Editorial

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">The following paper is devoted to the study of speech manipulation technologies in US political media discourse. A number of web-based articles have been taken under consideration for this study. They demonstrate the problem arising from the refugee flow in Europe and create a special “image” of the complicated European situation. It is helpful to see how the situation appears in the Internet media since this type of mass communication is most influential these days. While considering a large amount of media texts, a special speech manipulation technology has been revealed. This phenomenon demonstrates a distinct structure and close interrelations of purposefully selected elements. Going through a number of stages we can find out the technology of speech manipulation – a system of using the aggregate of speech manipulation instruments in order to purposefully guide the reality perception of the mass audience. The external level of the texts enables us to take a penetrating look at the internal intentions. This knowledge will help us not to confuse the migration crisis <italic>as it is</italic> and the migration crisis <italic>as it seems</italic>.</abstract>

The Migration Crisis as It Seems: Speech Manipulation Technology in US Internet Media

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">This article focuses on the rising hostility against immigrants / refugees and growing demand for hospitality, in both regional and transnational senses, in Caryl Phillips’s novel <italic>A Distant Shore</italic>, set in a local place in North England. I think that the author, in examining the parallel conditions of being a stranger in a village and an outsider to the nation, shows that the demands of hospitality are similarly urgent whether sought by nationals or foreigners though these are calibrated differently in terms of scales of belonging. My broader argument is that hospitality is an ethical practice of everyday life that requires continual renegotiation. Inspired by Levinasian ethics, I turn to Derrida’s and Rosello’s meditations on hospitality, which emphasise the metaphorical nature of the host-guest relationship and the tension it inscribes between the finiteness of politics and the infinity of ethics. By exploring the complex relationship between politics and ethics as this is made manifest in the literary representations of ordinary British citizens’ everyday practices, I suggest that this novel not only deals with the UK’s domestic tensions of multiculturalism and ethnic conflict, but also critically reflects on its bewildered (but hardly new) attitude toward the ongoing transnational integration of the new Europe in the postwar period.</abstract>

Strangers on the Doorstep: Hostility and Hospitality in <italic>A Distant Shore</italic>

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">This essay is an inquiry into two intermedial installations that address the experiences of people on the run from war or poverty, yet overtly hinder and problematize the viewer’s identification with the depicted refugees. By doing so, <italic>Friday Table</italic> (2013) by art collective Foundland, and Isaac Julien’s video installation <italic>Ten Thousand Waves</italic> (2010) differ from the many contemporary discourses dealing with the so-called refugee crisis that suggest a blind assumption of empathy’s benevolence. Taking theoretical texts concerning the relation between empathy, politics and the (lens-based) representation of refugees by, for instance, <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="j_abcsj-2016-0018_ref_029_w2aab3b7b3b1b6b1ab1ac29Aa">Slavoj Zizek (2016)</xref> and <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="j_abcsj-2016-0018_ref_005_w2aab3b7b3b1b6b1ab1ab5Aa">Jill Bennett (2005)</xref> as a starting point, I read <italic>Friday Table</italic> and <italic>Ten Thousand Waves</italic> as reflections on the pitfalls as well as the critical political possibilities of empathy in contemporary debates on refugees. Moreover, I argue that the two lens-based installations in question are able to examine the limits of empathy and identification with refugees through their common denominator: intermediality. Both <italic>Friday Table</italic> and <italic>Ten Thousand Waves</italic> combine lens-based media (photography, video and film) with non-lens-based medial forms such as drawings, graphs and calligraphy. As I will demonstrate, the interplay between different media is decisive when it comes to the way in which the three works of art produce, manage and reflect on the relation between spectators and depicted refugees.</abstract>

An Empty Table and an Empty Boat: Empathic Encounters with Refugee Experiences in Intermedial Installation Art

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">Current explorations of migration in fiction focus on innovative perspectives, linking memory and trauma with the concepts of exile and conflict. Personal memories ask for an understanding of what belonging and identity represent for the Irish; immigration has hybrid and fertile links to memory studies, psychology and psychoanalysis (Akhtar), making the immigrant both love and hate his new territory, while returning to the past or homeland to reflect and regain emotional balance. From the focus on ‘the sexy foreigner’ (Beltsiou), we rely on the idea of crisis discussed by León Grinberg and Rebeca Grinberg, Frank Summers’ examination of identity, the place of the modern <italic>polis</italic> and the variations of the narrative (Phillips), the trans-generational factor (Fitzgerald and Lambkin), the departure seen as an exile (Murray and Said) and the impact of guilt (Wills).Such views support an analysis of McGahern’s writing which works as a blend of memories and imagination, the writer highlighting dilemmas, success and failure as ongoing human threads. They are as diverse as the people met by the novelist in his youth, many of them being workers, nurses, entrepreneurs, teachers and writers, both young <italic>immigrants</italic> in search of a better life and <italic>migrants</italic> returning to spend their retirement or holidays home.</abstract>

