Search

East Timor is a country of which the totality of feature films made in or about it are history films, including East Timor’s first locally controlled feature film,Beatriz’s War(East Timor-Australia, 2013).Beatriz’s Warplaces at the centre of its story a historical event, but surprisingly remediates it through a French film set in the sixteenth century,The Return of Martin Guerre(1982). This article investigates the former’s use of the latter in terms of the desire for verifiability, stories which a polity believes are useful, the failure of truth commissions in East Timor, and the need for local witness to make stories have meaning with respect to issues in the present. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Novels about East Timor in English and Portuguese for children have been scarce. Despite a contemporary background of revisionist approaches to history, the nationalist focus of such material means that certain stories are handled rarely, even those that interpellate the nation in some way. This article examines ways in which support for East Timor is underwritten in the few novels for children and young adults that deal with East Timor in English and Portuguese, concluding with a brief assessment of the extent to which they realize Herbert Kohl’s suggestions of appropriate strategies for what he terms “Radical Children’s Literature.” [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Gurnah's fictional world evinces an anti-reductionist sociology which constitutes in part a subtle critique of culture as identity. His work is infused with cultural flows, rhizomatic and liquid connectivities that challenge both the certainties and categories of his characters as well as the institutional ascription of a single cultural voice to Gurnah himself. His determination to write narratives that cannot be aligned with his own aetiology or location is especially evident inDottie, centred not only on a woman but on one whose family origins and history are not mappable onto Gurnah's own. The refusal to use fiction as only a type of cultural alibi can be related to a view of personal and collective identity flows which this article explores with recourse to Seyla Benhabib's rejection of radical incommensurability and self-consistent cultures inThe Claims of Culture. What will be seen to structure Dottie's pragmatic daily struggles is rather the ‘cruel optimism’ as elaborated upon by Lauren Berlant, the desire for something that hinders and frustrates you but which continues to organize your plans and choices, in this case the connectedness of family. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective. For over three decades, the greatest burden of asthma deaths has occurred among persons aged 65 years and older. This study analyzed the association between increasing age and asthma prevalence among age groups within the US elderly population. Methods. We analyzed aggregated data on 54,485 civilian, noninstitutionalized US adults aged 65 years and older from the 2001-2010 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS). We estimated the prevalence of current asthma, lifetime asthma, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) among US elderly by 5-year age groups and age stages ('young elderly' aged 65-84 years and 'oldest old' aged ≥85 years). We calculated adjusted odds ratios (AOR) and 95% confidence intervals (CI) to identify asthma prevalence patterns among elderly populations. Results. From 2001 to 2010, the estimated average annual prevalence of current asthma among US elderly was 7.0%. Estimates of lifetime asthma, COPD, and co-occurring current asthma and COPD were 9.9%, 9.7%, and 3.0%, respectively. Prevalence of asthma decreased with advancing age while prevalence of COPD increased with advancing age. When controlling for study variables and significant interactions ( p = .05) with COPD, the odds of reporting current asthma decreased with advancing age: 0.87 (95% CI, 0.76-1.01) for 70- to 74-year-olds; 0.76 (95% CI, 0.66-0.87) for 75- to 79-year-olds; 0.62 (95% CI, 0.51-0.75) for 80- to 84-year-olds; and 0.45 (95% CI, 0.36-0.55) for ≥85-year-olds, as compared to 65- to 69-year-olds. Conclusions. Asthma continues to affect a substantial proportion of the US elderly population. Increased diagnosis of COPD may overshadow correct diagnosis and treatment in populations with advancing age. Treatment guidelines should focus on preventable risk behaviors to increase the quality of life within this population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Australia-based Lonely Planet series of travel guides allies its pragmatic agenda of informing mostly Western travellers with a didactic project in which the traveller is partly inscribed within a discourse of solidarity with the struggles and identities of the peoples whose spaces and products are being consumed. The guidebook to East Timor is arguably a special case within the Lonely Planet series, given the fledgling nation's interpellation of Australia's sense of itself as a people that both sponsors and represents freedom and justice, but which spectacularly failed in its moral and historical responsibilities to the East Timorese when they were invaded and oppressed within the Indonesian empire. What will be found is