Journal articles on the topic 'War stories, English – History and criticism'

Despite its short length (152 pages excluding reference matters), this pioneering study in English of “the Shanghai–Hong Kong nexus” in Chinese cinema succeeds in placing wartime Shanghai and Hong Kong cinemas in specific (albeit not always “proper” as Poshek Fu claims (p. xvi)) institutional and industrial contexts, bringing to light the “humanity” of the filmmakers, the “multiplicity of the historical situations,” and the “complexity of the cultural politics” of filmmaking and film criticism (p. xv). Most impressive of all is Fu's dedication to primary research, reading hard-to-find print materials as well as conducting interviews and watching rare films. The book's incredibly rich information (e.g. studio assets, production costs, ticket prices) will certainly interest scholars of modern Chinese history and culture, and Fu's accessible stories should attract general readers as well.After a preface outlining Fu's aims, chapter one, “Mapping Shanghai cinema under semi-occupation,” traces the rise of Zhang Shankun's Xinhua Company in Shanghai and reveals the ambiguities, contradictions and ironies of “Solitary Island cinema” between 1937 and 1941 – a cinema that defied political boundaries and thrived against odds. Chapter two, “Between nationalism and colonialism,” based on Fu's similarly-titled previous study (in The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity, edited by Fu and David Desser (2000)), discusses Hong Kong's “double marginality” between “Sinocentric” nationalism and British colonialism, and critiques the “Central Plains syndrome” in Shanghai filmmakers stranded in Hong Kong in the late 1930s. Against the Chinese syndrome, Fu asserts, Cantonese films like Southern Sisters (1940) articulated “a both/and hybridity” constitutive of a new “local consciousness” or emergent identity (p. 87). Chapter three, “The struggle to entertain,” derives from Fu's previous article (“The ambiguity of entertainment: Chinese cinema in Japanese-occupied Shanghai, 1942 to 1945,” Cinema Journal, 37.1 (Fall 1997)) and argues against a binary view of either/or (e.g. resistance/collaboration, patriots/traitors). Fu depicts “occupation cinema” as a space of entertainment for the colonized to “escape from Japanese propaganda” (p. xiv), although the both/and logic also compels him to note the paradox that occupation cinema ultimately “helped normalize and naturalize the everyday violence of the occupation” (p. 131). In an epilogue, “Filming Shanghai in Hong Kong,” Fu goes through the changing political–economic situations in post-war Shanghai and Hong Kong.

In an article, ‘The Slaves were Happy’: High School Latin and the Horrors of Classical Studies, Erik Robinson, a Latin teacher from a public high school in Texas, criticises how, in his experience, Classics teaching tends to avoid in-depth discussions on issues such as the brutality of war, the treatment of women and the experience of slaves (Robinson, 2017). However, texts such as the article ‘Teaching Sensitive Topics in the Secondary Classics Classroom’ (Hunt, 2016), and the book ‘From abortion to pederasty: addressing difficult topics in the Classics classroom’ (Sorkin Rabinowitz & McHardy, 2014) strongly advocate for teachers to address these difficult and sensitive topics. They argue that the historical distance between us and Greco-Roman culture and history can allow students to engage and participate in discussions that may otherwise be difficult and can provide a valuable opportunity to address uncomfortable topics in the classroom. Thus, Robinson's assertion that Classics teaching avoids these sensitive topics may not be so definitive. Regardless, Robinson claims that honest confrontations in the classroom with the ‘legacy of horror and abuse’ from the ancient world can be significantly complicated by many introductory textbooks used in Latin classes, such as the Cambridge Latin Course (CLC), one of the most widely used high school Latin textbooks in use in both America and the United Kingdom (Robinson, 2017). In particular, Robinson views the presentation of slavery within the CLC as ‘rather jocular and trivialising’ which can then hinder a reader's perspective on the realities of the violent and abusive nature of the Roman slave trade (Robinson, 2017). As far as he was concerned, the problem lay with the characterisation of the CLC's slave characters Grumio and Clemens, who, he argued, were presented there as happy beings and seemingly unfazed by their positions as slaves. There was never any hint in the book that Grumio or Clemens were unhappy with their lives or their positions as slaves, even though, as the CLC itself states in its English background section on Roman slavery, Roman law ‘did not regard slaves as human beings, but as things that could be bought or sold, treated well or badly, according to the whim of their master’ (CLC I, 1998, p. 78). One might argue, therefore, that there seems to be a disconnect between the English language information we learn about the brutality of the Roman slave trade provided in the background section of Stage 6, and what we can infer about Roman slavery from the Latin language stories involving our two ‘happy’ slaves.

Abstract Scholarship in modern Arabic literary studies has treated the literature of the Lebanese Civil War, particularly novels written by women, in some depth. One of the most important texts used in both scholarship and teaching about this war is Ḥanān al-Shaykh’s Ḥikāyat Zahrah, translated as The Story of Zahra. This article focuses specifically on the one chapter in the novel narrated from the point of view of the protagonist’s uncle in order to explore how the English translation dramatically changes a number of elements in the original text. It uses insights from translation studies to show how significant changes to the novel in translation produce a text that serves particular ideological functions in English, consistent with a horizon of expectations that constructs Arab women as oppressed and passive victims of war. The article analyzes specific translation choices—most notably the extensive editing out of words, sentences, and passages—to demonstrate how the character of Zahrah’s uncle is changed in English and depicted as an unsavory and abusive man with little background, context, or history that would help the reader to better understand the character’s actions and motivations. It also shows how cutting out elements of the uncle’s story serves to depoliticize the text in English, divesting it of its local political context and changing its meaning and function as a novel about the Lebanese Civil War. The article is grounded in postcolonial, feminist translation studies, especially those dealing with Arabic fiction, to argue that the English-language novel The Story of Zahra functions within an ideological field that recycles stereotypes and tropes about Arab women. It will propose that the translation changes here depict Arab men against Arab women, rather than in relation to them, and subordinate the analysis of politics and communal relations to a more individual and individualized story of one exceptional woman.

Alternate histories about the American Civil War seem ideally set up to explore the possibilities and tensions of social criticism through art and literature. Counterfactual stories about the war easily invoke contemporary issues of inequality and exploitation, and they are part of a genre—alternate history—that has traditionally lent itself to social commentary. Yet while scholarship on alternate history has captured the presentist orientation of many alternate histories in the fantasy-nightmare dichotomy, these categories appear reductive as a reflection of the layered and intriguing forms social criticism takes in Civil War alternate history. This article examines two examples of this genre that position themselves as political statements. Frank Purdy Williams’s largely forgotten novel Hallie Marshall: A True Daughter of the South (1900) subverts major literary traditions of its time to mount a counterintuitive critique of capitalist exploitation. Kevin Willmott’s mockumentary C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America (2004) is both a scathing critique of American racism and a multilayered satire on the distortion of history in popular culture. Both works use the conventions of alternate history as conduits for critique and provocation, which makes the revelation of their ideological investments ingenious but perhaps dangerously circuitous.

This article identifies three loci of the British colonial state’s anxiety about communication of news and views in India during the Second World War: its own officials (and their families); the press (both English language and vernacular); and the Indian public. It explores war-time dilemmas of the state with regard to censorship of both news and rumour, and it discusses the central paradox of censorship in colonial India during war-time.

Over the years Shona fiction that portrays Zimbabwe’s liberation war has been a subject of severe criticism because of its tendency to falsify and distort history. This article attempts to provide answers to the question of why authors of Shona war fiction tended to romanticise the war of liberation. In pursuance of this objective this article looks at circumstances and conditions that prevailed at the time that most of the Shona stories about Zimbabwe’s liberation war were written. These stories were published during the first decade of Zimbabwe’s independence and it is possible to look at this time and come up with a set of interdependent cultural, economic, political and ideological conditions that helped to shape writers’ perspectives on the war. The article argues that the conditions of artistic freedom that interfaced with internalised fear, the euphoria and celebration, the dominant ideology of the time, as well as the situation of competition were responsible for shaping the consciousness of the war fiction writers. In this article views expressed in interviews by some of the writers of Shona war fiction are taken into consideration. All interviews with authors referred to in the article were carried out by the researcher.

Khalil I. Al-Fuzai (1940-) is a man of letters from Saudi Arabia who published few collections of stories. In these stories he tries to introduce his characters in a simple, frank way (see Dohal 2013). One of these stories is “Eurhythmics on the Pavement of Danger.” Here he addresses the issue of journalism. I chose to translate this story for it is a good sample of how Al-Fuzai has connected between journalism and war (see other themes he addresses in Dohal, 2013, 2018 & 2019). Furthermore, it presents some aspects what has happened in 1991; this story has a part of history.

Abstract Sociopolitical phenomena such as corruption, political instability, (domestic) violence, cultural fragmentation, and the Nigerian Civil War (1967–1970) have been central themes of Nigerian narratives. Important as these are, they tend to touch on the periphery of the major issue at stake, which is the vector of persecution underlying the Nigerian tradition in general and in modern Igbo Nigerian narratives in particular, novels and short stories written in English which capture, wholly or in part, the Igbo cosmology and experience in their discursive formations. The present study of such modern Igbo Nigerian narratives as Okpewho’s The Last Duty (1976), Iyayi’s Heroes (1986), Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2007), and other novels and short stories applies René Girard’s theory of the pharmakos (Greek for scapegoat) to this background of persecution, particularly as it subtends the condition of the Igbo in postcolonial Nigeria in the early years of independence.

Historical studies of nature conservation and literary criticism of fiction concerned with the natural environment provide some pointers for the study of South African children’s literature in English. This kind of literature, in turn, has a contribution to make to studies of South African social history and literature. There are English-language stories, poems and picture books for children which reflect human interaction with nature in South Africa since early in the nineteenth century: from hunting, through domestication of the wilds, the development of scientific agriculture, and the changing roles of nature reserves, to modern ecological concern for the entire environment. Until late in the twentieth century the literature usually endorsed the assumption held by whites that they had exclusive ownership of the land and wildlife. In recent years English-language children’s writers and translators of indigenous folktales for children have begun to explore traditional beliefs about and practices in conservation.

John Wallis, a founding member of the Royal Society, theologian and churchman, participated in the leading ecclesiastical conferences in England from the beginning of the English Civil War to the Restoration. His allegiance across governments, both civil and ecclesiastical, has provoked criticism. Close investigation into his position on key church issues, however, reveals a deeper philosophical unity binding together his natural philosophy, mathematics and views on church polity and liturgy.

The name of Ernest Hemingway was first mentioned in Slovenian literary criticism by the writer and critic Tone Seliškar in 1933. Soon afterwards, Griša Koritnik, the foremost translator of English and American literatures in the period between the two wars, in his article »The Great War in the English Novel« described the protagonist of the novel A Farewell to Arms (1929) somewhat enigmatically as »the symbol of the old generation«. In a short survey of contemporary American literature, which Anton Debeljak in 1939 freely adapted from the article previously published by J. Wood Krutch in The Times, Hemingway was grouped together with the Nobel Prize winner Pearl S. Buck and novelist Erskine Caldwell, which is to say with the giants of the then mainstream American fiction. However, it is curious that a Slovenian reader should already from this article have learned how Hemingway, the author of »powerful stories«, had recently become monotonous, which was before he even had a fair chance to get acquainted with any of his works translated into Slovenian.

The name of Ernest Hemingway was first mentioned in Slovenian literary criticism by the writer and critic Tone Seliškar in 1933. Soon afterwards, Griša Koritnik, the foremost translator of English and American literatures in the period between the two wars, in his article »The Great War in the English Novel« described the protagonist of the novel A Farewell to Arms (1929) somewhat enigmatically as »the symbol of the old generation«. In a short survey of contemporary American literature, which Anton Debeljak in 1939 freely adapted from the article previously published by J. Wood Krutch in The Times, Hemingway was grouped together with the Nobel Prize winner Pearl S. Buck and novelist Erskine Caldwell, which is to say with the giants of the then mainstream American fiction. However, it is curious that a Slovenian reader should already from this article have learned how Hemingway, the author of »powerful stories«, had recently become monotonous, which was before he even had a fair chance to get acquainted with any of his works translated into Slovenian.

