In recent decades, the field of intercultural communication has been shaped by an enduring debate between two competing paradigms: essentialism and non-essentialism. While essentialism can be useful for identifying relatively stable cultural patterns, there is a risk of stereotyping and reification. By contrast, non-essentialism foregrounds fluidity, context and agency, but may struggle to account for continuity and macro-level regularities. This paper uses Zhuangzi's Qiwulun to reconsider this opposition. It argues that Qiwulun not only advocates the balanced use of both paradigms, but also reveals the epistemic, linguistic, and discursive conditions through which their dichotomy is constructed. Through the concepts such as Chengxin, Yiming, Deyiwangyan, Shiyushangxing and Liangxing, this paper offers a meta-paradigmatic pathway for moving beyond rigid dichotomous thinking. Rather than eliminating categories altogether, Qiwulun enables their reflexive and provisional use, allowing essentialist and non-essentialist insights to operate within their respective valid domains without being absolutised. In this way, the paper presents Qiwulun as a unique philosophical resource for achieving a more critical, reflexive, and holistic understanding of intercultural communication.
This article examines the relationship between language and identity through metalinguistic discourses surrounding the loanword 'identity' in relation to other recently introduced loanwords in Japan. In Japanese, 'identity' is often expressed by the English-derived loanword aidentit & imacr;. This term became the subject of intense debates from the late 1990s to the late 2000s. To uncover the underlying ideas behind these controversies, this study analyses newspaper articles addressing the loanword 'identity' by examining other loanwords referenced in the same contexts. The analysis reveals two distinct phases of argumentation: from the late 1990s to the early 2000s and from the mid-2000s to the late 2000s. In the first phase, 'identity' was frequently discussed alongside terms associated with an emerging international order shaped by globalisation. In the second phrase, it appeared more often in connection with vocabulary related to Japanese policy initiatives. This study argues that these debates reflect broader tensions in Japan's negotiation of identity along two key dimensions: sameness and difference. Initially, Japan sought to reposition itself within a changing global context in alignment with other nations, while subsequently it turned towards articulating values that distinguish it from them. Conclusively, metalinguistic discourses on the loanword 'identity' illuminate the process of identity negotiation.
This article introduces the Special Issue on Digital Activism in the Global South: Agency, Identity, and Representation. It adopts the critical lens of Cultural Discourse Studies (CDS), arguing that contemporary digital resistance cannot be adequately understood through either celebratory narratives of technological democratization or reductive accounts of platform determinism. Bringing together contributions from diverse geopolitical and cultural contexts, the Special Issue examines how marginalized communities strategically appropriate digital media infrastructures to negotiate visibility, identity, memory, legitimacy, and political agency within deeply unequal communication environments structured by colonial histories, racialization, caste hierarchy, developmental inequality, and platform capitalism. Rather than conceptualizing digital activism as a universalized form of technologically enabled participation, the issue foregrounds it as a heterogeneous field of culturally situated discursive struggles shaped by uneven historical and intercultural relations.
This paper examines language policy (LP) in Bangladesh as a postcolonial regime shaped by lasting tensions between formal state legitimacy and uneven institutional practice. Using qualitative documentary analysis, the study examined the constitutional provisions, legal acts, administrative orders, court decisions, education policies and related policy documents produced between 1972 and 2026. The analysis distinguishes between explicit policy - which formally privileges Bengali - and the implicit or de facto policy through which English has retained authority across key institutional domains. The findings demonstrate that Bengali has remained the dominant language of constitutional legitimacy, public authority and symbolic nationhood, while English continues to structure high-value domains (e.g. the judiciary, higher education, public service recruitment). Meanwhile, multilingualism remains weakly articulated in policy, and indigenous and minoritised languages have received limited recognition within formal policy frameworks. The article argues that Bangladesh's LP is therefore best understood as a stratified LP regime in which symbolic monolingualism, functional bilingualism and multilingual marginalisation coexist. This stratification produces unequal access to institutional engagement, representation, education and mobility, with implications for human rights and broader social inequality. The discussion contributes to debates on postcolonial LP by showing how the explicit Bengali-centred policy coexists with the institutional dominance of English and the marginalisation of other languages.
This study examines how artificial intelligence (AI) and algorithmically mediated narrative structures reshape representations of cultural hybridity, migration, and transcultural identity in contemporary German and Arab-German literature. Existing scholarship has primarily focused on technological innovation and AI-generated texts, while the influence of AI-assisted narration on intercultural literary production remains underexplored. The study addresses two questions: how AI-mediated narrative structures transform representations of migration and hybridity, and to what extent AI systems reproduce linguistic and cultural biases in multilingual literary contexts. Drawing on postcolonial theory, digital humanities, and AI ethics, the study applies qualitative comparative textual analysis and close reading. The corpus includes works by Abbas Khider, Rasha Abbas, Jenny Erpenbeck, and the AI-assisted Arabic novel A Treason in Morocco by Ahmad Lutfi. The article argues that algorithmic narration functions not merely as a technological tool, but as a transformative literary mechanism that reshapes transcultural identity while simultaneously reproducing new forms of algorithmic and cultural bias. The findings contribute to debates in comparative literature and digital humanities by demonstrating how AI-mediated storytelling transforms narrative form, authorship, and cultural representation.
