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This article offers a reflection on Frantz Fanon's diagnosis and analysis of French colonialism in Algeria. We will attempt to demonstrate that there is a concrete and clear connection between Fanon as the psychiatrist diagnosing the devastating effects of the French colonial system, and his subsequent political involvement in the Algerian revolution. This is not to say that each part does not contain valuable insights in their own rights, but rather to stress that without being read together, as a whole, one would miss a significant element in the understanding of the importance Fanon's thought subsequently came to play in the emancipation struggles of the colonized worldwide. Furthermore, we argue that it is crucial to understand the intimate connection between Fanon's psychiatric work, his diagnosis of colonial mental disorders, as well as diagnosis of the colonial system as such, and then his political engagement, in order to understand the particular context in which he favourably discusses the use of violence in the name of fighting against the oppressive system of colonialism. Above all, we argue that Fanon's critique of colonialism continues to spark controversy because it still represents the most powerful and incisive analysis of, as well as answer to, the troubled relationship between the blessed and the wretched of the earth.

This article examines the historical view of Benito Pérez Galdós in his historical novel named “Zaragoza” and “Cánovas” by comparing with Numancia of Cervantes. In front of the national survival crisis, Galdós recognizes that it is necessary that Spain should recover humanity and morality on basis of the krausist ideal. The krausists warned subjective idealism, stressing on free-will and moral conscience in a harmonious balance of rationality. Without refusing patriotism, they warned egoistic patriotism deformed by national selfishness or nationalism. Giner de los Ríos insisted on a necessity of harmonizing national inclination and universal one. Galdós emphasizes that the identity of Spain is not possession of privileged class but sweat and tears of the mass of people in daily life. He represents Efemera as the ideal history on the basis of Unamuno’s ‘intrahistoria’, by which, instead of Lukács’ progressive history, we can peep into a historical poetics of human free nature and vividness of discontinuous and endless shifting. According to the sub-history, we come to the conclusion that Galdós and Cervantes would lay emphasis on sub-history, aiming to essence of Spanish soul originated from national landscape and people’s daily life.

This paper addresses some issues on the Northern Nigerian traditional garments and caps. We observed that most of the Northern Nigerian garments and caps, particularly those of the Kanuri people, have their origin in the culture and traditions of the people. In very significant ways, the garments and the caps depict the belief systems, political metaphysics, and the general consciousness of the people including their creative impulses. But as more and more people move from rural areas to the cities, travel abroad and as more and more cultures intermingle, inevitable changes catch up with the culture and tradition of the people. We observed that it is hard to find in the Northern Nigeria scene, particularly among the Kanuri people, clothes that have assumed new nomenclature other than garments and caps. We realized that, the culture and tradition of the Kanuri people wearing longer, voluminous and roomy garments preferably with cap have witnessed changes due to the blend with foreign culture. This and many other issues are discussed in this paper. The purpose of this research is to show that inspite of the Kanuri people’s strong adherence to their beliefs and culture which hardly encourage any changes, the use of their traditional garments and caps have exhibited the flexibility of their beliefs, culture and traditions. The use of the garments and caps discussed in this paper are those observed among the Kanuri people of Northern Nigeria.