AbstractThe expansion of the colonial public sphere in India during the 1930s and 1940s saw the nation's English-language press increasingly serve as a key site in the struggle for freedom despite British censorship. This article examines the journalistic career of T. G. Narayanan, the first Indian war correspondent and investigative reporter, to understand the role of English-language newspapers in India's quest for independence. Narayanan reported on two major events leading to independence: the Bengal famine of 1943 and the Second World War. Drawing on Michael Walzer's concept of the ‘connected critic’, this research demonstrates that Narayanan's journalism fuelled the Indian nationalist movement by manoeuvring around British censors to publicize and expand Mahatma Gandhi's criticism of British rule, especially in light of the famine and war. His one departure from the pacifist leader, however, was his support of Indian soldiers serving in the Indian National Army and British Army.

Since 2013, the Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin and the German Archeological Institute (DAI) have hosted a digital archive documenting Syrian heritage and built environment. This project was developed in the face of a war that would destroy places of cultural heritage on a large scale. The archive consists of photos, plans, and documents and includes more than 200,000 items. For long-term storage and attainability they are integrated into the digital world of the DAI. In order to raise awareness and to present the data to a wider audience, selected photos and drawings are bundled into stories on a new website with text in English, Arabic, and German. The project exhibits Syrian cultural heritage in both its tangible and nontangible aspects.

Those who admire the work of John Pilger, journalist and film maker, willfind much to enthuse over in Hidden Agendas, his seventh book. At nearly 700pages it is lengthy and its list of subjects includes Vietnam, East Timor,apartheid, English tabloid newspapers, Wapping, Rupert Murdoch, Burma,Hillsborough, Australian aboriginals, Kenya, Tony Blair and New Labour, theGulf War, and Northern Ireland. Pilger's primary themes, however, are considerablyfewer: media control, globalization, the military, capitalism, and, crucially,opposition to this ideology. Pilger writes in the introduction: “This book is devoted to slow news” (p. 1).By “slow news” Pilger means those stories which have not received seriousmedia coverage. He goes on to note: “When slow news is included, it is morethan likely dressed in a political and social vocabulary that ensures the truth islost” (p. 2). That Pilger knows what the truth is, is a central premise of hisbook. In his bitter criticism of global media coverage of the Gulf War, hewrites: “The war was not a war at all. It was a one-sided blood-letting. KateAdie [BBC reporter], like most of her colleagues, had reported the news, butnot the story” (pp. 52-53). Pilger’s real concern throughout this book is thestory, not the news. This is an unequivocally political book appealing to theeducated general reader. A substantial number of notes are employed and thereis a useful index, but Hidden Agendas has no scholarly pretensions. Indeed,overall, Pilger can be cavalier, even irresponsibly so, with regard to referencing.For example, in the following assertion made in the introduction, at leastseven claims are made, not one of which is substantiated ...

Academics are falsely rumored to have a low regard for religion. Although Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, authors of The God Delusion and God Is Not Great, respectively, made atheism a best-selling subject in the United States, it is not coincidental that Hitchens and Dawkins are English. They were educated in a country where a strident antipathy toward religion is not unpatriotic. American atheists with as much brass are rare. Kicking religion around cannot be an American sport because, from colonial to contemporary times, religion has been a central component of American culture. To be sure, a lot of scholarly criticism has been directed at right-wing Christian and Islamic movements. But scholars whose personal views on faith incline them to echo Hitchens's mordant formula that “religion poisons everything” should probably look for a country other than the United States to study. The recent books of historians and sociologists of American religion have taken a tone toward the subject that has ranged from gentle to friendly.

The article assesses the results of studies of everyday lives of Soviet women in the 1950s–1960s in Anglo-American historiography, in which a problematic field has developed with its own boundaries, plots and search tasks, and a well-established range of sources. The peculiarity of Western scholars’ views of this issue were of considerable importance for biographical interviews, the stories of women who remember that time. (In contrast to Russian historiography, foreign scholars used an anthropological approach to study women’s history much earlier.) The authors define more clearly the successes of foreign scholars in the study of Soviet women’s history in the 1960s, as well as controversial assessments and prospects. Considered chronologically and sequentially, the assessments of Soviet life in the publications of English-speaking scholars revealed their strong dependence on the American model of everyday life for the corresponding period. The consumption system and social protection of the population, which grew sharply after the Second World War in Western countries, became the ideal that guided these scholars during the entire second half of the twentieth century. In such a comparison, Soviet women’s lives in conditions of constant deficits of goods and services, as well as other problems and shortcomings of the Soviet economic model, always seemed to be a losing battle. In the 2000s, this ideal model of American everyday life, with which scholars did not directly compare women’s everyday lives in the USSR, but which between the lines manifested itself as a standard, turned out to be somewhat squeezed by the desire to positively evaluate the achievements of Soviet social policy and the gains that it provided for women.

This article analyzes two successful Italian novels set during the Ventennio and the Second World War, namely Carlo Lucarelli’s Carta bianca (1990) and Maurizio De Giovanni’s Per mano mia (2011). It shows how Lucarelli confronts the troubling adherence to Fascism through a novel in which investigations are continually hampered by overpowering political forces. By contrast, in spite of expressing an anti-Fascist view, De Giovanni’s novel ends up providing a sanitized version of the Ventennio that allows the protagonist to fulfil his role as a policeman without outward contradictions. By mixing crime fiction and history, Lucarelli intervenes in the revisionist debate of the 1980s and 1990s by attacking the new mythology of the innocent Fascist. Twenty years later, following years of Berlusconi’s propaganda, De Giovanni waters down the hybridization of crime fiction and history with the insertion of romance and the supernatural in order to provide entertaining stories and attract a large audience. In the final analysis, from being functional to political and social criticism in Lucarelli’s series, the fruitful hybridization of crime fiction and history has turned into a mirror of the political and historical de-awareness of Italian society of the 2000s in De Giovanni’s series.

The article focuses on estimating the influence of Rudyard Kipling’s figure on the works of his younger contemporary, the American Frank Norris. The author comes to the conclusion that the English writer fundamentally determined his literary follower’s development vector. Kipling who has become extremely popular among American readers raises Norris’s interest toward neo-romantic short story. The early stage of Norris’s work is noted by Kipling’s powerful influence and the article reveals common plot, compositional and stylistic elements in their works. The writers are united by artistic ideals: Kipling and Norris emphasize the exotic and the criminal and treat the concept of masculinity in a similar way in their short stories. The relevance and scientific novelty of the article are determined by the fact that the article studies Norris’s short stories which were previously unexplored in Russian literary criticism. The author makes an attempt to determine the significance of romanticism’s legacy for Norris’s work and to demonstrate its close relationship with naturalism, exploring various works by R. Kipling. The article uses the following methods: elements of the biographical method; estimation of Norris's theoretical ideas according to the principles of cultural studies; comparative analysis of the works of the two authors. The article can be used in teaching the history of foreign (in particular, American) literature in higher educational institutions.

Wilkie Collins, one of the most popular Victorian novelists, has been widely acclaimed as the early master of the sensation novel and a pioneer of English detective fiction. Novels such as The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868) became best sellers and captivated Victorian readers with their convoluted plots full of mystery, crime and sexuality, usually within the respectable middle-class home. His popularity crossed national and linguistic borders, and his novels, novellas and short stories were soon translated into different languages. In Spain, we find over a dozen of different editions of Collins’s stories already in the nineteenth century, which often appeared serialised in popular journals or magazines, like their original counterparts. One of these early Spanish translations was The Woman in White which, in different forms and with different titles, attracted the attention of many publishers and readers during the twentieth century, despite the obstacles posed by censorship and the hardships of the post-war period. This paper aims to discuss the Spanish publication history and reception of Collins’s sensation novel The Woman in White and analyse the scale of its popularity.

Manning’s (1908-1980) novel The Great Fortune (1960) is the first Second World War novel of a six-part novel series titled Fortunes of War. Set in Bucharest, Romania, the novel portrays the historical events of the first year of the war (1939-1940) and how these affect Romanian society and the English community. The novel was well-received in England, and in 1987 was adapted to a television serial issued by BBC. In Romania, the response of the critics after the communist regime was rather harsh, accusing Manning of misinterpreting Romanian reality. Moreover, considering that Manning portrays not only the wealth of high society but also the misery and the political conflicts of those times with the fascist Guard in the background, it could be stated that in 1960 when the novel was reviewed by the censorship board, it might not have been positively evaluated. Therefore, this article analyses the reception of The Great Fortune in Romania during and after the Communist regime from a historical perspective focusing on critics and censors’ responses to determine whether censorship influenced the reception of the novel in Romania. To undertake this study the censorship files located at the National Archives in Bucharest, as well as articles guarded in various libraries in Romania, were consulted. Keywords: Manning, Second World War, Romania, Bucharest, censorship, criticism, history, reception studies

Abstract W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman’s 1066 and All That is a satirical history of England, published in 1930. It has long been thought to be a parody of popular history textbooks, characteristic of a generation of post-war writers disillusioned with the tone of patriotic English exceptionalism of many books. This paper explores contemporary critiques of history textbooks in the first third of the twentieth century and finds, however, that 1066 And All That is unusual in its implied criticism. It suggests that the standpoint of its authors reflects more than simply the recoil of their generation of ex-servicemen. It proposes that the book reflects their own particular experience of reading history at Oxford in 1919–22, at a time when teaching in the Modern History School still included much that was literary and whiggish. G.N. Clark had been their tutor, a historian close to C.H. Firth, Regius Professor of Modern History, and sympathetic to Firth’s long and controversial campaign for reform. While Clark’s later reputation was as a cautious scholar, as a young man he was a witty iconoclast, active in left-wing politics. We trace his influence on Sellar and Yeatman through the lectures they attended, and discover that 1066 And All That bears clear references to Clark’s reformist views on history at Oxford.

Today, historical video games going beyond the boundaries of the purely entertainment framework of screen media are increasingly influencing the formation of the public history infosphere. The aim of the study is a comprehensive analysis of historical video games as a tool for constructing mass historical consciousness and the implementation of ideologized strategies for the politics of memory. Methodologically, the work is based on the concepts of “public history infosphere” and “politics of memory”, as well as the historical method and classification approach. In addition, elements of comparative analysis, the method of narrative research of cultural artifacts and the optics of I. Bogost’s procedural rhetoric are used. The study determines the specificity and nature of broadcasting historical plots in the context of procedural actualization of video game narratives. Starting from the interactive-procedural nature of video games, the original possibilities and objective constraints in the reproduction of “stories about the past” are revealed. It is demonstrated that the programmatic and subjective-user modalities of a video game existence endow it with rhizome and nomadic characteristics. Video game architectonics has an intention to deconstruct the “metaphysics of presence” and the main repressive instances characteristic of traditional historical narrative. At the same time, based on the concept of simulations by G. Frasca, three main formats of historical video game reconstructions are revealed: factual (plot and setting), logical-dynamic and hybrid. The article identifies the most common ways of distorting, mythologizing and politicizing history in video games. Special attention is paid to the explication of the ideologized concept of “anti-Sovietism” in video game plots, as a form of quasi-historical criticism of the Soviet regime and the continuation of the rhetoric of the “Cold War”. The results of the study can be used in the expert assessment of the space of public history, in the identification of relevant media tools and meaningful concepts that form its semantic framework. In addition, certain conclusions are essential for the effective correction of memory policy strategies implemented in screen digital media.

Searching for the phrase “appreciation of literature” in Google's Ngram Viewer shows that the phrase reached its peak usage in English publications between 1936 and 1937 and then nosedived after those years. It's interesting to speculate about what came together at that time. In 1937, DC Thomson published the first issue of The Dandy, one of the best selling comics in the history of British pop culture and the third-longest-running comics in the world; Daffy Duck debuted in the animated short Porky's Duck Hunt, directed by Tex Avery for the Looney Tunes series; and Detective Comics commenced publication. A year later, Superman went public. But 1937 also was the year that John Crowe Ransom left Vanderbilt University for Kenyon College and published “Criticism, Inc.” in The Virginia Quarterly Review. The target of Ransom's ire is “moralist” historical criticism, into which camp he puts actual morality purveyors, the new humanists and the new leftists (those purveyors of what we often now call symptomatic readings), and “personal registrations” or unfettered appreciation (597). While of course correlation is not causation, 1937 might mark an important fork in the subterranean lines in the United States, where the two trains of comics fandom and literary criticism begin to go in different directions, on trajectories that take them farther apart during and after World War II: comics toward the aesthetics of appreciation, and criticism to increasingly professionalized literary analysis. Critics today seem to be returning to this junction, asking how comics and criticism might reunite. Perhaps that convergence is happening now, through approaches variously known as surface reading (Best and Marcus), reparative reading (Sedgwick), close reading, postcritique (Felski, Limits), thin description (Love), or redescription (Latour)—each of which encourages professionalized critical appraisal without taking rolling stock into dead-end symptomatic tunnels. Perhaps it is through some other approach, one that may look like Hillary Chute's Why Comics?

