The emergence of conditions such as migration, asylum-seeking, and dislocation compels translators to navigate complex agendas in these emergent settings. Despite the growing interest in translation as a form of activism, there have been few studies exploring the convergence of translation studies and theories of activism. Against this backdrop, the current study adopts the perspective of translation as a form of activism in order to throw light on Omid Tofighian's role as an activist through a case study of Behrouz Boochani, a prominent human rights advocate and an asylum seeker detained from 2013 to 2019 in different carceral sites. The central argument is that Tofighian addresses the plight of Boochani and his fellow asylum seekers while incorporating his own agendas through paratextual elements in Boochani's novel, No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison. The findings reveal that Tofighian's agenda amplifies the voices of asylum seekers, conceptualize the pain and experiences in concrete terms, and promote transnational discourse on refugeehood. The implications of this study provide a foundation for analysing the translator's role as a vital actor who makes every attempt at his disposal to bring about political and social changes through translation with an activist mission.
Social media serves as a field not only for the expression of taste but also for the production of taste. Within the context of digital literature, critics have expressed concern that the quality of literary works has declined due to the absence of rigorous curation. In response, cultural elites in Indonesia launched Imajisia, the first Instagram literary magazine. Using Imajisia as a case study, this article advances the concept of mediated literary taste, understood as the institutional production of literary taste on social media through strategies of distinction aimed at re-legitimizing cultural capital. The data consist of Imajisia's Instagram posts and interviews with its editorial team. Through qualitative content analysis, the study identifies two categories of distinction shaped by the adaptation to Instagram's media logic: distinction in literary form and distinction in literary content. Although Imajisia adapts to Instagram's microformat and curatorial practices, its editorial team is not fully subsumed by the platform's hegemonic logic. The study contributes to broader debates on digital literature, mediatization, and cultural production by demonstrating that social actors not only negotiate platform logic but also produce distinctions among comparable cultural products.
This article examines Kamala Harris' 2020-2024 presidential trajectory as a site where multiracial, diasporic identity confronts white supremacist nostalgia in contemporary US politics. Its central thesis argues that Harris' transoceanic hybridity, rooted in Black Atlantic and South Asian Indian Ocean histories, both destabilizes hegemonic narratives of national belonging and reveals the structural limits placed on hybrid, gendered bodies within presidential politics. Drawing on Critical Mixed Race Studies and Diaspora Theory, the article investigates how Harris' multi-ethnoracial identity was mobilized, scrutinized, and contested in media, campaign discourse, and political attacks, particularly in contrast to Donald Trump's masculinist, frontier-based imaginaries of power. Methodologically, the study employs qualitative critical discourse analysis of key campaign texts, including the September 2024 presidential debate, Trump's victory speech, and Harris' concession speech, alongside close readings of Harris' memoir. The analysis demonstrates how hybridity operates as a politically ambivalent force that can challenge exclusionary racial logics while remaining vulnerable to containment within dominant structures of power.
This study examines internet memes as a ludic discourse in Chinese popular culture through the case of Singer 2024. It adopts the concept of playful meaning to analyse how memes evolve when unexpectedly entangled with online nationalism. Through critical discourse analysis, three key findings emerge: First, referential and affective meanings co-evolve during meme circulation, challenging static understandings of meme meaning. Second, affective appropriation of political elements for fun differs from political interpretation at the referential level, enabling playful engagement while maintaining ideological distance within meme culture. Third, meme culture serves as a paradoxical channel for public discourse, enabling social commentary while retaining its entertainment value within China's marketized, creative digital ecosystem. This research advances understanding of China's digital culture by revealing the dual political-entertainment dynamics of meme culture.
Through autoethnographic encounters with selected artworks from the exhibition One Hundred Thousand Small Tales (OHTST) at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) Sri Lanka, and grounded in the author's lived experiences, this paper presents how art activates inherited memories and reveals the forms of erasure and absence. It argues that these artworks operate as affective repositories that resist official narratives by making visible the intimate and fragmented histories often excluded from public discourse. The analysis is framed as a conversation between the spectator (author) and the artworks, where each piece becomes an active participant in revisiting and reframing memories of the Tamil community. In so doing, it also highlights how art can create spaces where personal memories intersect and offer alternative ways of understanding the emotional and political afterlives of war.
This study offers a political economy analysis of Afghan newspapers before 1979, examining how print media mediated relations between state power, external actors and projects of modernization and nation-building. Focusing on five key outlets, Shams-u-Nahar, Siraj-ul-Akhbar, Aman-e-Afghan, Anis and The Kabul Times, it traces three phases: the emergence of court-centred print under Amir Sher Ali during the Great Game; the reformist, anti-colonial moment associated with Mahmud Tarzi and King Amanullah; and the selectively liberalized media environment under Zahir Shah, including the 'Free Parliament' and 'Decade of Democracy'. Combining a political-economy of communication framework with qualitative discourse analysis of selected issues, the article shows that newspapers operated primarily as instruments of propaganda, legitimation and developmental nationalism, while at specific junctures also opening constrained spaces for criticism and debate. It argues that pre-1979 Afghan print cannot be understood simply as an externally imposed project: exiled elites and domestic reformers appropriated Ottoman, Iranian, Indian and broader global models to articulate distinct visions of Afghan modernity, even as low literacy, limited infrastructure and linguistic fragmentation sharply curtailed their social reach and impact.
