Narrations on transcultural identity development
E-Book, Englisch, 248 Seiten
ISBN: 978-3-8309-8350-7
Verlag: Waxmann Lehrbuch
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: 1 - PDF Watermark
This book presents 19 narrations of authors about their own experiences as migrants. Coming from different parts of the world, they tell stories about struggles, development, doubt, challenges, hope and empowerment, sometimes amusing the reader and then again containing a saddening or thought-provoking undertone. These creative works are set in various cultural contexts such as for example Germany, Australia, South Africa, America, India or Hungary and describe how life experiences in different countries contribute to and influence the development of transcultural identities.
This book is a must for readers interested in transcultural stories, creative writing and identity development in cultural and transcultural contexts.
Autoren/Hrsg.
Weitere Infos & Material
1;Book Cover;1
1.1;Contents;5
2;Purple Jacaranda – food for thought on a city stroll (Claude-Hélène Mayer);9
3;“There’s something I wanna tell you …” (Stephan Wolting & Claude-Hélène Mayer);11
4;Georgia (David Castleton);17
5;Stopover in B., Germany, East Westphalia (Stephan Wolting);30
6;Caesura (Elias Jammal);42
6.1;Heidelberg: Relocation but no arrival;42
6.2;During the month of May …;44
6.3;June/July 2014;45
6.4;On a lost day in July;45
6.5;A summer without sunshine;46
6.6;The first semester!;47
6.7;Fragments of an unwritten diary …;47
6.8;January till today (2015);48
7;Nature child and big soul – meditations at Ayers Rock (Claude-Hélène Mayer);50
8;Young, female, Canadian and Muslim: Identity negotiation and transcultural experiences (Rashelle V.H. Litchmore & Saba Safdar);59
9;“When purple Jacarandas fall …” (Aden-Paul Flotman);68
9.1;Back to the beginning …;68
9.2;The journey by train …;68
9.3;Encountering the slightly unfamiliar…;69
9.4;Making sense of the senseless …;71
9.5;In conclusion …;72
10;Mobra was born when he was 13 (Orna Braun-Lewensohn);73
11;System failures or what is brought to the table (Stephan Wolting);81
12;Gregory heads east (Greg Bond);95
13;A recurrent dream (Christian Boness);102
13.1;A recurrent dream;103
13.2;Spirit of the Holy Communion;104
13.3;Arabic demon;106
13.4;Good Friday;111
14;A moveable feast (Dominika Krysztofowicz);115
15;“Multiculti” – (Anti-)Racism during my life in East Germany and in a unified Germany (Ulrich van der Heyden);126
16;In my backyard, in your backyard (Mandar Purandare);136
16.1;Behind the curtain;139
16.2;Miscellaneous;143
16.3;Correspondence;145
16.4;Letter to Father;145
16.5;E-mail to a dear friend;149
16.6;Monologues;150
16.7;Language, languages – monolingual, multilingual;152
16.8;Understanding: Literature, music, theatre, dance;154
16.9;Miscellaneous;157
16.10;A summer afternoon!;164
17;Evolving through cultures, careers and marriages toward a transcultural identity (Clifford H. Clarke);169
17.1;1945: Transition from the US to the Territory of Hawaii;169
17.2;1948: Transition from the Hawaiian Islands to Japan;170
17.3;1951: Transition from Tokyo to our new assignment in Kyoto, the preserved old capitol of Japan;171
17.4;1957: Transition from home in Kyoto, Japan, to Atlanta, Georgia;172
17.5;1958: Transition from Atlanta to Wake Forest University (WFU) in Winston-Salem, North Carolina;173
17.6;1962: Transition from college in North Carolina, US to Tokyo, Japan;175
17.7;1963: Transition from Tokyo to graduate school at Duke University in North Carolina;176
17.8;1966: Transitions from North Carolina to Cornell University in Ithaca, New York;177
17.9;1971: Transition from Cornell University in New York to Stanford University in California;178
17.10;1977: Transition from an FSA career into graduate student life and teaching at Stanford University;180
17.11;1982: Transition from a career in academia to one in global business consultancy;181
17.12;1995: Transition from California to Hawaii – to a new marriage and a new teaching career;182
17.13;2016: Transition from the USA to Japan for the last time … maybe …;183
18;The suitcase situation (for Andre) (Oliver Spatz);187
19;Tivu (Melisa Choubak);195
20;At home in the world (Ashutosh Kumar);204
21;A little introduction to the Hungarian language, or “Why make things easy if you can make them Hungarian?” (Eva Teshajev);215
22;New Year in Poland (Blandine Bizy);230
23;Biographies;238