The phenomenon of politicization of humanitarian scientific thought is becoming increasingly noticeable in the modern philosophical, cultural and political science. Scientists and philosophers belonging to political parties are nothing new in the history of science. Today, however, this kind of division into separate groups reveals not only ideological, but also a pronounced political character. The example of the Western European, English-speaking humanitarian academic community appears to be particularly indicative in this regard. Apparently, the conflict between the increasingly radicalized left and right discourses within the English-speaking academic community is entering an active phase. To understand the nature of this confrontation, it is necessary both to consider these discourses as separate phenomena, and to delve into their historical roots. The political discourse of the New Left is most clearly revealed in the program of the so-called cultural studies that appeared among post-war English Marxist intellectuals and later took root in the USA. The term was popularized by Herbert Richard Hoggart a British academic who specialized in sociology, English literature, and British popular culture. In 1964 he founded the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham (CCCS). The history of CCCS is strongly associated with the name of Stuart Henry Hall, who was Hoggart's assistant and headed the Center since 1971. The connection between political action and cultural studies permeates the entire history of this field of knowledge. The very formation of the discipline and its institutionalization in the UK were influenced by such political and cultural events as the post-war Americanization of English popular culture, the spread of telecommunications, the new era of multiculturalism in Britain, and new critical theories. At the same time, many post-war European countries, such as Germany and France, showed interest in research, which ultimately shaped the apparatus of cultural studies. Within the framework of this program, we can see an increasingly nature perspective on culture that combines the Marxist view on the problem of culture and the sociological one but is not reduced to either of them. In this kind of paradigm, culture is understood as a consequence of people's social actions, and at the same time, as a certain system that fixes the ways of implementing these relations. This approach differs from both classical Marxism facosed on economic relations between people and from structural functionalism, in which the concepts of society and culture are almost synonymous. The author states that the discourse of the New Left and the program of cultural studies are different manifestations of a single methodological approach or worldview. At present, this is the dominant worldview in the Western academic community. The article examines the history and main methodological guidelines of this type of cultural studies, as well as today's criticism of this approach.

Nowadays the hybrid attacks that use propaganda and fake news and are actively inculcated by the information centers under the control of Russian Federation on the territories of EU countries present serious threat not only to Ukraine in the view of disseminating false information about the events in our country but to the population of EU countries who are the final users of such information as well. On the basis of examples fixed by the European representatives concerning a great number of facts when Russia interfered into the process of elections in France and Germany, hackers attacks on social networks of Great Britain during public discussions and referendum on Brexit, we ascertained that the informational presence of the RF propaganda schemes played the decisive role in choosing the European policy, presaged Brexit and ensured the growth of European populists rating on the eve of the important political processes in a number of countries. The aim of the article is to show the means and methods of Russian information propaganda in EU countries on the example of the Chech Republic. Such methods of Russian information propaganda as strict following the multilingual principle while disseminating the same information to different resources in different countries; active usage of English as a mediator; usage of local internet resources; broadcasting the reiterative stories about the migrants from Arab states, the threat of Islamism for Europe, criticism of Western political elite, military crises in Ukraine; forming the image of Russia as the main opponent of aggressive US policy, the symbol of stability; focusing on the negative news, i.e. on protests, political rows, notorious retirements in EU and Western countries; ignoring the success and achievements etc. have been defined. We came to the conclusion that hybrid war in Ukraine drew attention of not only the European population but of the whole world to political, media and social phenomena that is the information war of Russia vs. Ukraine and in broad aspect – to a modern propaganda of Russia which has already challenged the whole democratic world, with an impact on public opinion formation and views of young people. Key words: hybrid war, misinformation, information influence, information propaganda.

Now that the Soviet empire has collapsed, it is time for a fresh look at the victims of the oppositional “Cold War criticism” that came to dominate American Studies in the 1980s. Hoping to stem the tide of the Reagan Revolution, the “New Americanists,” as Frederick Crews dubbed the academic heirs of the New Left, instigated a sweeping critique of their own discipline, charging the founders of American Studies with complicity in imperialism abroad and McCarthyism at home. Of all the founders, none was interrogated more thoroughly than F. O. Matthiessen, long regarded as the very model of a critic for whom radical politics and academic criticism were not mutually exclusive commitments. As late as the early 1980s, critics were still hailing Matthiessen as a pioneer in the development of American Marxist criticism. Frederick Stern, for example, asserted that Matthiessen's “methodology as a critic, though not in any pure sense Marxist…, comes closer to some of the distinguished efforts of the Marxist critics of Europe than does the work of just about any other major American critic of Matthiessen's time” (44). Similarly, Leo Marx argued that “in his subtle treatment of the interplay between literature and society, Matthiessen in a sense anticipated the development of a more supple Marxist cultural and literary theory since its liberation from the rigid doctrinal cast of the Stalin era” (256). Yet it was also in the early 1980s that the first blow to Matthiessen's reputation was struck in The American Renaissance Reconsidered, a collection of papers from the English Institute whose title, echoing that of Matthiessen's magnum opus, announced the beginning of an ambitious campaign to revise the history of American Studies – a campaign that proved to be quicker and easier than anyone could have expected.

AbstractThis article examines the case of Helen Arthur, a Catholic and Jacobite Irish woman who travelled with her children to France following William III’s victory over James II in the War of the Two Kings (1689–91). It considers Helen’s circumstances and her representation inThe Popish pretenders to the forfeited estates in Ireland, a pamphlet published in London in 1702 as a criticism of the act of resumption. The act, introduced by the English parliament in 1700, voided the majority of William III’s grants to favourites and supporters. Its provisions offered many dispossessed, including the dependants of outlawed males, a chance to reclaim compromised or forfeited property by submitting a claim to a board of trustees in Dublin. Helen Arthur missed the initial deadline for submissions, but secured an extension to submit through a clause in a 1701 supply bill, a development that brought her to the attention of the anonymous author ofThe Popish pretenders. Charting Helen’s efforts to reclaim her jointure, her eldest son’s estate and her younger children’s portions, this article looks at the ways in which dispossessed Irish Catholics and/or Jacobites reacted to legislative developments. More specifically, it shines a light on the possibilities for female agency in a period of significant upheaval, demonstrating opportunities for participation and representation in the public sphere, both in London and in Dublin. It also considers the impact of the politicisation of religion upon understandings of women’s roles and experiences during the Williamite confiscation, and suggests that a synonymising of Catholicism with Jacobitism (and Protestantism with the Williamite cause) has significant repercussions for understandings of women’s activities during the period. It also examines contemporary attitudes to women’s activity, interrogating the casting of Helen as a ‘cat’s paw’ in a bigger political game, invariably played by men.

The review notes Olga Kafanova’s great contribution to the study of the history of Russian literature, and especially works by Nikolai Karamzin, and productivity of her research as evidenced by the presented monograph. The book excels in its fundamental nature, novelty and reliability of the source base (more than 500 items of the bibliography of translations by Karamzin (1783–1800) and originals discovered while studying foreign works and periodicals). The review indicates the novelty and prospects of a number of Kafanova’s observations. In 2016, the public celebrated the 250th anniversary of Karamzin’s birth. The jubilee events were held in several countries and brought together dozens of scholars. One of the particular results of these events is an observation on the need for a comprehensive understanding of the work of Karamzin as a translator at a new level. The reviewed monograph promptly fills the noted gap and, using unique material, solves the problem of popularizing and preserving the Russian literary classics. The bibliography presented in the form of an appendix contains names of more than 50 authors of English, German, and French literature, whose texts Karamzin referred to. Based on the compiled corpus, Kafanova chooses an analytical approach that consistently reflects the evolution of Karamzin’s own system of views, on the one hand, and is based on the classic examples of Russian literary criticism and translation studies, on the other. Kafanova’s genre-generic approach easily synthesizes the several dimensions of the literary, editorial and institutional activities of Karamzin as a translator; there is no criticism of the clear definitions that classify Karamzin’s work on mastering the texts of foreign authors to one type or another. Another idea in the book is connected with a fundamental approach in the science of literature, according to which the history of literary processes is considered as a series of successive trends and directions of humanitarian thought. The reviewed book tells about the nuances of the era of pre-Romanticism, about the intricacies of interpreting Stern’s “sentimental stories of a sensitive heroine”, about the “portrait” project associated with “sensitive authors” (Wieland, Gesner, Klopstock, and others), and about the peculiarities of the Enlightenment and European Antiquity in the pantheon of literature by Karamzin and his contemporaries.

This article examines the coverage of Naples since 2000 in the Guardian and the Independent, paying particular attention to their portrayal of the Camorra and the refuse crisis. It argues that this coverage was not simply riddled with stereotypes but was also characterised by significant inaccuracies and omissions. Analysts in Italy have detailed how the trash emergency in 2008 was the outcome of corporate malpractice and institutional complicity and that organised crime, although intent on exploiting the situation, was not a determining factor. The British press, instead, tended to conflate the breakdown of the urban waste cycle with the dumping of toxic waste and, by inverting cause and effect, to point the blame at the Camorra. These accounts, it is argued, are partially explained by the very nature of foreign news that seeks out dramatic and clearcut stories for an otherwise disinterested audience. They also reflect the heightened interest in the Camorra following the Secondigliano War and the English translation of Roberto Saviano's Gomorrah. However, the article suggests that it is the press's assumption that Naples is already an ‘out of the ordinary’ urban setting that ultimately precludes the possibility of an informed coverage of the city and its predicaments.

This paper consists of three parts. The first is devoted to the role of the Athenian plague in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. There are indications that the civil war that broke out in the country, weakened by plague, was not simply the result of a historical and degraded human nature. Instead of using evil human nature as the key for understanding each social conflict, I suggest interpreting the Athenian civil war (stasis) as a symptom of non-egalitarian social relations. The second part of the paper is devoted to the birth of modern capitalism and the analysis of Thomas Hobbes’ philosophy. An English philosopher, Hobbes not only translated The History of the Peloponnesian War, but was also an author who treated the reality of modern civil wars as a principal point of reference. Hobbes created his philosophy mainly as a result of fearing a conflict that could undermine the existing division of power and wealth. The result of this fear was a mechanism that I refer to as the paradox of sovereign power. It was a process during which the authority that had been established to defend society against lawlessness and chaos dominated the social life, not respecting existing laws and customs, and thus creating the very world it was supposed to protect the people from. The third part is devoted to Walter Benjamin’s criticism of sovereign power. Observing the same processes as Hobbes did, the German philosopher viewed them from the inside (i.e., from the perspective of the victims of modern progress, the same view that aroused fear in the author of Leviathan). Benjamin argued that the social order established at the threshold of modernity was built on unlawful violence (primitive accumulation) and that the condition for its duration was the permanent reproduction of this lawlessness (hence, the thesis of the state of emergency, which has become the rule). According to Benjamin, this vicious circle of violence can only be escaped by recovering the memory of folk traditions, past class struggles, lost revolutions and social systems that, like the Paris Commune, pose the possibility of life liberated from the yoke.

