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Bougaard, an emerging South African creative practitioner, examines games from her “Coloured” childhood community in Eden Park, Johannesburg, and how these games may offer a window into a reframed Kullid identity. She considers the rhymes used in these games and the role of language—specifically Afrikaaps—in identity formation, and explores through papermaking and art installations the social contexts and meanings embedded in these games. In this article, the authors analyse Bougaard’s use of sculpture, papermaking and printmaking techniques both to mediate and to subvert conventionalised tropes and stereotypes of “Coloured” communities as well as to empower a sense of her familial and community-based identity through an emergent Kullidness. The authors focus on selected paper works and on three mixed media installations (2021–2022). The authors complicate any reading of these works as uncritically affirmative of a declamatory and essentialist identity position by proposing Bougaard’s visual strategies as premised upon mediation, ambivalence, indexicality, and refuting iconicity. The authors identify Bougaard as deploying elements of strategic essentialism in her desire for community visibility and visual sovereignty, and the authors therefore critique the benefits and the limitations of this approach, concluding that Bougaard’s choice of mediating strategies avoids a simplistic narrative of community life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this interview, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak revisits the debate between essentialism and anti-essentialism by reconsidering various theoretical frameworks she has engaged with over her intellectual journey. These frameworks include deconstruction, Marxism, and feminisms, alongside reflections on the role of philosophy. One key focus of her reflection is the concept of strategic essentialism in understanding social movements, diverging from her previous stances. Spivak suggests viewing it as an ongoing critique of essentialist approaches, emphasizing the importance of maintaining critical, strategic, and indispensable elements within a minimalizable essence. She also stresses the significance of authorial positioning and autobiographical narratives, drawing on childhood lessons. She explores teaching as a practice that can convey the impossibility of fixed essences rather than engaging in theoretical debates. She examines her own place within the Subaltern Studies Group and the political connotations of the “Third World.” Towards the end, she delves into the practical perspective on essences concerning empirical realities and the dynamic between researchers and their audiences.

In this interview, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak revisits the debate between essentialism and anti-essentialism by reconsidering various theoretical frameworks she has engaged with over her intellectual journey. These frameworks include deconstruction, Marxism, and feminisms, alongside reflections on the role of philosophy. One key focus of her reflection is the concept of strategic essentialism in understanding social movements, diverging from her previous stances. Spivak suggests viewing it as an ongoing critique of essentialist approaches, emphasizing the importance of maintaining critical, strategic, and indispensable elements within a minimalizable essence. She also stresses the significance of authorial positioning and autobiographical narratives, drawing on childhood lessons. She explores teaching as a practice that can convey the impossibility of fixed essences rather than engaging in theoretical debates. She examines her own place within the Subaltern Studies Group and the political connotations of the "Third World." Towards the end, she delves into the practical perspective on essences concerning empirical realities and the dynamic between researchers and their audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an attempt to trace the tradition of nationalism back to ancient Israel, public intellectual Yarom Hazony reads Deuteronomy 2 as a representation of ancient values of land-bounded autonomy and cultural homogeny. However, he overlooks two key aspects of the passage: 1) the familial and theological reasoning behind the divine protection of the other peoples, and 2) the messy aetiologies of how those peoples came to inhabit their lands. God calls the Edomites, Moabites, and Ammonites "brothers" and "sons of Esau" or "Lot," suggesting that the prohibition against invasion is not based on respect for sovereignty but instead mythological family and relative social connection. Thus, using postcolonial theories of group identity from Gayatri Spivak, this article argues that Deut 2 does not represent an ancient (pre)conception of the nation-state but rather a (re)negotiation of group relations and social identities in connection to co-habitation of the Levant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the second half of the 20th century, the notions of hybrid, hyphenated and transcultural identity have found urgent currency for scholars interested in the Arab Anglophone literary movement. Several books and anthologies have situated Arab Anglophone writers within diaspora