Stephan Wolting & Claude-Hélène Mayer “There’s something I wanna tell you …” All memories are profane and all memories are holy, but that’s all we have, we haven’t anything more. – Ferdinand von Schirach, What remains … On 10 October 2014 the Nobel Prize was awarded to the Indian child advocate Kailash Satyarthi and to Malala Yousafzai, the young Pakistani girl who was shot in the forehead by the Taliban because she had insisted on going to school. The German Chancellor Angela Merkel called her the “Identity of Pakistan”. This could be considered as a concession to the significance of an intercultural or transcultural background. In spite of the recent cautious approach, the strongly Hindu-inclined India and the Muslim Pakistan – two nuclear powers – are still age-old enemies; however, in our context it seems more crucial that, along with her story, Malala travelled all around the world, showing how autobiographical stories can influence the world – maybe even how they can change the world. Many people were deeply moved by her fate and by the willingness to tell her story, so much so that they were listening, captivated by the description of her life. What has happened in this widespread political context can be applied in a narrative-structural way to the microcosmos of the lives of many other people. Telling stories, listening to autobiographical stories and sharing stories have particular importance in society. “Life stories” have the gift of complementing one another, they can be interlinked and, at best, they can inspire other stories or generate new narrations. A quotation from the Swiss writer Peter Bichsel, when he spoke at the end of a series of lectures in Frankfurt (“Frankfurter Poetikvorlesungen”), further emphasises this position: Ladies and gentlemen, dear friends, I thank you very much. In the beginning I was very afraid of you, but you were lovely and I was getting close to you, because I recognized that you do like listening to my stories. You did something we all should do more often: to allow to me my stories. The world would look much better if we would allow to somebody his stories, allow to our friend and to our girlfriend, to our wife and to our husband, to our children – and to our sick neighbours, too.1 People are authors and people’s biographies are what makes them. There is a very close connection between the creation of a lifestyle and a literary work. The term author or female author has always been tied very closely to the biographical identity, according to the German writer Martin Walser, who wrote the following sentence in his diary: “The human being is a writer (better said: a storyteller), and if he isn’t still a writer, he isn’t a human being any longer.”2 We would like to inspire you with this work and to give you the opportunity to identify somewhat with it and, in the best case scenario, for you as the reader to write down your own story too. Stories have the power to help us to live and to keep alive our memories in our special way. The researchers of American Creative Writing Studies, notably among them Alexander Steele3, have pointed out the close connection between autobiographical and creative writing, without focusing too much on the influence of the sentence or a definition of aesthetic taste. Teachers of writing, such as Gary Snyder, have given their students an idea of the creativity, inventiveness and high level of aesthetics with which students or participants of their workshops are able to develop and write stories about their own lives under professional guidance.4 In this way the perception of the other, the empathy, the role distance, the tolerance of ambiguity and eventually the way in which metacommunication takes place could be trained and taught. Theoretical reflections referring to the “construction of otherness”, specifically “one’s own growth” are the force behind the project: the theories and conceptions about the discourse of brain, commemoration and memory, the psychology of development, the narratology as well as conceptions (concepts, scripts and patterns) concerning the trans- and intercultural development of young people. We understand the discourse of memory and what the brain does as put forward by Daniel L. Schacter: “We ARE Memory, our identity is memory.”5 In addition, Jean Piaget reflected on the idea that the psychology of development draws attention to the diverse and heterogeneous development of an individual on the one hand, and