This article addresses the issues surrounding the Yugoslav Civil War by offering my personal narrative in relation to loss and disappearance resulting from the exposure to war and sanctions in the nineties and the “Merciful Angel“ operation of the bombing of Serbia by NATO in 1999. It thus focuses on the female interpretation of people, ways of life, buildings and human artifacts belonging to the historical period of communist Yugoslavia which once were, yet no longer remain. The work with archives, especially the photographs which originate from my personal family possession, brings closer these ghosts of the past times to the present moment. At the same time, photography is a means to investigate the position and treatment of women during and after the period of Yugoslavia, their efforts and struggles for emancipation. The usage of photography as a visual narrative allows an insight into the lives of women during communism through the lens of my closest female family members. The article tackles different issues concerning women in communist Yugoslavia, and follows certain steps in their history, from the emancipation following the Second World War and participation of women in battle as combatants and nurses, their efforts in rebuilding the country and subsequent reestablishment of patriarchal values which occurred at the start of Yugoslav Civil war and conflicts that marked it. Autoethnography as a research method combined with personal narrative allows a deeper understanding of culture and values of Yugoslav society and their subsequent clash. In addition to this, it celebrates the importance of female voice and activism in the constant battle against patriarchy and women who chose to defy it by acknowledging responsibility and the patriarchal nature of war. Photographic practice-based research allows an insight into individual stories which form a deeper understanding of the pre- and post- war Yugoslav society and political circumstances surrounding it. Author(s): Ivana Mancic Title (English): Outside of Memories We Belong, Women of Yugoslavia Journal Reference: Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 17, No. 2-3 (Winter 2020) Publisher: Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities - Skopje Page Range: 82-88 Page Count: 7 Citation (English): Ivana Mancic, “Outside of Memories We Belong, Women of Yugoslavia,” Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 17, No. 2-3 (Winter 2020): 82-88. Author Biography Ivana Mancic, Nottingham Trent University Ivana Mancic is a Ph.D, researcher in Fine Art, School of Art and Design at Nottingham Trent University, U.K., with the focus on art practice aimed at the production of multi-disciplinary artworks, videos and installations, the purpose of which is to display the personal narrative to address the issues of war, loss and belonging, related to the specificity of the ex-Yugoslav context in order to contribute to the developing of the female voice of artists and pacifists in contemporary art. The personal narrative is presented in the written form through artworks, texts, essays and reflections on war experiences and current world crises through intersections between the present and the past.

This article is devoted to the history of the origin and rise to the peak of popularity of the operetta genre in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. This paper demonstrates that, in contrast to French or English operettas with their pronounced political and satirical orientation, the uncomplicated and frivolous librettos of the operettas staged in Vienna and Budapest were demonstrably apolitical. The plots of four operettas — The Bat and The Gypsy Baron (Johann Strauss), The Merry Widow (Franz Lehar), and The Riviera Girl (Germ. Csárdásfürstin, Imre Kálmán) — and the press responses they produced are considered. These works created the illusion of ease of overcoming social boundaries, included a cascade of sparkling, memorable melodies borrowed from different peoples of the multi-ethnic monarchy, and combined waltz, csárdás, polka, mazurka, and gypsy tunes on the stage, relegating differences to the background and making the audience forget about interethnic contradictions. Sweet love stories with happy endings helped audiences to forget that Europe was burning during the First World War. The operetta genre became part of mass culture, and even if its artistic level and value varied greatly from work to work, it proposed a new common cultural metalanguage and did not cut off the path to high musical culture for the masses, but rather straightened it.

The starting point of this discussion is Wright's On Living in an Old Country (1985), which sought to understand how a selective idea of national tradition had been mobilised by Thatcher for a disruptive political project that was fundamentally destructive of tradition. This is a rhetorical strategy that is extremely widespread today, alongside the notion that there is one, singular, version of history to be told. In the 1980s the postwar social-democratic settlement was portrayed by the right as a betrayal of the noble sacrifices made in the war, and the case for Brexit relies on a similar appeal to an allegedly interrupted national past. The left has been much less successful in mobilising such stories of national history, and tends to avoid questions of Britishness and Englishness. Given an increasingly disunited kingdom, however, the question of Englishness has become ever more pressing. This does not mean that it is a good time to adopt an unreflected idea of English 'patriotism'. Rather, the left should seek to foster a new, less beleaguered and resentful, more generous and more various experience of cultural identity within England: its ambition should be for a much broader cultural and political transformation. For the conditions into which the Conservative Party has led the British nations may not prove to be enduring. Things can shift suddenly. Nevertheless, as a slogan for the sugar harvest in Castro's Cuba once proclaimed: 'A Decisive Effort is Necessary'.

The starting point of this discussion is Wright's On Living in an Old Country (1985), which sought to understand how a selective idea of national tradition had been mobilised by Thatcher for a disruptive political project that was fundamentally destructive of tradition. This is a rhetorical strategy that is extremely widespread today, alongside the notion that there is one, singular, version of history to be told. In the 1980s the postwar social-democratic settlement was portrayed by the right as a betrayal of the noble sacrifices made in the war, and the case for Brexit relies on a similar appeal to an allegedly interrupted national past. The left has been much less successful in mobilising such stories of national history, and tends to avoid questions of Britishness and Englishness. Given an increasingly disunited kingdom, however, the question of Englishness has become ever more pressing. This does not mean that it is a good time to adopt an unreflected idea of English 'patriotism'. Rather, the left should seek to foster a new, less beleaguered and resentful, more generous and more various experience of cultural identity within England: its ambition should be for a much broader cultural and political transformation. For the conditions into which the Conservative Party has led the British nations may not prove to be enduring. Things can shift suddenly. Nevertheless, as a slogan for the sugar harvest in Castro's Cuba once proclaimed: 'A Decisive Effort is Necessary'.

Literary Studies and Cosmopolitan Desire With a focus on Swedish and English translations of the Brazilian war narrative Os sertões (1902) by Euclides da Cunha, this essay begins by exploring the conditions of possibility for the transnational circulation of this Brazilian national classic as ”world literature”. A cosmopolitan, North Atlantic literary network – in which the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig was an influential figure (even posthumously) – is shown to have been instrumental in drawing the Swedish translator Thomas Warburton’s attention to Os sertões in the 1940s. Having traced the outlines of this translation history, the essay provides a theoretical excursus on the dynamic of cosmopolitan and vernacular tendencies in literary history and in the history of literary studies, especially the Swedish discipline of litteraturvetenskap. The underlying argument is that literary studies in Sweden has been shaped by a combination of methodological nationalism (with regard to primary sources) and methodological eurocentrism (in terms of its historical and theoretical horizon). The particular cosmopolitanism of literary studies in Sweden has in this way been expressive of Sweden’s position in a specific configuration of geopolitical power relations – a configuration that is currently undergoing significant changes and could be seen to motivate Dipesh Chakrabarty’s call to ”provincialize Europe”. In closing, it is therefore claimed that the case of Os sertões and its Swedish translation can be read in two ways: as an affirmation of a twentieth-century North Atlantic hegemony (and its corresponding form of cosmopolitanism) but also, if we close read the text itself, as a challenge to that very hegemony, potentially enabling a redistribution of the cosmopolitan desire of literary criticism.

In 1993 Michael Winterbottom remarked that we have reached ‘what may be the last decades of the systematic editing of classical texts’. If he was right, what has been dwindling: capacity, interest, scope, or confidence?When editors' prefaces include such Latin as ‘ad huius operis finem … longdudum exspectatum’ (1983), ‘non solum hominibus, sed ne libris quidem non pepercit’ (1991, of the War), ‘ex Italia, ut Munk Olsen videtur, ortus’ (1997), or ‘latet uel peritus’ (1997, of an untraced manuscript), it is tempting to blame incapacity, and to blame that in turn on a decline of interest in Latin and more narrowly in textual criticism. Not just a laudator temporis acti se puero could document the decline by looking at statistics and syllabuses; but there would be widespread agreement that in so far as textual criticism has given way to greater concern with content its proportional decline is no bad thing. Relevant too, some would say, is the decline of composition; but I am not convinced by either the obvious or the deeper reason that they give. Obviously, a preface should not be the first thing, or the first thing for thirty years, that the editor composes in Latin. Need it be, though? Lloyd-Jones and Wilson chose English in their O.C.T. of Sophocles (1990), and Green has now followed their example in a Latin O.C.T., his very handy editio minor of Ausonius (1999). Anyone who takes the view expressed to me by a distinguished German Latinist, that by abandoning Latin in prefaces one cuts off the branch that one is sitting on, should answer Merkelbach's charge that the policy of writing the notes in Latin has held up Inscriptiones Graecae. At a deeper level, composing in a language is said to be the best way of learning it; but surely reading large amounts of it observantly is just as good or better, unless the distinction between active and passive knowledge of a language holds only for the modern languages that one reads comfortably and sometimes makes a pitiful attempt to speak. Even without mystical claims for the value of composition, declining knowledge of Latin is quite enough of a threat to editing.

The article studies the history of a small timber-harvesting colony that was created in the times of the GULAG labor camps, outlived the period of being a political colony, and was transformed into a museum, the Museum of the History of Political Repression Perm–36, in the 1990s. Based on the analysis of publications of the 1990s–2000s, an attempt was made to recreate the history of comprehension of the era of political repression using the example of a certain museum. From the active study of the topic in the early 1990s and establishment of a public museum with support from the Perm Oblast administration, Perm–36 moved on to undergo severe criticism from the local and federal press, deprivation of financing and administrative support and, finally, rather rough dismissal of the museum administration and appointment of top managers from the Ministry of Culture. The public museum had a powerful creative and scientific potential that allowed it to develop, implement new forms of work, and attract the international museum and human rights community, but, unfortunately, the State Memorial Museum of the History of Political Repression Perm–36 has become an ordinary regional museum in fact. In the first years of being a state museum (2015–16), the administration of Perm-36 tried to revise the directions of work of the public museum. This was expressed in its attempts to justify the authorities and the cruel laws of the time when the colony existed and to find some incriminating evidence against its political prisoners. New exhibitions of the museum (e.g. “Broken by windfalls”) highlighted the state’s need for the prisoners’ work, in particular in harvesting timber needed for the reconstruction of war-ravaged cities, the successes in mechanization of camp production, and so on. The public outcry forced the leadership of the museum to adjust its course. Now, according to the development concept adopted in 2019, the activities of the reserve museum are aimed at preserving the memory of victims of political repression in order to prevent such tragedies in the future. The state museum Perm–36 continues to open new exhibitions and expositions that tell the story of the colony through the stories of people from the GULAG camps, dissidents, and human rights activists. However, the activities of the state memorial museum, which is deprived of public initiative and creative potential of the first directors, cannot yet rise to the level of international recognition and significance that its predecessor, the public museum, used to have.

This celebration of modern Chinese literature is a tour de force, David Wang's third major summation in English. He is even more prolific in Chinese. Wang's command of the creative and critical literatures is unrivalled.Monster's subject is “the multivalence of Chinese violence across the past century”: not 1960s “structural violence” or postcolonial “epistemic violence,” but hunger, suicide, anomie, betrayal (though not assassination or incarceration), and “the violence of representation”: misery that reflects or creates monstrosity in history. Monster thus comments on “history and memory,” like Ban Wang's and Yomi Braester's recent efforts, although for historical reasons modern Chinese literature studies are allergic to historical and sociological methodologies.Monster is comparative, mixing diverse – sometimes little read – post-May Fourth and Cold War-era works with pieces from the 19th and 20th fins de siècle. Each chapter is a free associative rhapsody (sometimes brilliant, sometimes tedious; often neo-Freudian), evoking, from a recurring minor detail as in new historicist criticism, a major binary trope or problematic for Wang to “collapse” or blur. His forte is making connections between works. The findings: (1) decapitation (loss of a “head,” or guiding consciousness?) in Chinese fiction betokens remembering or “re-membering” (of the severed), as in an unfinished Qing novel depicting beheaded Boxers, works by Lu Xun and Shen Congwen, and Wuhe's 2000 commemoration of a 1930 Taiwanese aboriginal uprising; (2) justice is poetic, but equals punishment, even crime, in late Qing castigatory novels, Bai Wei, and several Maoist writers; (3) in revolutionary literature, love and revolution blur, as do love affairs in life with those in fiction; (4) hunger, indistinct from anorexia, is excess; witness “starved” heroines of Lu Xun, Lu Ling, Eileen Chang and Chen Yingzhen; (5) remembering scars creates scars, as in socialist realism, Taiwan's anticommunist fiction, and post-Mao scar literature; (6) in fiction about evil (late Ming and late Qing novels; Jiang Gui), inhumanity is all too human and sex blurs with politics; (7) suicide can be a poet's immortality, from Wang Guowei to Gu Cheng; (8) cultural China's most creative new works invoke ghosts again, obscuring lines between the human, the “real,” and the spectral.