and multicultural studies. In particular, the fascination of Western academia has augmented comfortable diffusion and propagation of writers and critics endorsing these concepts. Whilst representing trans-cultural and hybrid identities is of immense importance when assiduously addressing issues of diaspora, migration, exilic consciousness, and dislocation, it has also become a 'survival' strategy for some 'minority' writers. The article challenges the claim that Arab Anglophone women writers' depiction of hybrid identity is an expression of their lamentable state of affairs. It rather argues that those writers espouse strategic construction of hybridized identity to serve extrinsic aims related to recognition, canonization, and readership. This depiction is thus closer to an 'essentialist practice' than to a trans-cultural hybrid identity construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some feminisms, in and from the south, propose to revise to the epistemic of modern Western thought in an attempt to inhabit an externality detached from the Euronortecentrated logos. In and from the south certain feminisms reflect. These feminisms inhabit the externality of the modern patriarchy western colonial matrix, detached from the Euro-North-centered logos. This writing wants to listen to what community feminisms have to say in the voices of Lorena Cabnal and Aura Cumes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay analyzes online activist media addressing the red-tagging and trumped-up criminal charges against members of the Cordillera Peoples Alliance in the wake of the Anti-Terror Law in 2020. Engaging with critical scholarship on the archiving, colonial discourse, and representation of the Igorot body, I argue that these online activist media published on the organization's official Facebook account deploy strategic essentialism by subverting the colonially othered and criminalized marker of the savage-terrorist. The Igorot body is rendered as a quasi-heroic figure of the Igorot warrior who invokes and appropriates traditional bodily customs on warfare and gender relations to embody a self-styled heritage of resistance and martyrdom that undergirds the performance of their self-acquittal against the charges of terrorism and the authority of the colonial archive. Concurrently, the protested/protesting Igorot body moves against the "sovereign trickster" by staging an online fetad or the traditional mass mobilization of communal support, consolidating power from the "networked publics" against the threat of state terrorism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"In an era of intense anti‐transgender legislation attacking the rights of transgender adolescents, it is more important than ever to examine how transgender and nonbinary persons make claims of legitimacy. Transgender childhood narratives have historically been used as a tool to make one's transgender identity intelligible to others and legitimize claims to a specific gender (e.g., "I have always known I am actually a girl, not a boy"). Nascent gender identification demonstrates that one's gender is predetermined by forces outside of their control. This essentialist logic provides a "natural" and "acceptable explanation" for transgender identity and transition. The integration of these childhood tropes into diagnostic criteria and popular media has established them as markers of "legitimate" transgender identity. Failure to use these narratives, even if they do not align with personal experiences, risks one's access to medical, legal, and social resources. This article explores transgender childhood narratives in‐depth, detailing their historical roots and the theoretical frameworks that give them legitimacy. I examine their continued importance in demarcating both transgender and nonbinary authenticity and review literature that highlights the influence of these narratives across various realms of social life, including health and healthcare, public perceptions, and social recognition and support." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses schools’ use of multicultural school events as a practice designed to enhance inclusion and to prevent prejudice and negative intergroup attitudes in school. While prior research has largely criticized such events for promoting cultural stereotypes and essentialist cultural identities, in this article we discuss a more nuanced way of perceiving such practices. Based on our previous empirical work, we apply the idea of strategic essentialism (Spivak, 1996) and discuss how multicultural school events may also represent an opportunity for minority parents to achieve certain objectives by temporarily adopting the image provided by the majority and using it in a strategic manner to act and pursue chosen political advantages. However, we also critically discuss possible limitations and pitfalls of the idea of strategic essentialism as the concept may in fact essentialize the minority group contrary to the intention of the multicultural school event. The contribution of the article is a theoretically informed discussion of how these events may ascribe agency to the participating families, reducing the way critics perceive them solely as victims of a majority-dominated and non-inclusive practice.

