields of the social sciences in Latin America.

This article examines the Danube as a site of cultural memory and exploration, focusing on the descriptions of Bratislava as seen by British travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor in A Time of Gifts (1977) and Italian literary scholar Claudio Magris in Danubio (1986; Danube, 1989). For both Leigh Fermor, who saw it in the 1930s, and Magris, who visited the city in the 1980s, Bratislava serves as a border between the familiar West and the exotic East, and as a site of nostalgia for what Magris describes as "a multiple and supranational culture [koiné]". When seen in relation to the debate over Central European identity in the 1980s, both narratives look to the Slovak capital's multilingual past as a sign of its "marginocentric" history, but Leigh Fermor's trilogy has largely been overlooked by theorists of Danubian culture, while Magris has been accused of complicity with the forces of oppression (from Habsburg to Communist) described in his work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on nostalgia in the narratives of vocational teachers. The aim is to understand the role of nostalgia as a mechanism for adapting to or resisting educational change. The paper is based on the secondary analysis of semi-structured interviews with 30 Estonian vocational teachers. In the teachers' narratives, the nostalgia for the former vocational education system, which provided more autonomy and empowerment for teachers in their work, was overlaid with the nostalgia for a society with more stable family and work-life patterns and trusting attitudes towards vocational teachers. Although there were examples where the nostalgic narratives were strategically used to legitimize resistance to change, in most cases, nostalgia tends to serve as the mechanism for making sense of the educational changes teachers have been faced with. Nostalgia also contributes to making sense of oneself as a teacher in a new situation and collective identity building. It is argued in the paper that we should acknowledge the positive functions of nostalgia and create support mechanisms to facilitate sense-making and critical reflection upon the changes for teachers. Nostalgia should be recognized as a productive force indicating the contradictions in present reforms and practices and opening up new directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Influential members of the disarmament community have in recent years maintained that further progress towards the international community's nominally shared goal of a world without nuclear weapons depends on recapturing the spirit and practices of cooperation that prevailed in the late 1980s and 1990s. Proponents of abolition, in this view, should focus their efforts on revitalizing the tried and tested arms control formula that was implemented following the end of the Cold War. In this article, I argue that this call to make disarmament great again reflects unwarranted nostalgia for a past that never was, fostering overconfidence in established approaches to the elimination of nuclear weapons. Far from putting the world on course to nuclear abolition, the end of the Cold War saw the legitimation of nuclear weapons as a hedge against 'future uncertainties' and entrenchment of the power structures that sustain the retention of nuclear armouries. By overselling past progress towards the elimination of nuclear arms, the nostalgic narrative of a lost abolitionist consensus is used to rationalize the existing nuclear order and delegitimize the pursuit of new approaches to elimination such as the movement to stigmatize nuclear weapons and the practice of nuclear deterrence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Often migrants are caught between spaces where they live negotiating between their past and present selves. A sense of nostalgia traps them from within, which gets reflected in comparative parameters through their interaction with the new place and culture, through changing frameworks of family and relations, and through varying levels of perceptions. As a social phenomenon, migration gets potent when seen through the perspectives of time, nostalgia, and memory. Temporality hence is closely connected to the understanding of the process of migration. This paper aims to analyze the conditions and situations that the migrants face when aspects of time and remembrance are brought together on a temporal scale of past and present from select migrant narratives of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces the special issue and outlines the field of Gothic folklore and fairy tale, demonstrating how the emergence of the Gothic in the late eighteenth century was closely imbricated with the surge of folklore and fairy tale collecting in Britain and Europe. The article then begins a theorisation of Gothic folklore and fairy tale through the concept of negative nostalgia, in which gothic and folk narratives borrow from each other, presenting archaic elements in a dark, violent, monstrous mode that abjects and disavows features that conflict with modern progressivism, but remain nostalgically desired. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Cuadernos de Historia Contemporanea is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This essay, and the special issue it introduces, seeks to explore leadership in a post-truth age, focusing in particular on the types of narratives and counter-narratives that characterize it and at times dominate it. We first examine the factors that are often held responsible for the rise of post-truth in politics, including the rise of relativist and postmodernist ideas, dishonest leaders and bullshit artists, the digital revolution and social media, the 2008 economic crisis and collapse of public trust. We develop the idea that different historical periods are characterized by specific narrative ecologies, which, by analogy to natural ecologies, can be viewed as spaces where different types of narrative and counter-narrative emerge, interact, compete, adapt, develop and die. We single out some of the dominant