The article is devoted to the study of magical realism in German literary criticism, the origins of the term and its conceptual principles are considered. The author of the article relies on the research of German scientists, in particular M. Scheffel, D. Kirchner, H. Roland, T.W. Leine, M. Niehaus, J. Schuster and notes the differences and contradictions in the interpretation of the term, the vagueness of the concept and its heterogeneity. It is emphasized that the period of formation of the magic-realistic method of writing in Germany in the historical perspective generally covers the period from 1920 to 1960 and includes the beginning of the era of National Socialism and the Second World War. In German literature, the term was not immediately established, its assertion and dissemination were hampered by several factors: first, its contradiction, because it combines semantically opposite concepts – “realism”, which directly correlates with reality, the true image of reality, and “magical”, based on the supernatural, fantastic, reaching beyond reality; second, the moment of its origin falls on a rather complex and contradictory period of German history, which is reluctantly mentioned or silenced; third, magical realism has sometimes been mistakenly identified with the notion of “Neue Sachlichkeit”. Analysis of all factors shows that the origin and formation of the magic-realistic method in German literature has its own characteristics and uniqueness and differs from the world-famous examples of Latin American or English literature. As a result, the author notes that German magical realism is historically determined and in many of its examples reflects the traumatic postwar experience with a pronounced inrospectivity and humanistic orientation. As an aesthetic concept, magical realism expands the boundaries of realism: by depicting the objective world in its real dimensions, it focuses its gaze on the unreality hidden behind real objects.

“And now the new system of government came into being. For the first time since the accession of the House of Hanover, the Tory party was in the ascendant.” So wrote Lord Macaulay concerning the early years of George III's reign. In Macaulay's essay on the earl of Chatham one can find all the elements of the Whig myth of the reign of George III. Most of these ideas have been safely laid to rest by Sir Lewis Namier and modern research; we now know that there was neither a new system of government at the accession of the king nor anything resembling a Tory party. George III was not the tyrant depicted in the Declaration of Independence, there was no plot in the imagined cabinet of “king's friends” to overthrow the constitution, and when, with respect to the colonies, the king declared that he would abide by the decision of his Parliament, he was taking a stand on the side of Whig principles and the Revolution Settlement.One element in the putative resurgence of Toryism that Macaulay and other Whig historians emphasized was High-Anglican political theology. G. H. Guttridge, for example, in his English Whiggism and the American Revolution (1942) well understood the differences between the Toryism of the period of the American Revolution and that of the earlier century. Tories had come to accept the Revolution Settlement, the Hanoverian succession, and even “a modicum of religious toleration.” But if they had lost the bloom of monarchical sentiment, they retained the concept of a state unified above sectional and party interests. Guttridge's formulas were admittedly too simplistic and they justly invited criticism, but one of the overlooked merits of his work was that he located the continuity of conservative thought in its religious aspect. He observed that, “Standing for the two great Tory principles, national unity and a religious sanction for the established order, the Church of England was the central institution of Toryism—the state in its religious aspect, and the divine principle in monarchical government.” The demolition of the Whig interpretation, however, has resulted in a thorough-going neglect of political discourse, and several notable examples of this deconstruction bear directly upon Anglican political thought. In his introduction to the History of Parliament John Brooke wrote that during the American Revolution the Anglican clergy in England had no specific attitude toward the war or any other aspect of government policy. When the reprint of G. H. Guttridge's essay appeared in 1963, Ian Christie wrote a vigorous rebuttal to the idea of a revival of Toryism in the early part of George III's reign without a single reference to the Anglican Church.

The article deals with the last book of the well-known English writer A. S. Byatt Peacock & Vine (2016) in the context of her oeuvre (novels, stories, essays). It is proved that the controversial reviews by British critics are caused by the character of the genre and the author’s mythology. The book combines biographies of two artists and an essay on design of the turn of the 19th–20th centuries. It is concluded that A. S. Byatt uses her particular method of analogy at different levels of poetics. She juxtaposes biographies and oeuvres of William Morris and Mariano Fortuny with the help of such universals as the North and the South, which acquire a complicated character due to their being represented through national (or more specifically, cultural) images and symbols. The emphasis is not so much on the life as on the oeuvre of the designers – first and foremost, their houses and fabrics as seen by Byatt herself and through her biography and oeuvre. Her main principle lies in conceiving something of her own through something of the other’s, and vice versa. While the figure of Morris in Byatt’s novel The Children’s Book (2009) was fitted in the social, political, and psychoanalytical contexts of the epoch, the book Peacock & Vine ‘illuminates’ the artist’s life both with his own works and Fortuny’s experiments with colors and light. The main evaluation criteria are color (light) and proportion (contexture), distinctive for both the artists’ design and Byatt’s style. However, in verbal interpretation of floral and animalistic ornaments (vines and pomegranates, peacocks and phoenixes, lions and dragons), one can see a comprehensive dialogue between paganism and Christianity, past days and modernity, a man and a woman, two famous designers, ars nouveau and ars deco. Illustrations (photographs, drawings, reproductions) together with the verbal text of the biographical essay make an organic whole of the book, which emphasizes a special role of paratext in Byatt’s works. Searching for words to represent visual images is a special task for an author of a biographical essay that she was conscious about in her works. In the book Peacock & Vine, Byatt acquires the accuracy and clarity of the language she was dreaming of when working over the novel Still Life (1985). At the same time, simplicity and complexity of her style have become an integral part of her own mythology. The Englishman Morris, being passionate about the Middle Ages and the North, travelled to Iceland and conceived of the Scandinavian saga as a real history. In the Byatt’s book he is compared with the Spaniard Fortuny, who had a penchant for Classical Antiquity and the Mediterranean world, lived in Paris and Venice, and conceived of the Scandinavian saga only through the prism of the Wagner Theatre. As to the Byatt’s love to Scandinavian mythology, it goes back to her war-time childhood, which is reflected in her book Ragnarok: The End of the Gods (2011).

The life path, scientific-pedagogical and public activity of Volodymyr Sokurenko – a prominent Ukrainian jurist, doctor of law, professor, talented teacher of the Lviv Law School of Franko University are analyzed. It is found out that after graduating from a seven-year school in Zaporizhia, V. Sokurenko entered the Zaporizhia Aviation Technical School, where he studied two courses until 1937. 1/10/1937 he was enrolled as a cadet of the 2nd school of aircraft technicians named after All-Union Lenin Komsomol. In 1938, this school was renamed the Volga Military Aviation School, which he graduated on September 4, 1939 with the military rank of military technician of the 2nd category. As a junior aircraft technician, V. Sokurenko was sent to the military unit no. 8690 in Baku, and later to Maradnyany for further military service in the USSR Air Force. From September 4, 1939 to March 16, 1940, he was a junior aircraft technician of the 50th Fighter Regiment, 60th Air Brigade of the ZAK VO in Baku. The certificate issued by the Railway District Commissariat of Lviv on January 4, 1954 no. 3132 states that V. Sokurenko actually served in the staff of the Soviet Army from October 1937 to May 1946. The same certificate states that from 10/12/1941 to 20/09/1942 and from 12/07/1943 to 08/03/1945, he took part in the Soviet-German war, in particular in the second fighter aviation corps of the Reserve of the Supreme Command of the Soviet Army. In 1943 he joined the CPSU. He was awarded the Order of the Patriotic War of the 1st degree and the Order of the Red Star (1943) as well as 9 medals «For Merit in Battle» during the Soviet-German war. With the start of the Soviet-German war, the Sokurenko family, like many other families, was evacuated to the town of Kamensk-Uralsky in the Sverdlovsk region, where their father worked at a metallurgical plant. After the war, the Sokurenko family moved to Lviv. In 1946, V. Sokurenko entered the Faculty of Law of the Ivan Franko Lviv State University, graduating with honors in 1950, and entered the graduate school of the Lviv State University at the Department of Theory and History of State and Law. V. Sokurenko successfully passed the candidate examinations and on December 25, 1953 in Moscow at the Institute of Law of the USSR he defended his thesis on the topic: «Socialist legal consciousness and its relationship with Soviet law». The supervisor of V. Sokurenko's candidate's thesis was N. Karieva. The Higher Attestation Commission of the Ministry of Culture of the USSR, by its decision of March 31, 1954, awarded V. Sokurenko the degree of Candidate of Law. In addition, it is necessary to explain the place of defense of the candidate's thesis by V. Sokurenko. As it is known, the Institute of State and Law of the USSR has its history since 1925, when, in accordance with the resolution of the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of March 25, 1925, the Institute of Soviet Construction was established at the Communist Academy. In 1936, the Institute became part of the USSR Academy of Sciences, and in 1938 it was reorganized into the Institute of Law of the USSR Academy of Sciences. In 1941–1943 it was evacuated to Tashkent. In 1960-1991 it was called the Institute of State and Law of the USSR Academy of Sciences. In Ukraine, there is the Institute of State and Law named after V. Koretsky of the NAS of Ukraine – a leading research institution in Ukraine of legal profile, founded in 1949. It is noted that, as a graduate student, V. Sokurenko read a course on the history of political doctrines, conducted special seminars on the theory of state and law. After graduating from graduate school and defending his thesis, from October 1, 1953 he was enrolled as a senior lecturer and then associate professor at the Department of Theory and History of State and Law at the Faculty of Law of the Lviv State University named after Ivan Franko. By the decision of the Higher Attestation Commission of the Ministry of Higher Education of the USSR of December 18, 1957, V. Sokurenko was awarded the academic title of associate professor of the «Department of Theory and History of State and Law». V. Sokurenko took an active part in public life. During 1947-1951 he was a member of the party bureau of the party organization of LSU, worked as a chairman of the trade union committee of the university, from 1955 to 1957 he was a secretary of the party committee of the university. He delivered lectures for the population of Lviv region. Particularly, he lectured in Turka, Chervonohrad, and Yavoriv. He made reports to the party leaders, Soviet workers as well as business leaders. He led a philosophical seminar at the Faculty of Law. He was a deputy of the Lviv City Council of People's Deputies in 1955-1957 and 1975-1978. In December 1967, he defended his doctoral thesis on the topic: «Development of progressive political thought in Ukraine (until the early twentieth century)». The defense of the doctoral thesis was approved by the Higher Attestation Commission on June 14, 1968. During 1960-1990 he headed the Department of Theory and History of State and Law; in 1962-68 and 1972-77 he was the dean of the Law Faculty of the Ivan Franko Lviv State University. In connection with the criticism of the published literature, on September 10, 1977, V. Sokurenko wrote a statement requesting his dismissal from the post of Dean of the Faculty of Law due to deteriorating health. During 1955-1965 he was on research trips to Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Austria, and Bulgaria. From August 1966 to March 1967, in particular, he spent seven months in the United States, England and Canada as a UN Fellow in the Department of Human Rights. From April to May 1968, he was a member of the government delegation to the International Conference on Human Rights in Iran for one month. He spoke, in addition to Ukrainian, English, Polish and Russian. V. Sokurenko played an important role in initiating the study of an important discipline at the Faculty of Law of the Lviv University – History of Political and Legal Studies, which has been studying the history of the emergence and development of theoretical knowledge about politics, state, law, ie the process of cognition by people of the phenomena of politics, state and law at different stages of history in different nations, from early statehood and modernity. Professor V. Sokurenko actively researched the problems of the theory of state and law, the history of Ukrainian legal and political thought. He was one of the first legal scholars in the USSR to begin research on the basics of legal deontology. V. Sokurenko conducted extensive research on the development of basic requirements for the professional and legal responsibilities of a lawyer, similar to the requirements for a doctor. In further research, the scholar analyzed the legal responsibilities, prospects for the development of the basics of professional deontology. In addition, he considered medical deontology from the standpoint of a lawyer, law and morality, focusing on internal (spiritual) processes, calling them «the spirit of law.» The main direction of V. Sokurenko's research was the problems of the theory of state and law, the history of legal and political studies. The main scientific works of professor V. Sokurenko include: «The main directions in the development of progressive state and legal thought in Ukraine: 16th – 19th centuries» (1958) (Russian), «Democratic doctrines about the state and law in Ukraine in the second half of the 19th century (M. Drahomanov, S. Podolynskyi, A. Terletskyi)» (1966), «Law. Freedom. Equality» (1981, co-authored) (in Russian), «State and legal views of Ivan Franko» (1966), «Socio-political views of Taras Shevchenko (to the 170th anniversary of his birth)» (1984); «Political and legal views of Ivan Franko (to the 130th anniversary of his birth)» (1986) (in Russian) and others. V. Sokurenko died on November 22, 1994 and was buried in Holoskivskyi Cemetery in Lviv. Volodymyr Sokurenko left a bright memory in the hearts of a wide range of scholars, colleagues and grateful students. The 100th anniversary of the Scholar is a splendid opportunity to once again draw attention to the rich scientific heritage of the lawyer, which is an integral part of the golden fund of Ukrainian legal science and education. It needs to be studied, taken into account and further developed.