This paper considers how Koreans found their positions in the complex, overlapping, disjunctive, and interconnected “Oriental” repertoires in the early Cold War years. When we use the term, Oriental, it should require careful translation from context to context because it may be subject to very different sets of contextual circumstances. Klein views Cold War Orientalism in the complex of various regions including East Asian and Southeast Asian countries; however, when Koreans are contextualized at the center of the discussion the Orientalism produces another discursive meaning. Even though many great researches have been done on Korean immigrations, Korean American literatures, and US-Korea economic, political, and foreign relations, not many discussions about Korean American popular cultures have been discussed in the basis of the Oriental discourse in the United States.For this argument, this paper investigates the performative trajectory of a girl group “Kim Sisters” who began to sing at the US military show stages in South Korea in 1952 during the Korean War. They moved to Las Vegas show stages in 1959 and later appeared in Ed Sullivan Show more than thirty times during the 1960s and 70s. Meanwhile, they not only returned to South Korea often times to perform at the stages for Korean audiences in South Korea but also played at the shows for Korean immigrants in the United States. Korean American immigration to the United States has followed a different route from the majority of Asian American population such as Chinese or Japanese Americans, which means that efforts to compare this particular group to the others may be unnecessary. Rather doing comparative studies, this paper, therefore, focuses on the formation of the intersecting and multiple identities of Korean female entertainers who were forced or forced themselves to be incorporated into the American popular “Oriental” imagination, which I would call “embedded” identities. This embeddedness has been continuously maintained in the configuration of Korean characters in the United States. This will help not only to observe the discursive aspect of Asian American identity politics but also to claim a space for comparatively invisible Korean characters in the United States which has been often times neglected and not brought into a major Asian American or Oriental historical discourse. This paper starts with American scenes at the beginning of the twentieth century to trace Americans Oriental imagination which was observable in the various American cultural landscape and popular music soundscape. It will help us more clearly understand the production and consumption of the Korean “Oriental” performances during the early Cold War period and especially the Korean performance in the American venue, silently overshadowed into the political, social, and cultural framework.

The totality of language learning comprises three integrated components: linguistic, cultural, and attitudinal (Wilkes, 1983).Positively sensitizing students to cultural phenomena is urgent and crucial. A positive attitude toward L2 culture is a factor in language learning that leads to cross cultural understanding. This research examined, through a survey analysis, how three groups of students (one high school group and two university student groups) viewed the role of their foreign culture (i.e., American and British cultures) in achieving cultural understanding. The focus was upon how EFL learners approach the target language culture as well as their own culture.

This paper aims to analyze the influences of the socio-cultural environment on discourse in translation. To illustrate a deep connection between discourses and societies in which they were produced, communicative patterns of high- and low-context cultures are examined. Though the original version of the translated text comes from a different culture, the translation reflects communicative preferences of the target culture. To uncover some of these preferences, a comparative study of two translations from Russian into English and from English into Russian is conducted. This study, together with further investigation of some more recent translations into Russian, revealed a number of choices affected by translators’ cultural background (for example, making the translation more emotionally charged) and current ideological preferences in the society (excessive use of anglicisms).

This paper is a comparative study of English loans in Russian and Swahili. In the twenty first century, due to the advantage of English as a global language, a language of technology and business, it has had contact with many languages of the world and has become a major source of loans to many languages. Though very different from each other, both Russian and Swahili currently have English as their main source of loanwords. This study reports the extensive adaptation of English loans by Russian and Swahili and examines how these loan items are assimilated into the two languages. It concludes that besides the adaption of pure English loans they have both employed other strategies such as loan translations, semantic extensions and loanblends for vocabulary expansion.

This study presents experiments which examined the role of amplitude and fundamental frequency (f0) in the phonetic perception of short versus long stop length contrasts in Japanese (e.g., [t] vs. [tt]). Stop length contrasts are normally characterized by differences in the duration of stop closures. However, closure duration can be unreliable as a perceptual cue when one considers variability in the rate at which people speak. Acoustically, the amplitude and f0 of the vowel following stop consonants are known to covary with the length distinction of stops in Japanese. Given this fact, the current study examined amplitude and f0 as potential secondary cues to the distinction. The results indicate that even though both amplitude and f0 are robust correlates, Japanese listeners do not use these cues in categorizing short versus long stops.

South Africa is a multiracial country where different cultures and languages coexist. Culture can be conveyed through language. Language conditioning is also social conditioning, and through words we make sense of our own and others’ experience. In this paper I investigate the meaning of two culturally significant words: (English) peace and (African) ubuntu. Data findings will show how L2 speakers of English, when asked to define peace, promptly operate a process of transfer of the meaning from their mother-tongue Xhosa equivalent – uxolo - to its English equivalent. Ubuntu, an African word which encompasses traditional African values, has no counterpart in English. I will also argue how, in the ongoing process of globalisation, English is playing a predominant role in promoting cultural homogenization.

