Identity research has increasingly emphasised the narrative and discursive construction of social identities, yet relatively little attention has been paid to how identity narratives regulate the distribution of social resources within groups. Drawing on Identity Group Theory (IGT), this article conceptualises identity formation as a process of narrative resource allocation, in which participation entails investments of attention, effort, and emotional engagement, and generates forms of recognition, authority, and belonging.The analysis focuses on Zakes Mda's The Heart of Redness and Ways of Dying, which depict communities negotiating historical memory, social transformation, and collective loss in post-apartheid South Africa. Through close reading and discourse-oriented analysis, the article examines how characters mobilise narrative authority, form alliances, and participate in practices-such as debate and mourning-that structure communal life.It argues that Mda's fiction renders visible the processes through which recognition and influence circulate within groups. In doing so, the article demonstrates how the concept of identity economies advances cultural theory by moving beyond anti-essentialist accounts of identity as process toward an analysis of how narrative practices distribute recognition, authority, obligation, and belonging. The article therefore contributes to an interdisciplinary framework linking literary studies, cultural studies, sociology, and discourse analysis.
In Southwestern Uganda, material culture of the Batwa pygmies has been overtly manifested in a number of ways through painterly narratives produced by Edward Kamugisha to record images defining their collective identity. In this article, the discussion is centred on some of the striking narratives employed in the visual arts to reclaim the vanishing cultural artefacts, which are significant in the traditional way of life of the Batwa pygmies. In light of social and cultural identity of the Batwa pygmies, and of their need for survival expressed through their cultural heritage in Southwestern Uganda, a series of paintings as a form of identity reconstruction emerged through studio-investigation. Consequently, those narratives became an agency for cultural preservation. Consequently, the following questions emerge: How did the Batwa pygmies of Southwestern Uganda express their identity through material culture? How could the gap between traditional ethnography and contemporary visual arts practice be bridged? How would integrating process and artefact serve as painting reclamations? How should the material culture of the Batwa pygmies be re-imagined as socially concerned art? This article addresses those questions taking into consideration some lessons to be learned which may not be limited to Batwa pygmies of Southwestern Uganda but would inform broader conversations concerning how art would be used to address socio-cultural issues.
This commentary responds to Tomaselli and Xiao's (2023) article "Cultural Studies in Interhemispherical Perspective: China, Africa, Asia and Australasia" by extending its South-North and East-West conversation to the Indonesian digital public sphere. While their article valuably reopens the question of how cultural studies travels across unequal intellectual geographies, I argue that Global South media theory must move beyond the language of cultural representation alone. Indonesia shows that culture is not merely represented online; it is sorted, intensified, moralised, monetised and sometimes wounded through platform infrastructures. Drawing on empirical indicators of Indonesian internet use, social media news consumption, digital rights pressures and scholarship on Indonesian digital politics, this commentary proposes "platformed moral publics" as a modest conceptual extension. The term names the affective publics through which citizens negotiate religion, nationalism, gender, class and civic belonging under algorithmic visibility. The point is not to exceptionalise Indonesia, but to insist that theory from the South begins from lived contradiction.