narrative types that characterize post-truth narrative ecologies and highlight the ability of language to 'do things with words' that support both the production of 'fake news' and a type of narcissistic leadership that thrive in these narrative ecologies. We then examine more widely leadership in post-truth politics focusing on the resurgence of populist and demagogical types along with the narratives that have made these types highly effective in our times. These include nostalgic narratives idealizing a fictional past and conspiracy theories aimed at arousing fears about a dangerous future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on 222 qualitative interviews conducted through a large ethnographic research project on transformed industrial landscapes in six countries, the main argument of the article is threefold. First, landscapes and narratives about past and present landscapes are relevant to the identity of class; second, the transformation of industrial landscapes is most emphatically expressed by nostalgia; third, the narratives are a transnationally constitutive element of class identity. The narratives of workers about the transformation and destruction of former workplaces express an identity crisis as seen in feelings of mourning and indifference. However, this does not indicate an erosion in the relevance of identity. Considering class as also having an emotional dimension, the article demonstrates that a class identity also evolves out of loss and longing. As nostalgia for a past now gone is a common narrative identity element in the research areas, it is considered as constitutive of a transnational class identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Romania, the literary approach to the recent communist past centred on everyday life under the communist regime is usually associated with a nostalgic communist perspective. By reading communist nostalgia in the context of the communist politics that pervaded every aspect of everyday life, this paper traces the connections between narratives and moral responsibility at the level of Romanian literary productions. Many of the topics included in the collective volumes that bring together personal narratives of the past resonate with and influence the fictional creations of the past; in many cases, combining personal testimonies with fictional characters offered an improved mechanism for dealing with the past. The paper argues that the topic of daily life experiences under the communist regime can be further developed, raising awareness of the lack of discussions about moral responsibility at the societal level in post-totalitarian Romania. Even if the younger generations can use the literary narratives of the past to re-appropriate their predecessors' life stories, the reduction of the past to visual or linguistic stereotypes deepens the separation between public and private memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the concept of the "acceleration of time" associated with the multiplication of information flows, has become an important subject in the social sciences. In this context, knowledge emerges as an essential component of the productivity of postindustrial societies. These developments influence the role of universities in societies and, therefore, the formation of academic disciplines. This article is based on in-depth interviews, held in 2017, of teachers of social workers in Chile, with the aim of analyzing the temporal dimensions of the current definition of their discipline. This article proposes to conceptualize nostalgia as inter-temporality, so that it can be used as an analytical category for the formation of the approaches of other fields of the social sciences in Latin America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article questions notions of belonging in the case of displaced communities' descendants and discusses such groups' efforts to preserve their heritage. It examines the instrumental use of nostalgia in heritage discourses that drive preservation efforts. The case study presented is focused on the Russian Old Believers in Romania. Their creativity in reforming heritage practices is considered in relation to heritage discourses that emphasise continuity. The ethnographic data presented in this article, derived from my doctoral research project, is focused on three major themes: language preservation, the singing tradition and the use of heritage for touristic purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the backdrop of increasing anxieties about the state of the world and its future found among by scholars and grassroots alike, this article explores young people’s narratives of the future, paying particular attention to dominant temporal structures through which the young people frame their expectations and imagine their lives to come. The article builds on research with young Czechs in three different regions of the country, carried out in the years 2007-2009 and 2014-2016. In addition it incorporates elements from my former work on post-socialist transformations in rural Czech Republic. Drawing on anthropological debates about time, agency and social change, and on recent scholarship on nostalgia, I argue for the necessity of a diversified understanding of temporality when analysing narrations of both lived lives and future visions; linear and reproductive temporalities appear to co-exist with conceptions of time as accelerated, incoherent and unpredictable. Further, I argue that time or temporality is not just something which people are subject to; it also involves agency. This implies that well-established temporal frameworks can be used to narrate expectations for the future, or that different temporal frameworks can be strategically combined to manage both the present and the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates two recent South African novels which construct memory through narrative: Shaun Johnson’sThe Native Commissioner(2006. Johannesburg: Penguin Books, South Africa) and Anne Landsman’sThe Rowing Lesson(2007. Cape Town: Kwela Books). Both texts foreground the political contexts of culture and history, both see memory as belonging as much to the present and future as to the past, and both dramatize the role of imagination in addressing the trauma of loss. In both novels, place is crucially important, not as a simple geographical construct but as a reflection of biographical and cultural positioning. In Johnson’s text the narrator’s construction of his father’s story is vividly coloured by George Jameson’s empathetic identification with an Africa which apartheid will erase. Landsman’s text offers Betsy Klein’s imaginative projections of the Touw River in Wilderness, which are as much about her own childhood as about her domineering father. Memory, Johnson and Landsman show, cannot be confined to passive nostalgia for the past. It is centrally about the dynamics of knowing and learning from the past. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the duality of narrative voices as a representation of exile in the 2002 novel La Rambla paralela by the Colombian author Fernando Vallejo. Shifting between first and third-person narrators, Vallejo's work exposes the self that is caught between times, spaces, and realities. My contention here is that the alternation of first and third-person narrative voices reflects the pluralism of exile as voices in dialogue rather than a monologue, exploring the fluctuating distance between times, places, and identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including impact of narratives in educational fields, nostalgia in school educators and librarians, and sex education in schools as civics education.

This essay examines one of the most complex films recently made by Andrzej Wajda in view of its representation of death both in the narrative and in the aesthetics. It also studies the role of the director in reigning in the complex, multi discursive structure of the film and reflects on the film’s production history and its predecessors in Wajda’s filmography. In the conclusion to the essay, the author postulates that the film is an intimate confession of the renowned director on the mystery and inexplicability of death. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article explores deployment of nostalgia by the American superhero films "Captain America: The First Avenger" and "Captain America: The Winter Soldier" to question national narratives. Topics include the films' examination of both a Golden Age comic book hero and the golden age of American foreign intervention, and the ways in which nostalgia can be used subversively as a factor to reed outside of the narrative created by nostalgia.

The idea that has been explored in the article is what makes a film postmodern and if there is an inevitable gap between form and content, between postmodern techniques and the narrative structure in the same. The article addresses how Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, which has been touted by certain critics as postmodern, adopts postmodern multiplicity of time and spaces and Allen almost plays with theses ideas but does not entirely succumb to them. Michel Foucault's idea of heterotopia has been employed in studying the other space depicted in the film . The other space showcases Paris in the 1920s and Allen through his protagonist Gil highlights this as a celebratory digression and a moment's liberation. The narrative is plugged into modernist attitudes, including a narrative closure, which does not allow it to be regarded as a postmodern film in its entirety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My research on the stories of palliative care patients emphasizes the heterogeneity of the types of stories they tell, including stories of illness, of everyday life, of the future, and of the past (Synnes, 2012). This article pays special attention to the prevalence of stories of past experiences in which the past is portrayed through idyllic and nostalgic interpretation. In contrast to most research on illness narratives and narrative gerontology that is preoccupied with stories of change, these stories of nostalgia are characterized by a plot where nothing in particular happens. However, this may be the primary purpose for the storytellers in their particular situation of illness and imminent death. The main purpose of nostalgia is precisely to ensure the continuity of identity in the face of adversity (Davis, 1979). In this article, I argue that these stories of nostalgia are vital aspects of maintaining the continuity of the self, or a narrative identity, when much else in life is characterized by discontinuity and uncertainty. Thus, stories of nostalgia should not be dismissed as escapism but valued and listened to as important aspects of narrative care among palliative care patients, and as a way of preserving the sense of a narrative identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The reported research tested whether the social and agentic content of nostalgic memories varies as a function of attachment-related avoidance. We measured individual differences in attachment-related avoidance and anxiety and coded the interpersonal and agentic content of nostalgic and non-nostalgic narratives. Results revealed that nostalgic (relative to non-nostalgic) narratives contained more social content and that this link was not moderated by attachment-related avoidance. There was a significant association between attachment-related avoidance and attachment-related social content in nostalgic, but not non-nostalgic, past narratives. There was also a significant association between attachment-related avoidance and agency content in nostalgic, but not non-nostalgic narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article explores the different modalities of nostalgia manifested in the narratives of teachers about their lost homeland and post memories. It focuses on three different readings of nostalgia emanating from the author's research on Greek-Cypriot teachers' narratives about the 1974 Turkish invasion in Cyprus. It suggests the need to reconfigure the concept of nostalgia in the contexts of teacher professional development.