Grundtvig og folkehøjskolen i dag: Debatindlæg fra tre yngre Grundtvig-forskere om den grundtvigske arv i højskoledebatten i begyndelsen af 2004. Bidragene stammer fra et fyraftensmøde i Højskolernes Hus, Nytorv, København[Grundtvig and the Folk-Highschool today: Contributions to a Debate from three younger Grundtvig- Scholars, in Connection with the national Debate upon the Grundtvig-Legacy in the Folk-Highschool early in 2004. The Contributions stem from an Evening Meeting in Højskolernes Hus, Nytorv, Copenhagen]By Henrik Wigh-Poulsen, Jes Fabricius Møller and Kim Arne PedersenHenrik Wigh-Poulsen (Grundtvig Academy) sketches out the way in which the Grundtvig legacy, having at first been a force for religious and political transformation, has become a national gene-code by becoming identified with Danishness. However, this is not felt to be a victory within the Grundtvigian movement where almost from the start a worry about watering-down and a desire to get back to the wellsprings can be traced. Instead of worrying, a job of reconstruing ought to be addressed. In our post-postmodem age, the inherited legacy is no longer taken as given but has to be reformulated without use of the received terminology. The annexation of Grundtvig by Danish newnationalism and the modem folk-highschoofs critical relationship to the inheritance from him make this problematic, but with a startingpoint in Grundtvig’s conception of Christianity one may point to Grundtvig’s openness, founded upon his creation-theology, towards the present and the future and that interaction between Christianity and culture, tradition and renewal, which ensue from it.Jes Fabricius Møller, taking as his starting-point the enthusiasm of certain folk-highschool people for qualification-orientated education, combined with criticism of Grundtvig, suggests that this group of people’s current break with Grundtvig is not inconsistent with the history of the folk-highschools following the Second World War, when interest gravitated towards life-philosophy, theology and literature. Furthermore, Grundtvig has suffered the fate of been overshadowed by the Grundtvig-myth, a relationship which has partly to do with the compartmentalised nature of Grundtvig’s writings, and partly with the compartmentalisation of the Grundtvigian movement.Here, Grundtvig functions as a mythic gathering-point which English Summaries / danske resuméer overshadows the real Grundtvig. Grundtvig is of significance not because of the effectiveness of his specific message, but because he made himself effective and thereby became an historical premise for the present.Kim Arne Pedersen, in an extension of the study-group “A new view upon Grundtvig” within the Danish folk-highschools, sketches an outline for a new interpretation of the Grundtvigian vision of the highschool. The objective is that the highschools should keep up with the circumstances of the times without capitulating to their conditions, but concretely to formulate a third way between new nationalism’s exploitation of Grundtvig and his repudiation by Danish intellectuals and highschool people: that is, on the one hand a nationalistic Grundtvig, and on the other hand the Danish education system’s focus upon the concept of qualification-attainment [>kompetence-begrebet], which is here to be understood as being in harmony with the present time’s focus upon power relationships as the determinant within human relationships.The history of Grundtvig’s influence and the debate among Grundtvig scholars form a background for the third way. In opposition to acceptance of power relationships as foundational, an extension of Martin Buber is brought to bear upon the dialogue. Grundtvig is seen as a part of modernity, and against the background of the Grundtvigian concepts of converse [samtale] and interaction [vekselvirkning] the Grundtvigian concept of life-enlightenment [livsoplysningsbegreb] is construed out of the human relationship to God within a radical freedom and with space for the miracle and the unexpected which breaks through into human life through this dialogue. The Grundtvigian concept of national communality [folkelighed] is construed, in opposition to theories of social-constructivist nationalism, along the lines of Adrian Hastings’ understanding of “nation” as a concept coming into existence via Christianity in the medieval and early modem periods. Global changes mean that today national communality [folkelighed] is indeed to be understood against the background of the national culture, but also, simultaneously, as an imperative, a project, rather than as a description of a pre-established reality.

Grundtvig og folkehøjskolen i dag: Debatindlæg fra tre yngre Grundtvig-forskere om den grundtvigske arv i højskoledebatten i begyndelsen af 2004. Bidragene stammer fra et fyraftensmøde i Højskolernes Hus, Nytorv, København[Grundtvig and the Folk-Highschool today: Contributions to a Debate from three younger Grundtvig- Scholars, in Connection with the national Debate upon the Grundtvig-Legacy in the Folk-Highschool early in 2004. The Contributions stem from an Evening Meeting in Højskolernes Hus, Nytorv, Copenhagen]By Henrik Wigh-Poulsen, Jes Fabricius Møller and Kim Arne PedersenHenrik Wigh-Poulsen (Grundtvig Academy) sketches out the way in which the Grundtvig legacy, having at first been a force for religious and political transformation, has become a national gene-code by becoming identified with Danishness. However, this is not felt to be a victory within the Grundtvigian movement where almost from the start a worry about watering-down and a desire to get back to the wellsprings can be traced. Instead of worrying, a job of reconstruing ought to be addressed. In our post-postmodem age, the inherited legacy is no longer taken as given but has to be reformulated without use of the received terminology. The annexation of Grundtvig by Danish newnationalism and the modem folk-highschoofs critical relationship to the inheritance from him make this problematic, but with a startingpoint in Grundtvig’s conception of Christianity one may point to Grundtvig’s openness, founded upon his creation-theology, towards the present and the future and that interaction between Christianity and culture, tradition and renewal, which ensue from it.Jes Fabricius Møller, taking as his starting-point the enthusiasm of certain folk-highschool people for qualification-orientated education, combined with criticism of Grundtvig, suggests that this group of people’s current break with Grundtvig is not inconsistent with the history of the folk-highschools following the Second World War, when interest gravitated towards life-philosophy, theology and literature. Furthermore, Grundtvig has suffered the fate of been overshadowed by the Grundtvig-myth, a relationship which has partly to do with the compartmentalised nature of Grundtvig’s writings, and partly with the compartmentalisation of the Grundtvigian movement.Here, Grundtvig functions as a mythic gathering-point which English Summaries / danske resuméer overshadows the real Grundtvig. Grundtvig is of significance not because of the effectiveness of his specific message, but because he made himself effective and thereby became an historical premise for the present.Kim Arne Pedersen, in an extension of the study-group “A new view upon Grundtvig” within the Danish folk-highschools, sketches an outline for a new interpretation of the Grundtvigian vision of the highschool. The objective is that the highschools should keep up with the circumstances of the times without capitulating to their conditions, but concretely to formulate a third way between new nationalism’s exploitation of Grundtvig and his repudiation by Danish intellectuals and highschool people: that is, on the one hand a nationalistic Grundtvig, and on the other hand the Danish education system’s focus upon the concept of qualification-attainment [>kompetence-begrebet], which is here to be understood as being in harmony with the present time’s focus upon power relationships as the determinant within human relationships.The history of Grundtvig’s influence and the debate among Grundtvig scholars form a background for the third way. In opposition to acceptance of power relationships as foundational, an extension of Martin Buber is brought to bear upon the dialogue. Grundtvig is seen as a part of modernity, and against the background of the Grundtvigian concepts of converse [samtale] and interaction [vekselvirkning] the Grundtvigian concept of life-enlightenment [livsoplysningsbegreb] is construed out of the human relationship to God within a radical freedom and with space for the miracle and the unexpected which breaks through into human life through this dialogue. The Grundtvigian concept of national communality [folkelighed] is construed, in opposition to theories of social-constructivist nationalism, along the lines of Adrian Hastings’ understanding of “nation” as a concept coming into existence via Christianity in the medieval and early modem periods. Global changes mean that today national communality [folkelighed] is indeed to be understood against the background of the national culture, but also, simultaneously, as an imperative, a project, rather than as a description of a pre-established reality.

Grundtvig og folkehøjskolen i dag: Debatindlæg fra tre yngre Grundtvig-forskere om den grundtvigske arv i højskoledebatten i begyndelsen a f2004. Bidragene stammer fra et fyraftensmøde i Højskolernes Hus, Nytorv, København[Grundtvig and the Folk-Highschool today: Contributions to a Debate from three younger Grundtvig- Scholars, in Connection with the national Debate upon the Grundtvig-Legacy in the Folk-Highschool early in 2004. The Contributions stem from an Evening Meeting in Højskolernes Hus, Nytorv, Copenhagen]By Henrik Wigh-Poulsen, Jes Fabricius Møller and Kim Arne PedersenHenrik Wigh-Poulsen (Grundtvig Academy) sketches out the way in which the Grundtvig legacy, having at first been a force for religious and political transformation, has become a national gene-code by becoming identified with Danishness. However, this is not felt to be a victory within the Grundtvigian movement where almost from the start a worry about watering-down and a desire to get back to the wellsprings can be traced. Instead of worrying, a job of reconstruing ought to be addressed. In our post-postmodem age, the inherited legacy is no longer taken as given but has to be reformulated without use of the received terminology. The annexation of Grundtvig by Danish newnationalism and the modem folk-highschoofs critical relationship to the inheritance from him make this problematic, but with a startingpoint in Grundtvig’s conception of Christianity one may point to Grundtvig’s openness, founded upon his creation-theology, towards the present and the future and that interaction between Christianity and culture, tradition and renewal, which ensue from it.Jes Fabricius Møller, taking as his starting-point the enthusiasm of certain folk-highschool people for qualification-orientated education, combined with criticism of Grundtvig, suggests that this group of people’s current break with Grundtvig is not inconsistent with the history of the folk-highschools following the Second World War, when interest gravitated towards life-philosophy, theology and literature. Furthermore, Grundtvig has suffered the fate of been overshadowed by the Grundtvig-myth, a relationship which has partly to do with the compartmentalised nature of Grundtvig’s writings, and partly with the compartmentalisation of the Grundtvigian movement.Here, Grundtvig functions as a mythic gathering-point which English Summaries / danske resuméer overshadows the real Grundtvig. Grundtvig is of significance not because of the effectiveness of his specific message, but because he made himself effective and thereby became an historical premise for the present.Kim Arne Pedersen, in an extension of the study-group “A new view upon Grundtvig” within the Danish folk-highschools, sketches an outline for a new interpretation of the Grundtvigian vision of the highschool. The objective is that the highschools should keep up with the circumstances of the times without capitulating to their conditions, but concretely to formulate a third way between new nationalism’s exploitation of Grundtvig and his repudiation by Danish intellectuals and highschool people: that is, on the one hand a nationalistic Grundtvig, and on the other hand the Danish education system’s focus upon the concept of qualification-attainment [>kompetence-begrebet], which is here to be understood as being in harmony with the present time’s focus upon power relationships as the determinant within human relationships.The history of Grundtvig’s influence and the debate among Grundtvig scholars form a background for the third way. In opposition to acceptance of power relationships as foundational, an extension of Martin Buber is brought to bear upon the dialogue. Grundtvig is seen as a part of modernity, and against the background of the Grundtvigian concepts of converse [samtale] and interaction [vekselvirkning] the Grundtvigian concept of life-enlightenment [livsoplysningsbegreb] is construed out of the human relationship to God within a radical freedom and with space for the miracle and the unexpected which breaks through into human life through this dialogue. The Grundtvigian concept of national communality [folkelighed] is construed, in opposition to theories of social-constructivist nationalism, along the lines of Adrian Hastings’ understanding of “nation” as a concept coming into existence via Christianity in the medieval and early modem periods. Global changes mean that today national communality [folkelighed] is indeed to be understood against the background of the national culture, but also, simultaneously, as an imperative, a project, rather than as a description of a pre-established reality.

