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Modernity And Tradition In The Islamic Movements In Iraq: Continuity And Discontinuity In The Role Of The Ulama

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Modernity And Tradition In The Islamic Movements In Iraq: Continuity And Discontinuity In The Role Of The Ulama
Author(s)Sakai, Keiko
AbstractThis article analyzes a set of five postcards, purchased from a street stand in Belgrade, the capital of Yugoslavia, shortly after the NATO bombing of the country took place in the spring of 1999. While the postcards obviously serve as protests against the bombing, as well as testimonies of the nation-wide trauma caused by it, they also reveal a careful negotiation between representations of trauma – keeping it displaced enough to avoid vicarious traumatization for individual survivors, but focused enough to translate it into a part of the national Serb identity and relying on the symbolism available in historical public narratives. However, since all the postcards analyzed here use English language in one former another, they can also be read as peculiar interpretations of globalization on a local level. The article is an examination of the function of English, both in the negotiation of private/public trauma as described above, bandits role in the complex reconfiguration of the phenomenon of globalization as embedded with local meaning given the context of the narrative within the Serbian popular culture. While these pop culture artifacts offer an assurance to the Serb national spirit, they also express a multifaceted national take on globalization visible in the use of English as the language of the Western ‘enemy’. Overall, the postcards can be read as a curious traumatic figuration of postmodernism which seems to be battling modernism in Belgrade’s streets, while the Serb nationalism faces off with the global world in the realm of the imaginary.
IssueNo1
Pages37-54
ArticleAccess to Article
SourceArab Studies Quarterly
VolumeNo23
PubDateWinter 2001
ISBN_ISSN0271-3519


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