Research and Innovation

Headlines on re-education camps in Xinjiang and a forced switch to Mandarin as the language of instruction in Inner Mongolian primary schools have brought concern in the international community about the wellbeing of China’s ethnic minorities. To address this concern, the current article examines China's minority police changes under Xi Jinping in the last few years.

Engaging with this relatively unknown collection of fairy tales, Koser examines how Benedikte Naubert strategically deployed the learned figure of the Egyptian almé to mount a defense of women as storytellers and transmitters of knowledge and cultural memory. Naubert's figure of the almé articulates the perils women faced when asserting themselves as authors, offers as a model for eighteenth-century women writers to negotiate the literary sphere, and constructs a community of women storytellers. At the same time, Koser critically explores Naubert's literary interventions into early Orientalist discourses that contributed to images of the "Orient" and processes of othering around 1800.

Avital Karpman, Hebbrew Program Director, was an invited speaker for a virtual conversation on "Re-imagining The Future Of Hebrew In America," with Sharon Avni, Professor, BMCC. The event was sponsored by CASJE (Collaborative for Applied Studies in Jewish Education).

 

Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) stands out among recent Latin American writers because of his unique combination of critical acclaim, popularity, and literary significance. Queer Exposures analyzes two central but understudied topics in Bolaño’s fiction and poetry: sexuality and photography. Moving beyond a consideration of how his texts represent these topics, Ryan F. Long demonstrates that, when considered in tandem, they form the basis for a new innovative and critical approach. Emphasizing the processes of exposure associated with photography and sexuality, especially queer sexuality, provides readers and scholars with a versatile method for comprehending Bolaño’s constellation of texts. With close readings of a broad range of texts, from poetry written just after his arrival in Spain in the late 1970s to his posthumously published novels, Queer Exposures concludes that an emphasis on sexuality and photography is essential for understanding how Bolaño’s texts function in dialogue with one another to elucidate and critique the interrelations of writing, visual representation, and power.

Ulysses, Europe, Orpheus, and Eurydice are among the mythical characters whose adventures have been illustrated since antiquity in the arts, and for over a century now, in cinema. French filmmakers Agnès Varda, Alain Resnais, Christophe Honoré, and Jean-Jacques Annaud participated in the transmission and rewriting of these Greek myths, each in their own way. In "Ulysses" (1982), Varda combined an autobiographical commentary on a photograph taken in 1954 with a feminist and political perspective on its context, echoing the works of Roland Barthes and Jacques Rancière on photography. Resnais, in "You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet" (2012), returned to his passion for theater by revisiting two of Jean Anouilh's plays in light of Jean-Luc Nancy and Mathilde Girard's dialogue on myth and performance. "Métamorphoses" by Honoré (2014) offers a transgender reading of mythological stories, in every sense of the word, under the aegis of Jupiter, Bacchus, and Orpheus in order to articulate a liberated but informed vision of the future for younger generations living in a Mediterranean environment. In "His Majesty Minor" (2007), Annaud presents a parody of "The Odyssey" through a critical reading of Greek mythology by the humanities and social sciences

The first part of Theo Angelopoulos' career was dominated by references to the myth of the Atreides with the return of the father betrayed by his wife, the plot hatched with her lover leading to his violent death, the suffering of his children, and Orestes' revenge. The story of Ulysses' return to Ithaka later replaced Agamemnon's in his filmography. "The Suspended Step of the Stork" illustrated this theme by depicting the impossibility of the reunion between the modern Ulysses and his Penelope. This article demonstrates that from "Ulysses' Gaze" on, Angelopoulos' narratives became more and more influenced by the Homeric myth. This return to the oldest source of literature allowed the filmmaker to elaborate and express a personal and intimate myth that were developed in "Eternity and a day" and subsequent films.

This essay revisits José Antonio Saco’s intellectual contribution to the Hispanic archive that emerges from the recovery of Bartolomé de las Casas’ texts and the colonial connections between indigenous slavery and the African slave trade. Saco adheres to a notion of Hispanism, filtered through Las Casas, that facilitates a multiple and contradictory identification with coloniality, that allows him to anchor, his national, Caribbean, and universal historiographical project in the Hispanic and Black Atlantic. In turn, Saco and the Lascasian legacy that he rescued becomes an important colonial departure for contemporary theorizations: Antonio Benítez Rojo’s Caribbean readings of a paradoxical and complex repeating island, as well as Fernando Ortiz’ vision of a process of transculturation with repercussions beyond the Caribbean.

This article casts Jean-Jacques Annaud's "Wolf Totem" (2015) as a site of cultural negotiation and focuses on Annaud's adaptational dialogue with Jiang Rong's novel (2004) by the same name to turn a deeply local story into a transnational film. Annaud achieves a more general perspective than the Chinese novel by refusing to make any claims to historical accuracy or documentary objectivity. But, as in most of his previous films, he strives to confront social and political reality from a an independent, informed, and critical position. Annauds thus continues to support and embody a struggle for cinema's independence from any political or material constraint while exposing the shortcomings of any representation of an unknown culture that depends on stereotypes and prejudice.

The Automatic Collation for Diversifying Corpora (ACDC) project will significantly improve the accuracy of handwritten text recognition (HTR) for Arabic-script manuscripts by developing a collation tool to automatically create large amounts of training data from existing digital texts and manuscript images without time-consuming human annotation of individual manuscripts. The ACDC project will accomplish this task by extending the capabilities of the text alignment tool passim and the HTR engine Kraken to align very poor initial HTR transcriptions of diverse manuscript exemplars with existing digital texts in order to automatically produce training data in a “distantly supervised” manner. The ACDC tool’s acceleration of the training data production process will enable, for the first time, the creation of generalizable Arabic and Persian HTR models required for the digital transcription of large-scale Persian and Arabic manuscript collections.

This chapter compares indexical expressions utilized in English and Japanese email discourse from book companies in the United States and Japan in order to highlight their referential functions and underscore their pedagogical importance. These deictics also serve a marketing purpose by constituting a bond between company and customer and encouraging further patronage. English emails adopt a relatively casual stance, with positive politeness markers such as bare imperatives functioning to invite future customer engagement. Pronominal reference also predominates, whereas in Japanese, recurring combinations of nominal forms with polite prefixes and honorific or humble polite predicates enable a company to express appreciation for a customer’s patronage, acknowledge benefits received, and indirectly index a deferent stance consonant with customer expectations for online vendors.