Queer Africans in diaspora often reclaim histories obscured by colonialism. Implicit in gay Nigerian activist Bisi Alimi's influential archival work is an anti-colonial, but strategically essentialist, claim of a historical place for queer African peoples. I submit "historical place" and "(dis)placing" to understand queer disidentifications with historical construction. The risks of strategic essentialism can become epistemological opportunities for identity building. My analysis first traces how strategic essentialism persuasively constructs historical place and then explores how (dis)placing unsettles epistemological constructions of queer African identity. Advocating for a recognition of multiplicity, I encourage scholars to understand (dis)placing as complex vernacular discursive strategy that produces further possibilities for belonging and anti-colonial imagination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to revisit the enterprise of the Chinese School (CS) of IR and discuss how it should be viewed and handled in the discipline, specifically from within the analytical framework of the power/resistance nexus put forward by Foucault, Bhabha, and Spivak. The argument of this article is twofold. Firstly, the CS attempts to reinvigorate traditional Chinese concepts (that is, humane authority, the Tianxia system, and relationality), which mimick Western mainstream IR. These concepts channel the CS into a realist notion of power, a liberal logic of cosmopolitanism, and a constructivist idea of relationality. Thus, the CS uses against the West concepts and themes that the West currently use against the non-Western world. Nevertheless, as the second part of the argument will demonstrate, the enterprise of the CS can still be justified because it can be regarded as a reverse discourse; mimicking yet altering the original meanings of the taken-for-granted concepts, ideas, and principles used by mainstream IR scholars. Moreover, with the judicious use of strategic essentialism, the CS can potentially be one local group in a wider effort to contest diffused and decentred forms of Western domination through linking various struggles to form a unified 'counter-hegemonic bloc' of post-Western IR in the discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rural development in the Chinese state's strategy has been a changing political-economic problematic. The state has practiced a strategic essentialism with regard to 'peasantry.' It has actively taken 'peasantry' as a temporary unifying master-category while at the same time working with the differences within the category for the long-term goal of transformation. The post-Mao contradiction, emphasizing the protection of the 'peasantry' while encouraging differentiation, offers contemporary struggles both opportunity and frustration. This essay examines how the rural has been conceptualized in reform-era policies and discusses two cases of scholar activism, the rural reconstruction movement and the food sovereignty network in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The singular voice of women at COPs strategic entry point into the climate debate. • Ecofeminist tropes and Gender Balance homogenize women erase important differences. • Dominant gender message at the COPs controlled by a select group. • Intersectionality contests perpetuation of social and environmental inequalities. • Attention to intersections of structural inequalities and climate related pressures. Climate change is one of the most pressing issues of our time and will have differential impacts across different geographies and social strata. The Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is the most important international meeting surrounding climate change. The 2015 Paris climate talks reflected the global preoccupation around climate change, in that it was the first time 150 Heads of State ever gathered to discuss an issue. For geographers, the COPs are important sites to study because decisions around our environmental commons can perpetuate or contest socio-environmental narratives responsible for social and environmental inequalities. Increasingly, gender is being introduced into the climate debate in sites such as the COPs. Using qualitative methods, this paper delineates the mechanisms by which some meanings of gender like gender balance dominate over others like gender equality. My research illustrates how discourses of gender and climate change arise, are perpetuated, and materialized through climate policy. I use an intersectional lens to underscore the practices that perpetuate injustices, and explore the discourses that are the most popular at the COPs around gender and climate change, who perpetuates them, which narratives are mobilized, and which become invisible. I highlight how material practices at the COPs that construct polarized divisions of gender are accompanied by polarized divisions of space. Feminist geographies of climate change can challenge the global conversation about gender and climate change to form new coalitions and techniques to find just and equitable outcomes in the face of climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I analyze the ontology of the African oil palm among indigenous Marind communities in Merauke, West Papua. This introduced cash crop is conceptualized by Marind as tree and person, assailant and victim, and stranger and kin. Its ontology further multiplies through its material manifestations as plant, part, and product—from an individual stand to monocrop plantation, and from seedling to packaged oil. Drawing from two ethnographic accounts of negotiations between Marind and state and corporate actors, I then examine how Marind strategically foreground or background different facets of oil palm's reality to serve the political ends of their activism, producing what I call "teleontologies," or ontologies that serve an instrumental purpose. Essentializing the reality of oil palm is deemed necessary by many Marind for indigenous activism to succeed. But such essentializations are also deeply contested and can backfire unintentionally on the indigenous activists who deploy them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

South Africa's 2018/2019 summer holidays were marked by a flurry of media reports describing, some in vivid, graphic detail, the ritual slaughter of a sheep on a popular Cape Town beach by a group of #MustFall activists. Their action was in response to reports of a private security company, ostensibly working at the behest of nearby local commercial outlets and residents, having forced Black people off the beach. Focusing on various media reports and responses to the incident, the article shows that there is a revival and regrowth of essentialist expression in the ways contemporary South Africans address persistently overlapping issues of racial and class differences that are made particularly salient through their being marked by everyday discrimination. Through analysis of media reports and responses the article considers the various forms of essentialist expression that manifested during the ritual and in responses to it. In doing that it reveals particular local manifestations of the global turn to a populist politics and it demonstrates that, whilst essentialist expressions take diverse forms, some of which appear to offer empowerment potential in decolonising and other anti-oppressive moments, they also always carry the long-term potential for reinforcing divisive