Education in Oceania continues to reflect the embedded implicit and explicit colonial practices and processes from the past. This paper conceptualises a cultural approach to education and leadership appropriate and relevant to the Republic of the Marshall Islands. As elementary school leaders, we highlight Kanne Lobal, a traditional Marshallese navigation practice based on indigenous language, values and practices. We conceptualise and develop Kanne Lobal in this paper as a framework for understanding the usefulness of our indigenous knowledge in leadership and educational practices within formal education. Through bwebwenato, a method of talk story, our key learnings and reflexivities were captured. We argue that realising the value of Marshallese indigenous knowledge and practices for school leaders requires purposeful training of the ways in which our knowledge can be made useful in our professional educational responsibilities. Drawing from our Marshallese knowledge is an intentional effort to inspire, empower and express what education and leadership partnership means for Marshallese people, as articulated by Marshallese themselves. Introduction As noted in the call for papers within the Waikato Journal of Education (WJE) for this special issue, bodies of knowledge and histories in Oceania have long sustained generations across geographic boundaries to ensure cultural survival. For Marshallese people, we cannot really know ourselves “until we know how we came to be where we are today” (Walsh, Heine, Bigler & Stege, 2012). Jitdam Kapeel is a popular Marshallese concept and ideal associated with inquiring into relationships within the family and community. In a similar way, the practice of relating is about connecting the present and future to the past. Education and leadership partnerships are linked and we look back to the past, our history, to make sense and feel inspired to transform practices that will benefit our people. In this paper and in light of our next generation, we reconnect with our navigation stories to inspire and empower education and leadership. Kanne lobal is part of our navigation stories, a conceptual framework centred on cultural practices, values, and concepts that embrace collective partnerships. Our link to this talanoa vā with others in the special issue is to attempt to make sense of connections given the global COVID-19 context by providing a Marshallese approach to address the physical and relational “distance” between education and leadership partnerships in Oceania. Like the majority of developing small island nations in Oceania, the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) has had its share of educational challenges through colonial legacies of the past which continues to drive education systems in the region (Heine, 2002). The historical administration and education in the RMI is one of colonisation. Successive administrations by the Spanish, German, Japanese, and now the US, has resulted in education and learning that privileges western knowledge and forms of learning. This paper foregrounds understandings of education and learning as told by the voices of elementary school leaders from the RMI. The move to re-think education and leadership from Marshallese perspectives is an act of shifting the focus of bwebwenato or conversations that centres on Marshallese language and worldviews. The concept of jelalokjen was conceptualised as traditional education framed mainly within the community context. In the past, jelalokjen was practiced and transmitted to the younger generation for cultural continuity. During the arrival of colonial administrations into the RMI, jelalokjen was likened to the western notions of education and schooling (Kupferman, 2004). Today, the primary function of jelalokjen, as traditional and formal education, it is for “survival in a hostile [and challenging] environment” (Kupferman, 2004, p. 43). Because western approaches to learning in the RMI have not always resulted in positive outcomes for those engaged within the education system, as school leaders who value our cultural knowledge and practices, and aspire to maintain our language with the next generation, we turn to Kanne Lobal, a practice embedded in our navigation stories, collective aspirations, and leadership. The significance in the development of Kanne Lobal, as an appropriate framework for education and leadership, resulted in us coming together and working together. Not only were we able to share our leadership concerns, however, the engagement strengthened our connections with each other as school leaders, our communities, and the Public Schooling System (PSS). Prior to that, many of us were in competition for resources. Educational Leadership: IQBE and GCSL Leadership is a valued practice in the RMI. Before the IQBE programme started in 2018, the majority of the school leaders on the main island of Majuro had not engaged in collaborative partnerships with each other before. Our main educational purpose was to achieve accreditation from the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC), an accreditation commission for schools in the United States. The WASC accreditation dictated our work and relationships and many school leaders on Majuro felt the pressure of competition against each other. We, the authors in this paper, share our collective bwebwenato, highlighting our school leadership experiences and how we gained strength from our own ancestral knowledge to empower “us”, to collaborate with each other, our teachers, communities, as well as with PSS; a collaborative partnership we had not realised in the past. The paucity of literature that captures Kajin Majol (Marshallese language) and education in general in the RMI is what we intend to fill by sharing our reflections and experiences. To move our educational practices forward we highlight Kanne Lobal, a cultural approach that focuses on our strengths, collective social responsibilities and wellbeing. For a long time, there was no formal training in place for elementary school leaders. School principals and vice principals were appointed primarily on their academic merit through having an undergraduate qualification. As part of the first cohort of fifteen school leaders, we engaged in the professional training programme, the Graduate Certificate in School Leadership (GCSL), refitted to our context after its initial development in the Solomon Islands. GCSL was coordinated by the Institute of Education (IOE) at the University of the South Pacific (USP). GCSL was seen as a relevant and appropriate training programme for school leaders in the RMI as part of an Asia Development Bank (ADB) funded programme which aimed at “Improving Quality Basic Education” (IQBE) in parts of the northern Pacific. GCSL was managed on Majuro, RMI’s main island, by the director at the time Dr Irene Taafaki, coordinator Yolanda McKay, and administrators at the University of the South Pacific’s (USP) RMI campus. Through the provision of GCSL, as school leaders we were encouraged to re-think and draw-from our own cultural repository and connect to our ancestral knowledge that have always provided strength for us. This kind of thinking and practice was encouraged by our educational leaders (Heine, 2002). We argue that a culturally-affirming and culturally-contextual framework that reflects the lived experiences of Marshallese people is much needed and enables the disruption of inherent colonial processes left behind by Western and Eastern administrations which have influenced our education system in the RMI (Heine, 2002). Kanne Lobal, an approach utilising a traditional navigation has warranted its need to provide solutions for today’s educational challenges for us in the RMI. Education in the Pacific Education in the Pacific cannot be understood without contextualising it in its history and culture. It is the same for us in the RMI (Heine, 2002; Walsh et al., 2012). The RMI is located in the Pacific Ocean and is part of Micronesia. It was named after a British captain, John Marshall in the 1700s. The atolls in the RMI were explored by the Spanish in the 16th century. Germany unsuccessfully attempted to colonize the islands in 1885. Japan took control in 1914, but after several battles during World War II, the US seized the RMI from them. In 1947, the United Nations made the island group, along with the Mariana and Caroline archipelagos, a U.S. trust territory (Walsh et al, 2012). Education in the RMI reflects the colonial administrations of Germany, Japan, and now the US. Before the turn of the century, formal education in the Pacific reflected western values, practices, and standards. Prior to that, education was informal and not binded to formal learning institutions (Thaman, 1997) and oral traditions was used as the medium for transmitting learning about customs and practices living with parents, grandparents, great grandparents. As alluded to by Jiba B. Kabua (2004), any “discussion about education is necessarily a discussion of culture, and any policy on education is also a policy of culture” (p. 181). It is impossible to promote one without the other, and it is not logical to understand one without the other. Re-thinking how education should look like, the pedagogical strategies that are relevant in our classrooms, the ways to engage with our parents and communities - such re-thinking sits within our cultural approaches and frameworks. Our collective attempts to provide a cultural framework that is relevant and appropriate for education in our context, sits within the political endeavour to decolonize. This means that what we are providing will not only be useful, but it can be used as a tool to question and identify whether things in place restrict and prevent our culture or whether they promote and foreground cultural ideas and concepts, a significant discussion of culture linked to education (Kabua, 2004). Donor funded development aid programmes were provided to support the challenges within education systems. Concerned with the persistent low educational outcomes of Pacific students, despite the prevalence of aid programmes in the region, in 2000 Pacific educators and leaders with support from New Zealand Aid (NZ Aid) decided to intervene (Heine, 2002; Taufe’ulungaki, 2014). In April 2001, a group of Pacific educators and leaders across the region were invited to a colloquium funded by the New Zealand Overseas Development Agency held in Suva Fiji at the University of the South Pacific. The main purpose of the colloquium was to enable “Pacific educators to re-think the values, assumptions and beliefs underlying [formal] schooling in Oceania” (Benson, 2002). Leadership, in general, is a valued practice in the RMI (Heine, 2002). Despite education leadership being identified as a significant factor in school improvement (Sanga & Chu, 2009), the limited formal training opportunities of school principals in the region was a persistent concern. As part of an Asia Development Bank (ADB) funded project, the Improve Quality Basic Education (IQBE) intervention was developed and implemented in the RMI in 2017. Mentoring is a process associated with the continuity and sustainability of leadership knowledge and practices (Sanga & Chu, 2009). It is a key aspect of building capacity and capabilities within human resources in education (ibid). Indigenous knowledges and education research According to Hilda Heine, the relationship between education and leadership is about understanding Marshallese history and culture (cited in Walsh et al., 2012). It is about sharing indigenous knowledge and histories that “details for future generations a story of survival and resilience and the pride we possess as a people” (Heine, cited in Walsh et al., 2012, p. v). This paper is fuelled by postcolonial aspirations yet is grounded in Pacific indigenous research. This means that our intentions are driven by postcolonial pursuits and discourses linked to challenging the colonial systems and schooling in the Pacific region that privileges western knowledge and learning and marginalises the education practices and processes of local people (Thiong’o, 1986). A point of difference and orientation from postcolonialism is a desire to foreground indigenous Pacific language, specifically Majin Majol, through Marshallese concepts. Our collective bwebwenato and conversation honours and values kautiej (respect), jouj eo mour eo (reciprocity), and jouj (kindness) (Taafaki & Fowler, 2019). Pacific leaders developed the Rethinking Pacific Education Initiative for and by Pacific People (RPEIPP) in 2002 to take control of the ways in which education research was conducted by donor funded organisations (Taufe’ulungaki, 2014). Our former president, Dr Hilda Heine was part of the group of leaders who sought to counter the ways in which our educational and leadership stories were controlled and told by non-Marshallese (Heine, 2002). As a former minister of education in the RMI, Hilda Heine continues to inspire and encourage the next generation of educators, school leaders, and researchers to re-think and de-construct the way learning and education is conceptualised for Marshallese people. The conceptualisation of Kanne Lobal acknowledges its origin, grounded in Marshallese navigation knowledge and practice. Our decision to unpack and deconstruct Kanne Lobal within the context of formal education and leadership responds to the need to not only draw from indigenous Marshallese ideas and practice but to consider that the next generation will continue to be educated using western processes and initiatives particularly from the US where we get a lot of our funding from. According to indigenous researchers Dawn Bessarab and Bridget Ng’andu (2010), doing research that considers “culturally appropriate processes to engage with indigenous groups and individuals is particularly pertinent in today’s research environment” (p. 37). Pacific indigenous educators and researchers have turned to their own ancestral knowledge and practices for inspiration and empowerment. Within western research contexts, the often stringent ideals and processes are not always encouraging of indigenous methods and practices. However, many were able to ground and articulate their use of indigenous methods as being relevant and appropriate to capturing the realities of their communities (Nabobo-Baba, 2008; Sualii-Sauni & Fulu-Aiolupotea, 2014; Thaman, 1997). At the same time, utilising Pacific indigenous methods and approaches enabled research engagement with their communities that honoured and respected them and their communities. For example, Tongan, Samoan, and Fijian researchers used the talanoa method as a way to capture the stories, lived realities, and worldviews of their communities within education in the diaspora (Fa’avae, Jones, & Manu’atu, 2016; Nabobo-Baba, 2008; Sualii-Sauni & Aiolupotea, 2014; Vaioleti, 2005). Tok stori was used by Solomon Islander educators and school leaders to highlight the unique circles of conversational practice and storytelling that leads to more positive engagement with their community members, capturing rich and meaningful narratives as a result (Sanga & Houma, 2004). The Indigenous Aborigine in Australia utilise yarning as a “relaxed discussion through which both the researcher and participant journey together visiting places and topics of interest relevant” (Bessarab & Ng’andu, 2010, p. 38). Despite the diverse forms of discussions and storytelling by indigenous peoples, of significance are the cultural protocols, ethics, and language for conducting and guiding the engagement (Bessarab & Ng’andu, 2010; Nabobo-Baba, 2008; Sualii-Sauni & Aiolupotea, 2014). Through the ethics, values, protocols, and language, these are what makes indigenous methods or frameworks unique compared to western methods like in-depth interviews or semi-structured interviews. This is why it is important for us as Marshallese educators to frame, ground, and articulate how our own methods and frameworks of learning could be realised in western education (Heine, 2002; Jetnil-Kijiner, 2014). In this paper, we utilise bwebwenato as an appropriate method linked to “talk story”, capturing our collective stories and experiences during GCSL and how we sought to build partnerships and