to the medium of memory and how memories can adulterate memories, on the other, as he illustrated with a short story: One of my oldest memories would – if it would have been true – have taken place in my second life year. I see the following scene vividly happening exactly in front of me. I was sitting in a pram, which was pushed by my nanny to the Champs-Elysées, when a guy came and wanted to kidnap me. The leather strap held me back, but the nanny tried to resist the man and to defend me (therefore she got some minor scratches in her face which I remember and “see” until today). A crowd of people was gathering immediately and a policeman with a small pelerine and a white stick came up, whereupon the guy fled in panic. I can see, until today, the whole scene, how it took place close to the metro-station. But when I was fifteen, my parents got a letter from that nanny, in which she informed us about her accession to the Salvation Army Counters; she was expressing her wish to confess her former mistakes, especially to give back the watch, which she had got for this – including her self-made scratches – completely invented story. As a child I was supposed to listen to this story, in which my parents believed. In a way of visual memory I did project it into the past. So the story is a memory of a memory, however a wrong one. Many “real” authentic memories are of this kind.6 This quotation already suggests that there is essentially no difference between the “work of remembering” and the shaped and fictionalised memory, which is shown in the work “99 ways to tell a story” by Raymond Queneau, a collection of 99 retellings of the same story.7 The narration or the presentation of something that has happened is always structured and literalised.8 Accordingly, we have tried to inspire the authors to tell a story based on their memory which is itself still fiction. This was to be connected to the focus on the development of an intercultural identity, as set out, for instance, by Davis S. Hoopes,9 indicating that there is a development of identity/personality from ethnocentrism to an ethnorelative multicultural personality.10 There is an essential contradiction to this purpose, which could hopefully lead, in the best case scenario, to a constructive and productive way of dealing with the memories in these stories. The contradiction is that on the one hand literature aims at an individual approach to memory; however, cultural studies or research about intercultural communication tends to be geared towards collective or ethnic participation. Referring to a quotation by Goethe that the specific nature leads to the general nature, and vice versa, the general to the specific, we hope that it still works in this volume. The final focus is shifted in the sense of a narratology of the world according to fields of research and living. In his latest work, the social-psychologist Harald Welzer points out the significance of new stories or the retelling of stories, to get new ideas of cultural and newly constructed mentalities and to escape from the old patterns, frames and scripts.11 In doing so, we can believe we are going to change the conditions and the situation of the world. Welzer was the founder of a new foundation called Future 2, where people try to tell small stories from alternative points of view to the world. According to Welzer, this is how we can survive and save the world. It begins with the individual story, and so everybody should try to tell his or her story. We hope to present you with an entertaining and educating mix of different stories/narrations of intercultural encounters, developments and special situations. Berlin, Pretoria, Oktober 2015 1This is a reference to a poem by Matthias Claudius, “Der Mond ist aufgegangen” (The moon has risen), LE 97, P. Bichsel: Der Leser. Das Erzählen. Frankfurter Poetikvorlesungen. Frankfurt 1997: Suhrkamp, p. 97. 2Cf. M. Walser: Schreiben und Leben (Die Tagebücher 1979-1981). Reinbek bei Hamburg 2014: Rowohlt. 3Cf. Gothams Writers’ workshop: Writing Fiction: The Practical Guide from New York’s Acclaimed Creative Writing School Paperback. New York 2003: Bloomsbury. 4Cf. G. Snyder: The Gary Snyder Reader: Prose, Poetry, and Translations. New York 2000: Counterpoint New edition. 5D. L. Schacter: Searching for Memory. The Brain, the Mind and the Past. New York 1997: Basic Books; Reprint edition, quoted from Introduction Memory’s Fragile...