This paper is intended to describe the idiosyncratic aspects of the verb way construction in English, clarifying the productivity property of this construction and to elucidate the claim that this construction displays the properties of language-general, not a language-particular by comparing the behaviors from Dutch. And this paper will argue against the lexical approach and explain the drastic mismatches in syntax and semantics responsible for the constructional properties as one type of directional motion constructions by proposing a constructional analysis in HPSG.

A brief consultation of English Arabic dictionaries and encyclopedias shows that there is no one single standard Arabic translation of the English concept ‘democracy’. Arab authors use, instead, a series of multiple terms that need clarification if the first term is to be clear. In many cases, they tend to localize the term into Arabic using various orthographic forms; at other times, they run a rather lengthy analysis to elucidate the concept that seems to be an essentially contested term. This paper aims to inquire into the reasons for the confusion and inconsistency in the translation of the concept ‘democracy’, as well as the underlying arguments for advocating the localization rather than translation of this political concept. This will be followed by a discussion of the implications of this study for lexicographers and translators. Given the fact that ideology is of non-Arabic origin, English perceptions of this fluid concept might help account for its lack of clarity in Arabic translations since Arabic is highly influenced by English in various spheres of life. It would thus be wise first to check the perceptivity of English authors of the concept. To better serve the purpose of this study, the author distinguishes here between 'translation' and so –called 'localization'. The term 'translation' is concerned with finding an existing term in the target language with an equivalent meaning for a foreign word, whereas localization involves taking the foreign term and making it linguistically and culturally appropriate to the target language, by subjecting it to the morphological and syntactic rules of Arabic to be used as if it were originally Arabic.

Compared to studies on prosodic effects on the comprehension of syntactic ambiguity in English, there are relatively few that investigated prosodic effects in East-Asian languages. This study examined the role of prosodic information in processing syntactically ambiguous sentences in Japanese. For syntactically ambiguous sentences containing relative clauses, this paper investigated whether prosodic information is immediately available during the process of these ambiguous sentences. Results from an auditory comprehension experiment with an on-line, cross-modal naming task seemingly suggest that contrary to the findings from the off-line study that examined the same constructions, prosodic information may not be immediately available to Japanese listeners. A possible account for failure to obtain effects of prosodic information is provided.

This study explored how a Chinese college student who previously had not reached a threshold level of Korean proficiency used L1 (Chinese) and L2 (English) as a tool to socialize into Korean (L3) culture of learning over the course of study. From a perspective of language socialization, this study examined the cross-linguistic influence of L1 and L2 on the L3 acquisition process by tracing an approach to language learning and practices taken by the Chinese student as a case study. Data were collected through three methods; interview protocols, various types of written texts, and observations. The results showed that the student used English as a means to negotiate difficulties and expertise by empowering her L2 exposure during the classroom practices. Her ways of using L2 in oral practices could be characterized as the ‘Inverse U-shape’ pattern, under which she increased L2 exposure at the early stage of the study and shifted the intermediate language to L3 at the later stage of the study. When it comes to the language use in written practices, the sequence of “L2-L1-L3” use gradually changed to the “L2-L3” sequence over time, signifying the importance of interaction between L2 and L3. However, the use of her native language (L1) in a Korean-speaking classroom was limited to a certain aspect of literacy practices (i.e., vocabulary learning or translation). This study argues for L2 communication channel in cross-cultural classrooms as a key factor to determine sustainable learning growth.

Acknowledging the importance of English as the language of tourism discourse, this paper explores its current standing in the landscape of tourism in Oman. It also investigates its features and functions aimed at promoting the country as a wonderful tourist destination to people around the globe and framing tourism as a customer-oriented industry that meets tourists’ interests and needs. To convey these messages the authors examine English tourism discourse in Oman from linguistic, pragmatic and socio-cultural perspectives.