intolerance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How might identity and identity politics inform music teachers' practices and assumptions about disability? In this article, we engage in a critical discussion about how music educators might respond to disability. This article is presented in three parts as a collaborative dialogue between the two authors, using the landscape of identity politics to frame the discussion. In the first part, Warren Churchill discusses Tobin Siebers' theorizing of "the ideology of ability" as it relates to music education's dominant response to disability. Building on his idea of "complex embodiment," Siebers lays out a justification for disabled individuals to actively engage in identity politics for self-advocacy. Churchill connects Siebers' ideology to Joseph Abramo's epistemology of sound. In the second part, Cara Faith Bernard makes a counter-argument against deploying identity politics in the music classroom, drawing upon Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's notion of strategic essentialism to examine its potential risks with regards to music education curricula, in which essentialism may lead to establishing detrimental "best practices" for students. Thereafter, in Part Three, the authors join together to make sense of these seemingly contradictory philosophical outlooks on identity politics, in the hope of furthering conversation about music education's ongoing response to disability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article highlights how Anglophone anthropological studies of Japanese animation (anime) have overlooked its businesspeople (such as producers, investors, merchandisers, and entrepreneurs) by formulaically advocating anime creators and fans as crusaders subverting the global dominance of Euro-American global entertainment capitalism. Contextualising such orientation as an example of what Gayatri Spivak calls "strategic essentialism", the article further explores how to break out of this essentialist impasse of analysis in the anthropological approach to anime. The article suggests that a potential exit might exist through envisioning the business anthropology of anime, i.e. by casting an ethnographic focus on anime's businesspeople as the legitimate interlocutors for anthropological inquiries into anime. The author further explores the preliminary theoretical implications of this analytical turn through his own business ethnography of an international start-up venture of anime merchandising. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sharing François Laruelle's thesis on heterogeneity in the use of the concept of difference, which imparts a specific color to philosophy in the twentieth century, the author examines Rosie Braidotti’s specific interpretation of difference, which, being inspired by differentialism and the nomadic project, creates one of the most interesting contemporary philosophical conceptions. The various roles of difference are sought – first, in the context of Braidotti's understanding of the stages of the feminist project as a set of degrees of difference; second, by viewing difference as a defining element in her theory, the construction of the nomadic subject and his or her becomings in a posthuman and postanthropocentric context; third, in the political projections of the feminist brand of nomadism, based on the politics of location. The article argues the conclusion about the positive structure of the nomadic posthuman subject as opposed to the classical subject on the one hand and the deconstructed subject on the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, a solid and successful underground punk subculture that also found its ways into the West developed as a part of the Chinese youth culture. However, despite punks' empowering and inclusive character, some – especially female – musicians, face harsh pushbacks within the Chinese underground punk scene. This article examines the emergence of punk in China, the way it comments on and challenges social problems of modern-day China by using the example of the first all-female punk band, Hang on the Box. Based on postcolonial concepts by Homi K. Bhabha and Gayatri C. Spivak, this article explores the subversion of women's identity in a patriarchic system in a time of self-advancement and self-enrichment, but also of economic instability and personal uncertainty. With songs about abortion and machismo, the band tackles Beijing's sexist rock norms and addresses topics of social inequality. At the same time, the band members express their individuality and personal freedom in a society that values the collective over the individual. Hang on the Box unveils a third space, in which existing power relations are negotiated, aiming to challenge and deconstruct gender stereotypes and cultural identities that are forced upon women and therefore endanger both their freedom and gender equality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at the internalization and strategic utilization of racialized ideas about "Indianness" among urban American Indians (AIs). Based on 2½ years of ethnographic research in two urban AI communities, this study illustrates that urban AIs simultaneously resist and reify dominant, essentializing images of Indianness (e.g. brown skin, black eyes and full-bloodedness). Urban frequently "mixed-blood" AIs work to attach new meanings to Indianness that align with their individual experiences of Indian identity. At the same time, however, they contradict their resistance efforts with practices and statements that indicate their attachment to the racialized images they are trying to resist. As such, I argue that both internalized oppression and strategic essentialism are persistent mechanisms of racialization among urban AIs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several critiques have emerged of the neurodiversity paradigm and of claims made by activists in the Neurodiversity Movement. These critiques include concerns that the Neurodiveristiy movement downplays the differences between Autistic people. In this article, I argue that the neurodiversity paradigm is a strategically adopted response to current realities. Sometimes, it is strategically necessary to appeal to existing narratives about Autism, or to emphasize solidarity within the Autistic community over the autism spectrum's internal diversity. At times, this can lead activists to neglect a more nuanced articulation of the Neurodiversity paradigm, which allows for the diversity of our community while still calling for solidarity in the face of shared experiences of discrimination. I compare this strategy with strategies of strategic essentialism utilized in the Indigenous Rights movement in Canada. I also explore the ways in which discourses of ableism and racism have historically been intertwined. Both Autistic people and Indigenous people represent diverse communities that must grapple with externally imposed identities to access legal rights, and both identities have been denigrated as mentally inferior by non-Autistic and colonial powers. I conclude that it is sometimes necessary to employ these types of strategies to secure needed resources and protections. I call for both scholars and advocates to take a more intersectional approach to understanding how strategic essentialism is being deployed within the Neurodiversity Movement., Competing Interests: No competing financial interests exist., (Copyright 2023, Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers.)

