Journals
2026 EN
Khan Qaisar · Khan Kalimullah
Bollywood’s post-liberalization cinema has increasingly operated as a cultural apparatus that both reflects and reinforces the politics of nationalism, often through its strategic creative adaptations of social and religious identity. Within this cinematic discourse, representations of terrorism have evolved into a powerful ideological tool, shaping perceptions of Muslims as internal or external threats to the Indian nation-state. Against this backdrop, the present study investigates the profound ideological influence of Indian Hindi cinema during the 1990s, particularly within the melodramatic war genre. It examines how these films engage with identity politics, unravelling the shifting dynamics between India’s Hindu majority and Muslim minority, as well as the nation’s uneasy relationship with Pakistan. Through a close textual and visual analysis of three key films— Garv (Honour and Pride) , Dil Se (From the Heart) , and Fiza —the research decodes the metaphoric and symbolic construction of Indian Muslims as internal ‘Others’ and Pakistani Muslims as external ‘Others’. Employing a cohesive analytical framework, it explores recurring themes, narrative structures, and aesthetic strategies that contribute to the normalization of such portrayals. Findings reveal a persistent pattern of stereotyping, where cinematic narratives frame Indian Muslims as latent threats and Pakistani Muslims as antagonists. Yet, these portrayals also mirror deeper socio-political anxieties embedded in post-liberalization India. The paper concludes by advocating for a critical reassessment of cinema’s ideological function, urging scholars and viewers alike to move beyond reductionist narratives and engage with the complex realities of nationalism and social change.
Journals
2026 EN
Rasyid Surayah · Yani Ahmad · Hamzah Saidin
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This study examines the historical traces and socio-political dynamics of the Bugis-Makassar community after the Makassar War which was marked by the signing of the Bungaya Treaty in the 17th century. Using a sociological, political and historical method approach that includes heuristic stages, source criticism, interpretation, and historiography, this study attempts to deconstruct the dominant narrative that has so far represented a colonial perspective. The findings show that the Bungaya Treaty was not merely a peace agreement between the VOC and the Gowa Sultanate, but rather a hegemonic instrument that was systematically enforced against the kingdoms in South Sulawesi. Rejection of the contents of the agreement was responded to with military violence by the VOC which then triggered a broad socio-political transformation. Reinterpretation of the Bungaya Treaty event reveals four main dynamics; First, the collapse of the free trade system due to the VOC monopoly and the prohibition of shipping for Makassarese; Second, the strengthening of the supremacy of colonial power as stated in Article 20 of the Bungaya Treaty; Third, the Bugis-Makassar diaspora as a form of political and cultural resistance; and fourth, there was a shift in the power structure in South Sulawesi which was marked by the emergence of Bugis political dominance, especially Boné and Soppéng under the leadership of Arung Palakka. This research recommends to re-interpret the Bungaya Agreement of 1667, not as a final defeat, but as a catalyst for political transformation and cultural resilience of the Bugis-Makassar people.
Journals
2026 EN
Ober Józef · Matusevych Tetiana · Konovalova Marta
The article examines the civic activism of Ukrainian students during the war, placing it within the broader scholarly debate on the importance of civic diplomacy in strategic communication. Since citizen diplomacy is a form of public diplomacy, which in turn is a component of strategic communication, studying the behaviour of citizen ambassadors is important for developing and articulating a broader context for strategic communication. Particular attention is paid to the influence of sociodemographic factors on the forms and intensity of students’ socio-political participation. The study results indicate that students, as civic ambassadors, manifest themselves through different communication acts - involvement in protests, creating media content on socially significant topics, signing petitions, and information campaigns against disinformation. An original survey questionnaire was developed for this study, consisting of 18 closed questions, including four on socio-demographic information. Statistical calculations used were as follows: Mann-Whitney U test, Kruskal-Walli’s test, Spearman rank order correlation, and PROFIT analysis. The results indicate the importance of integrating civic education into university curricula and emphasise the role of students in shaping Ukraine’s image and supporting diplomatic efforts in times of crisis. The civic engagement of Ukrainian university students is largely dependent on sociodemographic factors.