that the guide contains a troubled conjunction of moral support for East Timor, at times neocolonial in its implications, and political rejection of the former colonizer Portugal as a reference point for the East Timorese, while the country's attractions for the Australian visitor are ironically construed overwhelmingly in terms of visual markers of the Portuguese colonial presence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines a series of Australian texts in an attempt to perceive the ways in which East Timor has functioned as a test of the operation of Australian memory and the processing of national shame over the failure of the nation to aid a neighbouring people who had aided Australia at great cost during the Second World War. After introducing the notion of shame and the contrast between official Australian policy and public sentiment over the issue of East Timor from the date of the Indonesian invasion in 1975, a contrast rooted in the nation's sense of itself as being a sponsor of freedom, democracy and the fair go, the essay examines a series of fictional texts dealing with East Timor in some way, and then returns to the concept of shame and its relevance in this context. The texts dealt with include fiction for adults and children: Tony Maniaty's The Children Must Dance (1984), Gail Jones's Other Places (1992), Bill Green's Cleaning Up (1993), Kerry Collison's The Timor Man (1998), Libby Gleeson's Refuge (1998) and Josef Vondra's No-name Bird (2000), along with the Australian-Canadian miniseries Answered by Fire (2006) and the Australian film Balibo (Robert Connolly, 2009). As expected, concerned observers share many features of their reaction to events in East Timor, but inevitably, as they read East Timor they are also reading Australia and its relation to an ethics of conviction that might have dealt more honourably with the invasion and oppression on its doorstep. The analysis draws on the work of Jeffrey Olick, Avishai Margalit and Michael Morgan in its approach to regret, shame and memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives. We analyzed national data to estimate asthma prevalence among U.S. adults by urban-rural residence and to determine the relative contributions of sociodemographic and health behavior characteristics on the probability of reporting asthma. Methods. We linked the 2005 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) to Urban Influence Codes (UICs), categorizing respondents into four urban-rural groups: metropolitan, adjacent metropolitan, micropolitan, and remote. BRFSS collects health data from all 50 states. UICs classify respondent's county as urban or rural based on population size and proximity to metropolitan areas. We calculated asthma prevalence estimates and generated odds ratios (ORs) for the probability of reporting asthma. Results. Overall asthma prevalence (7.9%; 95%CI = 7.73-8.08) was not statistically different (p = 0.28) by urban-rural residence. After adjusting for selected characteristics, adjacent metropolitan (OR = 0.96; 95%CI = 0.90-1.02) and remote (OR = 0.95; 95%CI = 0.85-1.05) residents were less likely—and micropolitan (OR = 1.04; 95%CI = 0.93-1.16) residents were more likely—to report asthma compared with metropolitan residents; but confidence intervals included null. Conclusions. Asthma prevalence is as high in rural as in urban areas. Certain demographic, behavioral, and health care characteristics unique to place of residence might affect asthma prevalence. Because these results substantially change our understanding of asthma prevalence in rural areas, further investigation is needed to determine geographic-related risk factors [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Janette Turner Hospital's Charades enacts a complex and lively intertwining of narrative strands in which contiguities between different modes of representing truths are examined. These modes include the demands of stories, whether fabular or realist, the drive to explain the origins of the universe, along with the claims to objectivity of photographs and history. In the process, the book playfully activates parallels with the story of Shahrazad, leading to constant juxtapositioning of narrative theory and the protocols of scientific explanation. In turn, the teasing energies of the multiplicity of stories come up against the hermeneutic responsibilities exacted by Holocaust deniers or the gaps and absences in our own family histories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One hundred seventy-nine first through fourth graders who had been retained were compared to 179 demographically-matched nonretained children on measures of school adjustment problems and competencies, and background identifying information. Retained compared to nonretained children were found to have more serious school adjustment problems and fewer competencies, and to have more risk and fewer resource indicators on background identifying variables. Within the retained sample, poorly-adjusted children had more risk and fewer resource indicators than well-adjusted children. Retention in grade appears not to help psychosocially immature children and may, in fact, be detrimental to children already at risk. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]