The curriculum has been proposed as a powerful means with the potential to initiate social transformation. It reflects the dominant social, economical and political discourses and for this reason it seems reasonable to situate reconciliatory discourses in relation to the curriculum. Whilst curriculum scholars mostly agree that we need to seek new directions and ways of understanding curriculum, there is little consensus about the direction the field should take. Two particular issues that this article addresses are the tendency of curriculum practitioners to tackle social issues at a symptomatic level instead of considering the roots of the problems, and the overemphasis on the political dimension with little or no attention given to the ethical dimensions of the curriculum. In an attempt to develop new ways of understanding curriculum and enabling social change, I explore nostalgia as a way to stimulate dialogue over competing narratives. To facilitate this exploration, I draw on the notion of the ethical turn in the study of curriculum and the theory of intersectionality. Examples from South Africa are used to develop the argument. I conclude by situating the discussion in the context of other post-conflict societies where reconciliation is needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Issues in Ethnology Anthropology is the property of Issues in Ethnology Anthropology and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The writings of Northern settlers in South Korea constitute a unique voice of their own, which I call 'border people's narratives.' Their narratives are often contradictory, critical and hopeful in reflecting the dramatic ruptures in their lived experiences. Their voices stretch over between past and present, and the old home in North Korea and the new place of South Korea. The border people's narratives encompass the simultaneous existence of contradictory feelings: guilt and appreciation, anger and sorrow, nostalgia and assimilation, and hope and disappointment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper suggests ways in which the diasporic Persian-American visual artist, Siros Ariya, represents the problematic of the gay image within the rubric of national identity, cultural nostalgia, social contradictions and personal conflicts within his self portraits. Siros Ariya (1960-present) started his public exhibitions in the 80s, when the gay scene of New York City was plagued with the epidemic of AIDS. An alumnus of the Andrew Warhol School of Visual Art and born to a military family loyal to the Persian monarchy, Ariya works with his body as his primary canvas, which, through various technical processes, is layered with those elements that in their own individual way, define him as a gay man of the Persian diaspora within the specificity of the "national narrative" pertinent to his personal background. By doing so, Ariya at once meets with some deep-seated cultural taboos as well as the challenges--at times even the impossibility--of representation. By looking at his self portraits from the 80s all the way to 2010, I will investigate the ways in which his art can be engaged with both from the perspective of the self-representation of an artist, as well as the problematic positioning of an Iranian gay man with all the cultural heritage that he, as an artist, may struggle with in his quest for establishing his identity. While a well-known name within the private galleries and collections and the old-money establishment of American oil tycoons, there is a silence in the larger discourse around Iranian gay art, particularly regarding Ariya's works, which richly deserve to be spoken about. This is yet another aspect that I will engage with in order to explore the inhibitions that may exist around the subject of the Iranian gay body and its representation in visual art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to address the question: How do we 'arrive' at queer(er) futures? To begin with, queer rethinkings of futurity need to make a radical break from logics that find their basis in heteronormativity and reproductive futurity. Sara Ahmed's concept of orientations provides a framework within which we might move beyond nostalgic narratives and the reiteration of these normative logics. Developing orientations that are critically queer (enough) will enable one to choose lines of disorientation, to remember differently, and to integrate the past and future differently in relation to the present. I also look at José Esteban Muñoz's suggestion that we put queer 'on the horizon', viewing it as potentiality for a different world. Further, I regard the element of community as an essential element in one's queer knowledge production, as 'queer' cannot exist in isolation. How to shape our bodies, lives, and worlds differently, and develop queer potentialities that might eventually materialize? In Jeanette Winterson's novel The Stone Gods, I examine how her characters are orientated, and how they reorientate themselves when obstacles throw them off course. What do they do with these queer moments? Do they invest in them, or do those moments just slip away, unnoticed? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]