Journals
2026 EN
Wei Wang
Chinatowns are well known globally as cultural landscapes associated with Chinese migrants and their history. This paper situates Chinatown narratives in the context of Chinese literature through three examples: Mr. Ma and Son (1929), Chinatown Family (1948) and Fathers and Sons (2022). Lao She’s Mr. Ma and Son takes a ‘bystander’ viewpoint, exposing both Western stereotypes of Chinese people and Chinese misconceptions of Westerners in London Chinatown, while simultaneously addressing the urgent need among Chinese people for a Chinese renewal in the early 20 th century. Lin Yutang’s Chinatown Family adopts the view of ‘dreamers’ in New York Chinatown narrative, aiming to construct a democratic ‘utopia’ in the post-World War II era. In the 21 st century, Liang Xiaosheng’s Fathers and Sons innovates the Chinatown narrative through the transnational ‘sojourners’ focusing on Chinese immigrants’ contributions and close ties with China. To better understand how Chinese literary texts interweave the narrative of ‘looking at self’ and ‘looking around the world at others’ in constructing the image of Chinatown, this paper observes how Chinese cultural identity is formed, reshaped, and reinterpreted across transcultural contexts till the 21 st century.
Journals
2026 EN
Almaneea Ohoud Othman
This article presents a postcolonial ecocritical reading of three major works by Etel Adnan and examines how experiences of displacement inform her understanding of identity and her critique of anthropocentric worldviews. It argues that Adnan’s sustained engagement with the natural world allows her to reconceptualize the self as relational and embedded, rather than autonomous or sovereign. In distancing herself from identity formations rooted in fixed locales or exclusionary cultural frameworks, particularly those shaped by war and political conflict, Adnan turns to nature as a source of belonging and ethical orientation. Drawing on Susan Clayton’s concept of environmental identity, the article demonstrates how this form of identification cultivates responsibility toward both human and nonhuman worlds. The study ultimately suggests that Adnan’s work illuminates the capacity of dislocated subjects to articulate environmentally attentive modes of identity that support ecological awareness and collective responsibility.
Journals
2026 EN
Burhanudin Muhamad · Zustiyantoro Dhoni · Rokhim Mukhammad Nur
+1 more
This article reads three of Triyanto Triwikromo’s Semarang-set short stories—’Zikir Walik Jagipeken [Jagipeken Back Dhikr]’ (2013), ‘Penguburan Kembali Sitaresmi [The Reburial of Sitaresmi]’ (2015), and ‘Bunga Busuk [The Rotten Flower]’ (2012)—as decolonial urban palimpsests negotiating the afterlives of colonialism and the 1965–66 mass killings. Our objectives are to show how the stories re-map Semarang’s sites as layered archives of violence and resistance, to identify narrative strategies (haunting, fragmentation, temporal and spatial dislocation) through which counter-memories emerge, and to refine the ‘decolonial urban palimpsest’ as a lens for literary responses to state violence. Guided by Quijano’s coloniality of power, we combine close reading of voice, spectrality, temporality, spatialisation, and toponyms with grounded contextualisation. We demonstrate how the texts enact a counter-cartography that unsettles official narratives of modernisation and closure, while exposing racialised, classed, and gendered hierarchies that persist in post-independence memory regimes. The article contributes empirically by situating Semarang’s contested memoryscape within colonial and Cold War genealogies; methodologically by operationalising decolonial reading through site-attentive textual analysis; and conceptually by proposing a portable framework for reading urban traces as counter-archives. Future research could extend this approach to other Indonesian cities and media, and examine how genres negotiate censorship and regimes of remembrance.
