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Redressing international problems: North Korean nuclear politics
- Shine Choi
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- Journal:
- Review of International Studies / Volume 46 / Issue 3 / July 2020
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 14 January 2020, pp. 337-349
- Print publication:
- July 2020
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- Article
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Marysia Zalewski's Feminist International Relations: Exquisite Corpse on feminism and global politics directly addresses matters of style, that is, questions of language and representation that foreground the invisible yet so palpable aspect of how meanings circulate. This article puts Zalewski's work in conversation with Trinh Minh-ha's D-Passage: The Digital Way and Lynda Barry's What It Is that similarly push the limits of how we craft feminist arguments. These feminists show how styles of writing and thinking, and how ideas gain shape to circulate matter in academic sites of knowledge as much as in art and culture. Building on these works, I put forward the thesis: to theorise is to feel out boundaries and question the questions we encounter that perennially relegate women as taint and malaise. I further explore this thesis by highlighting the visual dimensions of writing and thinking, in particular, what drawing, and drawing lines that shape ideas do. I focus on caricatures from the currently evolving North Korean nuclear crisis to loosen up the ways we go about thinking about war and politics wherein thinking is recognised not so much as a craft to be perfected but a democratic form of being in the world.
24 - Diaspora
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- By Shine Choi, Massey University School of People, Environment and Planning.
- Edited by Charles Forsdick, Zoë Kinsley, Kathryn Walchester
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- Book:
- Keywords for Travel Writing Studies
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 13 July 2019
- Print publication:
- 22 April 2019, pp 69-71
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- Chapter
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Summary
Often translated as dispersion or scattering of a people, diaspora cannot be discussed without contrasting it to terms that appear in its place, namely, the figure of the immigrant, the migrant, the ethnic or religious minority, the postcolonial and increasingly the transnational. They are all figurations of travel and effects of movements across borders, and in this sense, have a profound vantage point on what it means to inscribe and be inscribed by themes common in travel writing, such as displacement and dwelling, longing for an elsewhere and contact with/as an alien. Unlike transnationalism, however, diaspora is a concept more closely tied to movements of human beings, and unlike postcolonial or cultural minority, it is a term that has embedded in it an idea of movement. Robin Cohen (1997, ix), a widely cited scholar on diaspora, points out how diaspora is derived from two Greek words – ‘dia’ which means ‘over’, and ‘speiro’, a verb for ‘to sow’. If translated as ‘dispersion’, embedded in the term is a particular kind of movement – that is, movements defined by their landings in multiple sites, travel experienced as being carried by a trajectory out of one's hands, transitions with velocity and force, which are all metaphors found in diasporic writing as we see below. Specifically, what distinguishes diaspora as a key term in modern discourse is perhaps its link to the intellectual tradition of the Jewish diaspora. It is a tradition and historyof displacement and suffering that goes back to the biblical times of the Jewish exodus from the Holy Land and their dispersal and settlements around the globe.
Prompted by its wide critical usage, scholars have debated how diaspora should be conceptualized. The two main positions are, on one hand, proponents for anchoring the Jewish diaspora as the originary point or the ideal type to be used in developing diaspora as a concept (Cohen 1997; Safran 2004, 2005; Sheffer 2006), and, on the other, proponents for a more generalized framework that positions the Jewish diaspora as one of many (Clifford 1997b; Braziel and Mannur 2003). In support of centring the Jewish diaspora, William Safran (2005, 36) writes, ‘Diaspora [galut] connoted deracination, legal disabilities, oppression, and an often painful adjustment to a hostland.’ Here diaspora is anchored in the experiences of suffering as a point of departure for understanding a people's movement and connection despite their possibly diverse locations of dwelling.