This article analyses the ways in which contemporary Francophone African film interrogates concepts of identity and representation through its inflections of elements of film genre, particularly genre-linked presentations of gender. The article examines in detail Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s Les Saignantes and Abderrahmane Sissako’s Bamako as case studies, focusing on how the films’ reformulations of gender and genre reflect on the nature of representation in postcolonial cultural contexts. To explore how these inflections of genre and their reflection on representation may be politically resistant, the argument brings into dialogue theories of film genre as a relational concept (Stam, Neale, Bordwell and Thompson) and gender identity theory, drawn from the work of Spivak and Irigaray. In combination with detailed readings of the two films, this approach leads to two broader conclusions: firstly, that the strategic deployment of gender constructions within re-articulations of genre coordinates can constitute a form of aesthetic resistance; and secondly, that insights from postcolonial theory and gender theory can inform the analysis of film genre in non-Western contexts and elucidate the signification of film genre in contexts defined by networks of cultural appropriation, adaptation and exchange. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most research links (racial) essentialism to negative intergroup outcomes. We propose that this conclusion reflects both a narrow conceptual focus on biological/genetic essence and a narrow research focus from the perspective of racially dominant groups. We distinguished between beliefs in biological and cultural essences, and we investigated the implications of this distinction for support of social justice policies (e.g., affirmative action) among people with dominant (White) and subordinated (e.g., Black, Latino) racial identities in the United States. Whereas, endorsement of biological essentialism may have similarly negative implications for social justice policies across racial categories, we investigated the hypothesis that endorsement of cultural essentialism would have different implications across racial categories. In Studies 1a and 1b, we assessed the properties of a cultural essentialism measure we developed using two samples with different racial/ethnic compositions. In Study 2, we collected data from 170 participants using an online questionnaire to test the implications of essentialist beliefs for policy support. Consistent with previous research, we found that belief in biological essentialism was negatively related to policy support for participants from both dominant and subordinated categories. In contrast, the relationship between cultural essentialism and policy support varied across identity categories in the hypothesized way: negative for participants from the dominant category but positive for participants from subordinated categories. Results suggest that cultural essentialism may provide a way of identification that subordinated communities use to mobilize support for social justice.

Doing fieldwork in a politically active Indianist environment is difficult for anthropologists, especially in the context of multicultural policies through which land rights are based on cultural/ethnic identities. In these circumstances conventional anthropological discourse may become a veritable strategic resource (Agier 1997, Albert 1997, Boyer 2010). In this article I return to discuss my ethnographic experience in Northwest Argentina where a process of ethnicization and territorial demands arose after the 1980s. I describe my first fieldwork trips in 2000 and 2002 giving the reasons why I found myself gradually avoiding becoming politically engaged on the side of the activists. Keeping my distance from the Indian political organization put me in an awkward position vis-à-vis my hosts with whom I nevertheless sympathized. I describe the way my decision affected the way I conducted my interviews and carried out my fieldwork in general.