Journals
2026 EN
Zheng Qi
This article adopts a media archaeological approach to examine the campus wall newspapers (bibao 壁報) of National Southwest Associated University (Guoli Xinan Lianhe Daxue 國立西南聯合大學, NSAU) during the Second Sino-Japanese War. It reconstructs the historical trajectory of these newspapers across different NSAU campuses on China’s wartime home front. Under conditions of bombings, scarcity, and political control, flexible yet fragile wall newspapers functioned as a form of citizen publication, produced by underground Communist organizations, progressive leftist students, and the San-min Chu-i Youth Corps to articulate competing expressions and to link campus life with national and international events. Despite recurrent episodes of physical destruction and administrative censorship, the production and dissemination of wall newspapers created a dense and contested intellectual space within NSAU.
Journals
2026 EN
Trong Le Dinh
This study analyzes the impact of the ‘Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution’ on Sino-Vietnamese relations in the context of the 1968 Mậu Thân Offensive, thereby illuminating an underexplored dimension of the Cold War history in East Asia. Using a historical–policy analytical approach and systematically drawing on archival materials, diplomatic documents, and recent Chinese scholarship, the article demonstrates that internal political upheavals resulting from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution directly reduced China’s military and economic aid to Vietnam, while simultaneously restructuring the China-Vietnam-Soviet Union triangle toward heightened ideological tensions. At the same time, the study shows that the 1968 Mậu Thân Offensive was not only a turning point in the Vietnam War but also exerted a reverse influence on Beijing’s foreign policy, indirectly facilitating Sino-American rapprochement from the late 1960s. By situating these two major historical events of Vietnam and China within a unified analytical framework, the article offers a novel interpretation of the role of China’s domestic politics in the Vietnam War and the shifting balance of power in the Cold War in East Asia.
Journals
2026 EN
Górak-Sosnowska Katarzyna · Łazor Jerzy
The war in Gaza is domesticated globally by national media ecosystems using locally-resonant frames. Research suggests that this produces a pro-Israeli bias in Western outlets, with the opposite observed in the Middle-East. The article analyzes how these patterns function in a semi-peripheral media system. It studies how four key Polish outlets framed the war in Gaza in 2023–2024, arguing that they instrumentalized the conflict to reproduce pre-existing ideological narratives. Drawing on the proximity-framing nexus, the analysis conceptualizes proximity as ideological alignment between outlets and the actors, causes, and values they foreground. The study uses a mixed-method design, combining dictionary-based code co-occurrence analysis and code mapping with a qualitative analysis of media articles. This allows the capturing of actors, processes, and evaluative frames. Findings show that right-wing outlets embedded Gaza primarily in security- and threat-oriented frames, while left-wing outlets used the conflict to articulate projects of anti-colonialism and social justice. Media narratives remained Poland-centric, foregrounding domestic politics, historical memory, and identity projects and only secondarily representing Palestinian and Israeli voices. The article contributes to scholarship on conflict reporting, Eastern European semi-peripheries and mediated solidarity by showing how distant wars become discursive resources in domestic struggles over democracy, memory, and belonging.
Journals
2026 EN
Alothman Kawthar Y.
This study examines how forced migration and displacement impact both physical and psychological health, taking Dima Wannous’s The Frightened Ones as a representative example. Set against the Syrian revolution and subsequent refugee crisis, the novel portrays the protagonist’s struggle with anxiety, fear, and fragmented identity while living in exile. As the protagonist navigates exile and displacement, her body becomes a symbol for anxiety, illness and psychological distress. Employing an interdisciplinary approach that draws on trauma theory, migration studies and health humanities, this study explores how Wannous’s narrative reflects the embodied effects of war, forced displacement and persistent instability. This article argues that Wannous uses narrative fragmentation, repetition and interior monologues to mirror the long-term health consequences of migration trauma. My article also argues that Wannous’s narrative challenges the assumption that physical relocation leads to recovery, illustrating how exile often intensifies rather than alleviates the lingering effects of violence. By positioning The Frightened Ones within broader discussions on migrant health and refugee precarity, this article highlights the role of contemporary Arabic literature in articulating the invisible yet deeply felt burdens of displacement.