• Iberoamérica
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• v.22 no.2
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• pp.123-151
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• 2020

This paper shows a theoretical-reflective analysis on the importance of vocational training and value education to transition into models that are inclusive in cultural diversity, typical of the globalized and hyperconnected environment of modern societies. Interculturality is contextualized as a key element in linking teaching-learning processes with the uniqueness and problems associated with cultural ethnocentrism and alterity. In this sense, the work is part of a thematic review that contributes to the understanding, inclusion and recognition of cultural, racial and ethnic diversity in the different formal spaces of learning. As summary, value education and transversality are the basis for building educational interculturality in future generations.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.65-92
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• 2018

According to Wenying Xu, Asian American literature abounds in culinary metaphors and references (8); subsequently, a growing number of critics have begun to recognize that food "feeds into the literary rendering of Asian American subjectivity [and] provides a language through which to imagine Asian alterity in the American imagination" (Mannur 13). Ann Mah's Kitchen Chinese: A Novel about Food, Family, and Finding Yourself (2010) is yet another text within which to investigate how food "operates as one of the key cultural signs that structure people's identities" (Xu 2). Even as Kitchen Chinese insists on underscoring that Chinese food, as much as the voyage to her "motherland" China, is critical to protagonist Isabelle's quest to gain a better understanding of herself, we are able to observe how Isabelle exploits Chinese culture and its foodways as "food pornography" in order to align herself with mainstream America. Needless to say, the novels' relegation of Chinese food as "food porn" is problematic in that it encourages readers to participate in the exoticization of Asia and its culture, and the reduction of its people as the other. Ultimately, this essay aims to consider how the consumption and rejection of food becomes a critical means by which the Asian American subject fashions her identity.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.159-183
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• 2014

This thesis aims to explore another possibility of comparative literature in the light of translation. Comparative literature has been criticized for its Eurocentrism to attempt to assimilate all differences from other cultures and national literatures into the frame of the Western. On the other hand, it has been haunted by the anxiety of "unhomliness", which means it doesn't have a stable and definable terrain as an independent disciplinary. However, it can offer the possibility to overcome its limitation and thematize in- betweenness of diverse terrains due to its fluid and ambiguous position and identity of discipline. When it deals with the issue of in-betweenness, 'the Untranslatable' can be an helpful apparatus to analyze comparative literature through translation theories. Along with the recent change in the study of comparative literature under the influence of transnationalism and hybridization, the role of translation which has been disregarded for a long time is being reevaluated. Translation functions to transfer literary works beyond boundaries of languages, whereas it visualizes incommensurable differences through the failure of finding ultimate equivalences between languages and arriving at one single meaning. The existence of the untranslatable suggests that the attempt to totalize differences is unfeasible, thereby makes comparison unending. Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown can be an appropriate instance that the untranslatable was used as a literary technique to show unreducible alterity of non-Western language and culture.

• Asian review of World Histories
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.5-44
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• 2013

This essay offers a historically based critique of the idea of "alternative modernities" that has acquired popularity in scholarly discussions over the last two decades. While significant in challenging Euro/American-centered conceptualizations of modernity, the idea of "alternative modernities" (or its twin, "multiple modernities") is open to criticism in the sense in which it has acquired currency in academic and political circles. The historical experience of Asian societies suggests that the search for "alternatives" long has been a feature of responses to the challenges of Euromodernity. But whereas "alternative" was conceived earlier in systemic terms, in its most recent version since the 1980s cultural difference has become its most important marker. Adding the adjective "alternative" to modernity has important counter-hegemonic cultural implications, calling for a new understanding of modernity. It also obscures in its fetishization of difference the entrapment of most of the "alternatives" claimed--products of the reconfigurations of global power--within the hegemonic spatial, temporal and developmentalist limits of the modernity they aspire to transcend. Culturally conceived notions of alternatives ignore the common structural context of a globalized capitalism which generates but also sets limits to difference. The seeming obsession with cultural difference, a defining feature of contemporary global modernity, distracts attention from urgent structural questions of social inequality and political injustice that have been globalized with the globalization of the regime of neoliberal capitalism. Interestingly, "the cultural turn" in the problematic of modernity since the 1980s has accompanied this turn in the global political economy during the same period. To be convincing in their claims to "alterity", arguments for "alternative modernities" need to re-articulate issues of cultural difference to their structural context of global capitalism. The goal of the discussion is to work out the implications of these political issues for "revisioning" the history and historiography of modernity.