The present article sets out to explore certain aspects of how individuals with an ethnic minority background experience the journalistic media. It is derived from a project based on in-depth interviews aimed at mapping the media experiences and strategies of individuals with a minority background. Many tell of their experiences of being ethnified or subject to culturalization by the reporters – and thereby ascribed a lesser Norwegian identity even if they happen to be born and raised in Norway. In several cases, the interviewees demonstrate how they have had to emphasize their ethnicity in order to gain better access to media with regard to issues and causes that have nothing to do with their minority background. These continuing intersecting processes may inspire (strategic) essentialism among minority groups as a necessary albeit disputed way of obtaining media attention and recognition. Anthropologists’ approaches to essentialism, ethnification and culturalization are discussed, and by way of conclusion, the article discusses Gayatri Spivak’s “strategic essentialism”, its advantages, pitfalls and limitations.1

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This article seeks to establish comparability and continuity to past and present anti-Asiatic racisms in New Zealand society. In the years after 1986, the acceptance of non-European immigrants to New Zealand has drawn criticisms from both the dominant Anglo-Celtic majority in conjunction with the country's indigenous Maori population. At a time when Asian minority subaltern existence fails to challenge the dominant discourse that has forestalled the state subvention of multiculturalism, it is hoped that this work provides conceptual clarity on the similarities and differences that exist between historical and contemporary anti-Asiatic racisms in New Zealand. There is, in other words, a shift from fears towards Asians or Orientals as an inferior 'race' to the current racialization involving the inscription of new forms of colonial power designed to maintain a sense of ethnocracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are two pertinent issues with regard to written histories of art music in Africa. First, the non-existence of written histories, and second, deficiencies in existing literature. A categorisation of literary tropes – contemporary hagiography, the self-promotion of difference, and the self-promotion of prescribed Africanisation – which I argue bars African scholarship on art music from partaking in global discourses, is presented in the first part of the article. These nationalist historiographical practices are read as acts of strategic essentialism. In the second part I present a problematisation in the context of the material archive, using the ethnography of my visit to the collection of modern African music at Iwalewa-Haus, University of Bayreuth, Germany, as the point of reference. From this I conclude that the promotion of the intellectual ownership of knowledge on AfricabyAfrica should serve a much greater purpose than the symbolic act of postcolonial restoration of simply transferring physical ownership of archives. Finally, I explain how strategic essentialism and the transfer of the physical ownership of archives can both be understood as exercises in symbolic interactionism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the semiotic and performative negotiations of Gypsy tropes on the New Old Europe Sound scene by Romani brass musicians from Vranje, Serbia. Roma eager to access world music markets since the 1990s must engage with stereotypes popularised by the global hype for ‘Gypsy Brass’, characterised by two interrelated complexes: one conferring ‘authenticity’ by depicting Roma as pre-modern and passionate, and another connoting ‘hybridity’ through assertions of Romani rootlessness and perpetual musical borrowing. The juxtaposition of these tropes produces much-desired ‘authentic hybridity’ for western fans. While many Roma reproduce essentialisms to garner popular interest, they also strategically manipulate performances to resist clichéd impositions of Gypsyness, coding their practices as sophisticated artistry or inherent musical talent. Popular demand for Gypsy ‘authentic hybridity’ silences critical economic, cultural and historical specificities of Romani musical performance, however, re-embedding Romani performers within power relations that deny them full agency over self-representation and musical choices. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Most of the accounts, whether in Arabic or English, which deal with the first 18 days (25 January – 11 February) of the 2011 Egyptian revolution highlight theunityof the Tahrir days. This paper investigates the homogenous Tahrir experience from the perspective of three Egyptian women writers who lived this experience. I analyse the intersection between the personal and the political in three texts: Ahdaf Soueif’s memoirCairo: My City, Our Revolution, Mona Prince’s testimonyIsmi Thawra(My Name is Revolution) and Donia Kamal’s novelSigarah Sab‘a(A Seventh Cigarette). All three texts were published in 2012. The paper engages two specific feminist concepts: Judith Butler’s performativity and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s strategic essentialism. The paper is divided into three parts. The first part briefly outlines the theoretical framework. The second part situates the revolution and the writers in the context of Egyptian women’s earlier struggle for the nation, whilst exploring Nira Yuval-Davis and Elleke Boehmer’s studies on the problematic relation between gender and nation. The third part examines the three texts closely in light of the specified feminist concepts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]