Us and Them: A Vision of Heroes on the Move in John McGahern’s Fiction

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">The paper offers a comparative perspective on transmigrant cultural identities as illustrated in the works of two contemporary South Asian American and Romanian American authors, Jhumpa Lahiri and Aura Imbăruș. The comparison involves Gogol, a South Asian American character, and Aura, the author of the memoir <italic>Out of the Transylvania Night</italic>. Although Gogol is a fictional character and Aura is an actual transmigrant, their comparative assessment relies on the assumption that both narratives are inspired by the authors’ background of relocation. Despite their different cultural origins, both authors share thematic aspects related to the dynamics of cultural identity in the context of migration. This paper aims to provide a starting point for an enlarged framework of comparative analysis, in order to foreground intersections between different experiences of cultural negotiation in the context of displacement. Born and raised in America, Gogol is challenged by his cultural multiplicity and strives to suppress elements of his Indian identity. After years of rebelling against his parents’ norms, Gogol shifts to the Bengali model, when his father dies. Once he accepts the relevance of his cultural roots, Gogol is able to plunge into a dimension situated beyond his Bengali and American selves. His transcendent strategy is illustrated by his decision to plunge into a third space of redefinition, suggested by the Russian literature which is appreciated by Gogol’s father. Aura Imbăruș offers the example of a first generation Romanian transmigrant who undergoes voluntary relocation to the United States. Fascinated by the American world, Aura is eager to take over norms of material success and consumerism, overlooking the relevance of her cultural roots. When she undergoes a personal family crisis, Aura eventually reassesses the value of her Romanian background, aiming to reconcile her source culture with her Americanised self. In a manner similar to Gogol’s, Aura manages to integrate American norms of success, while forging enduring bonds with the Romanian American community in California.</abstract>

Creative Pluralism in Indian and Romanian Accounts of Transnational Migration

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">After the Syrian civil war, deaths of those fleeing crisis areas have tragically become a regular news item. Not new to the world, however, such crises emerge from tensions between identity and difference as codified in international politics, whereby refugees and migrants become the Other and subject to unyielding universals, such as the law or narrow concepts of what is right. Indeed, the cultural logic of “global identities” informing the current refugee and migrant crisis seems recurrent, as exemplified in the recent cases of the Tamils from Sri Lanka and the Somalis. The cultural logic of global identity is also reflected in the popular nineteenth-century novella by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, <italic>The Man with the Twisted Lip</italic>, in which the main character disguises himself as a professional beggar to appeal to middle class values in order to incite their guilty consciences. Drawing on Ian Baucom, Marc Shell, and Jean-Joseph Goux, this article argues that the main character’s actions reflect and embody the cultural logic of the global politico-economy in late nineteenth century London. As such, Doyle’s novella illustrates the Derridean notion of hospitality by revealing that “identity and difference are mutually constitutive” (Baker 109) and offers insightful commentary on the current refugee and migrant crisis.</abstract>

‘Global’ Identity or the (Ir)Reducible Other: The Cultural Logic of Global Identity in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s <italic>The Man with the Twisted Lip</italic>

Against the Double Blackmail: Refugees, Terror and Other Troubles with the Neighbors

The Freedom of the Migrant: Objections to Nationalism

The Pound Reaction. Liberalism and Lyricism in Midcentury American Literature

Soulmaker: The Times of Lewis Hine

Shakespeare and the Visual Imagination

AHEAD OF PRINT

Volume 41 (2023): Issue 1 (December 2023)

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Volume 19 (2012): Issue 2012 (December 2012)

American, British and Canadian Studies

 Publishing House and Owner: Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Romania  Founded in 1999 as the journal of the Academic Anglophone Society of Romania, American, British and Canadian Studies is currently published biannually by Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, under the aegis of the Research Centre for Linguistic, Literary and Cultural Studies at LBUS and the Academic Anglophone Society of Romania. It is an international, peer-reviewed journal that sets out to explore disciplinary developments in Anglophone Studies in the changing environment forged by the intersections of culture, technology and electronic information. Our primary goal is to bring together in productive dialogue scholars conducting advanced research in the theoretical humanities. As well as offering innovative approaches to influential crosscurrents in contemporary thinking, the journal seeks to contribute fresh angles to the academic subject of English and promote shape-changing research across conventional boundaries. By virtue of its dynamic and varied profile and of the intercultural dialogue that it caters for, American, British and Canadian Studies aims to fill a gap in the Romanian academic arena, and function as the first publication to approach Anglophone Studies in a multi-disciplinary perspective. Within the proposed range of diversity, our major scope is to provide close examinations and lucid analyses of the role and future of the academic institutions at the cutting edge of high-tech. With this end in view, we especially invite contributions in the fields of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Theory, Area Studies, Cultural Anthropology, Language and Linguistics, Multimedia and Digital Arts, Translation Studies and related subjects. With its wide subject range, American, British and Canadian Studies aims to become one of the academic community’s premium scholarly resources.  Archiving  Sciendo archives the contents of this journal in Portico - digital long-term preservation service of scholarly books, journals and collections.  Plagiarism Policy  The editorial board is participating in a growing community of Similarity Check System's users in order to ensure that the content published is original and trustworthy. Similarity Check is a medium that allows for comprehensive manuscripts screening, aimed to eliminate plagiarism and provide a high standard and quality peer-review process. 