collaboration with each other, our communities, and the PSS. Bwebwenato and drawing from Kajin Majel Legends and stories that reflect Marshallese society and its cultural values have survived through our oral traditions. The practice of weaving also holds knowledge about our “valuable and earliest sources of knowledge” (Taafaki & Fowler, 2019, p. 2). The skilful navigation of Marshallese wayfarers on the walap (large canoes) in the ocean is testament of their leadership and the value they place on ensuring the survival and continuity of Marshallese people (Taafaki & Fowler, 2019; Walsh et al., 2012). During her graduate study in 2014, Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner conceptualised bwebwenato as being the most “well-known form of Marshallese orality” (p. 38). The Marshallese-English dictionary defined bwebwenato as talk, conversation, story, history, article, episode, lore, myth, or tale (cited in Jetnil Kijiner, 2014). Three years later in 2017, bwebwenato was utilised in a doctoral project by Natalie Nimmer as a research method to gather “talk stories” about the experiences of 10 Marshallese experts in knowledge and skills ranging from sewing to linguistics, canoe-making and business. Our collective bwebwenato in this paper centres on Marshallese ideas and language. The philosophy of Marshallese knowledge is rooted in our “Kajin Majel”, or Marshallese language and is shared and transmitted through our oral traditions. For instance, through our historical stories and myths. Marshallese philosophy, that is, the knowledge systems inherent in our beliefs, values, customs, and practices are shared. They are inherently relational, meaning that knowledge systems and philosophies within our world are connected, in mind, body, and spirit (Jetnil-Kijiner, 2014; Nimmer, 2017). Although some Marshallese believe that our knowledge is disappearing as more and more elders pass away, it is therefore important work together, and learn from each other about the knowledges shared not only by the living but through their lamentations and stories of those who are no longer with us (Jetnil-Kijiner, 2014). As a Marshallese practice, weaving has been passed-down from generation to generation. Although the art of weaving is no longer as common as it used to be, the artefacts such as the “jaki-ed” (clothing mats) continue to embody significant Marshallese values and traditions. For our weavers, the jouj (check spelling) is the centre of the mat and it is where the weaving starts. When the jouj is correct and weaved well, the remainder and every other part of the mat will be right. The jouj is symbolic of the “heart” and if the heart is prepared well, trained well, then life or all other parts of the body will be well (Taafaki & Fowler, 2019). In that light, we have applied the same to this paper. Conceptualising and drawing from cultural practices that are close and dear to our hearts embodies a significant ontological attempt to prioritize our own knowledge and language, a sense of endearment to who we are and what we believe education to be like for us and the next generation. The application of the phrase “Majolizing '' was used by the Ministry of Education when Hilda Heine was minister, to weave cultural ideas and language into the way that teachers understand the curriculum, develop lesson plans and execute them in the classroom. Despite this, there were still concerns with the embedded colonized practices where teachers defaulted to eurocentric methods of doing things, like the strategies provided in the textbooks given to us. In some ways, our education was slow to adjust to the “Majolizing '' intention by our former minister. In this paper, we provide Kanne Lobal as a way to contribute to the “Majolizing intention” and perhaps speed up yet still be collectively responsible to all involved in education. Kajin Wa and Kanne Lobal “Wa” is the Marshallese concept for canoe. Kajin wa, as in canoe language, has a lot of symbolic meaning linked to deeply-held Marshallese values and practices. The canoe was the foundational practice that supported the livelihood of harsh atoll island living which reflects the Marshallese social world. The experts of Kajin wa often refer to “wa” as being the vessel of life, a means and source of sustaining life (Kelen, 2009, cited in Miller, 2010). “Jouj” means kindness and is the lower part of the main hull of the canoe. It is often referred to by some canoe builders in the RMI as the heart of the canoe and is linked to love. The jouj is one of the first parts of the canoe that is built and is “used to do all other measurements, and then the rest of the canoe is built on top of it” (Miller, 2010, p. 67). The significance of the jouj is that when the canoe is in the water, the jouj is the part of the hull that is underwater and ensures that all the cargo and passengers are safe. For Marshallese, jouj or kindness is what living is about and is associated with selflessly carrying the responsibility of keeping the family and community safe. The parts of the canoe reflect Marshallese culture, legend, family, lineage, and kinship. They embody social responsibilities that guide, direct, and sustain Marshallese families’ wellbeing, from atoll to atoll. For example, the rojak (boom), rojak maan (upper boom), rojak kōrā (lower boom), and they support the edges of the ujelā/ujele (sail) (see figure 1). The literal meaning of rojak maan is male boom and rojak kōrā means female boom which together strengthens the sail and ensures the canoe propels forward in a strong yet safe way. Figuratively, the rojak maan and rojak kōrā symbolise the mother and father relationship which when strong, through the jouj (kindness and love), it can strengthen families and sustain them into the future. Figure 1. Parts of the canoe Source: https://www.canoesmarshallislands.com/2014/09/names-of-canoe-parts/ From a socio-cultural, communal, and leadership view, the canoe (wa) provides understanding of the relationships required to inspire and sustain Marshallese peoples’ education and learning. We draw from Kajin wa because they provide cultural ideas and practices that enable understanding of education and leadership necessary for sustaining Marshallese people and realities in Oceania. When building a canoe, the women are tasked with the weaving of the ujelā/ujele (sail) and to ensure that it is strong enough to withstand long journeys and the fierce winds and waters of the ocean. The Kanne Lobal relates to the front part of the ujelā/ujele (sail) where the rojak maan and rojak kōrā meet and connect (see the red lines in figure 1). Kanne Lobal is linked to the strategic use of the ujelā/ujele by navigators, when there is no wind north wind to propel them forward, to find ways to capture the winds so that their journey can continue. As a proverbial saying, Kanne Lobal is used to ignite thinking and inspire and transform practice particularly when the journey is rough and tough. In this paper we draw from Kanne Lobal to ignite, inspire, and transform our educational and leadership practices, a move to explore what has always been meaningful to Marshallese people when we are faced with challenges. The Kanne Lobal utilises our language, and cultural practices and values by sourcing from the concepts of jouj (kindness, love), kautiej (respect), and jouj eo mour eo (reciprocity). A key Marshallese proverb, “Enra bwe jen lale rara”, is the cultural practice where families enact compassion through the sharing of food in all occurrences. The term “enra” is a small basket weaved from the coconut leaves, and often used by Marshallese as a plate to share and distribute food amongst each other. Bwe-jen-lale-rara is about noticing and providing for the needs of others, and “enra” the basket will help support and provide for all that are in need. “Enra-bwe-jen-lale-rara” is symbolic of cultural exchange and reciprocity and the cultural values associated with building and maintaining relationships, and constantly honouring each other. As a Marshallese practice, in this article we share our understanding and knowledge about the challenges as well as possible solutions for education concerns in our nation. In addition, we highlight another proverb, “wa kuk wa jimor”, which relates to having one canoe, and despite its capacity to feed and provide for the individual, but within the canoe all people can benefit from what it can provide. In the same way, we provide in this paper a cultural framework that will enable all educators to benefit from. It is a framework that is far-reaching and relevant to the lived realities of Marshallese people today. Kumit relates to people united to build strength, all co-operating and working together, living in peace, harmony, and good health. Kanne Lobal: conceptual framework for education and leadership An education framework is a conceptual structure that can be used to capture ideas and thinking related to aspects of learning. Kanne Lobal is conceptualised and framed in this paper as an educational framework. Kanne Lobal highlights the significance of education as a collective partnership whereby leadership is an important aspect. Kanne Lobal draws-from indigenous Marshallese concepts like kautiej (respect), jouj eo mour eo (reciprocity), and jouj (kindness, heart). The role of a leader, including an education leader, is to prioritise collective learning and partnerships that benefits Marshallese people and the continuity and survival of the next generation (Heine, 2002; Thaman, 1995). As described by Ejnar Aerōk, an expert canoe builder in the RMI, he stated: “jerbal ippān doon bwe en maron maan wa e” (cited in Miller, 2010, p. 69). His description emphasises the significance of partnerships and working together when navigating and journeying together in order to move the canoe forward. The kubaak, the outrigger of the wa (canoe) is about “partnerships”. For us as elementary school leaders on Majuro, kubaak encourages us to value collaborative partnerships with each other as well as our communities, PSS, and other stakeholders. Partnerships is an important part of the Kanne Lobal education and leadership framework. It requires ongoing bwebwenato – the inspiring as well as confronting and challenging conversations that should be mediated and negotiated if we and our education stakeholders are to journey together to ensure that the educational services we provide benefits our next generation of young people in the RMI. Navigating ahead the partnerships, mediation, and negotiation are the core values of jouj (kindness, love), kautiej (respect), and jouj eo mour eo (reciprocity). As an organic conceptual framework grounded in indigenous values, inspired through our lived experiences, Kanne Lobal provides ideas and concepts for re-thinking education and leadership practices that are conducive to learning and teaching in the schooling context in the RMI. By no means does it provide the solution to the education ills in our nation. However, we argue that Kanne Lobal is a more relevant approach which is much needed for the negatively stigmatised system as a consequence of the various colonial administrations that have and continue to shape and reframe our ideas about what education should be like for us in the RMI. Moreover, Kannel Lobal is our attempt to decolonize the framing of education and leadership, moving our bwebwenato to re-framing conversations of teaching and learning so that our cultural knowledge and values are foregrounded, appreciated, and realised within our education system. Bwebwenato: sharing our stories In this section, we use bwebwenato as a method of gathering and capturing our stories as data. Below we capture our stories and ongoing conversations about the richness in Marshallese cultural knowledge in the outer islands and on Majuro and the potentialities in Kanne Lobal. Danny Jim When I was in third grade (9-10 years of age), during my grandfather’s speech in Arno, an atoll near Majuro, during a time when a wa (canoe) was being blessed and ready to put the canoe into the ocean. My grandfather told me the canoe was a blessing for the family. “Without a canoe, a family cannot provide for them”, he said. The canoe allows for travelling between places to gather food and other sources to provide for the family. My grandfather’s stories about people’s roles within the canoe reminded me that everyone within the family has a responsibility to each other. Our women, mothers and daughters too have a significant responsibility in the journey, in fact, they hold us, care for us, and given strength to their husbands, brothers, and sons. The wise man or elder sits in the middle of the canoe, directing the young man who help to steer. The young man, he does all the work, directed by the older man. They take advice and seek the wisdom of the elder. In front of the canoe, a young boy is placed there and because of his strong and youthful vision, he is able to help the elder as well as the young man on the canoe. The story can be linked to the roles that school leaders, teachers, and students have in schooling. Without each person knowing intricately their role and responsibility, the sight and vision ahead for the collective aspirations of the school and the community is difficult to comprehend. For me, the canoe is symbolic of our educational journey within our education system. As the school leader, a central, trusted, and respected figure in the school, they provide support for teachers who are at the helm, pedagogically striving to provide for their students. For without strong direction from the school leaders and teachers at the helm, the students, like the young boy, cannot foresee their futures, or envisage how education can benefit them. This is why Kanne Lobal is a significant framework for us in the Marshall Islands because within the practice we are able to take heed and empower each other so that all benefit from the process. Kanne Lobal is linked to our culture, an essential part of who we are. We must rely on our own local approaches, rather than relying on others that are not relevant to what we know and how we live in today’s society. One of the things I can tell is that in Majuro, compared to the outer islands, it’s different. In the outer islands, parents bring children together and tell them legends and stories. The elders tell them about the legends and stories – the bwebwenato. Children from outer islands know a lot more about Marshallese legends compared to children from the Majuro atoll. They usually stay close to their parents, observe how to prepare food and all types of Marshallese skills. Loretta Joseph Case There is little Western influence in the outer islands. They grow up learning their own culture with their parents, not having tv. They are closely knit, making their own food, learning to weave. They use fire for cooking food. They are more connected because there are few of them, doing their own culture. For example, if they’re building a house, the ladies will come together and make food to take to the males that are building the house, encouraging them to keep on working - “jemjem maal” (sharpening tools i.e. axe, like encouraging workers to empower them). It’s when they bring food and entertainment. Rubon Rubon Togetherness, work together, sharing of food, these are important practices as a school leader. Jemjem maal – the whole village works together, men working and the women encourage them with food and entertainment. All the young children are involved in all of the cultural practices, cultural transmission is consistently part of their everyday life. These are stronger in the outer islands. Kanne Lobal has the potential to provide solutions using our own knowledge and practices. Connie Joel When new teachers become a teacher, they learn more about their culture in teaching. Teaching raises the question, who are we? A popular saying amongst our people, “Aelon kein ad ej aelon in manit”, means that “Our islands are cultural islands”. Therefore, when we are teaching, and managing the school, we must do this culturally. When we live and breathe, we must do this culturally. There is more socialising with family and extended family. Respect the elderly. When they’re doing things the ladies all get together, in groups and do it. Cut the breadfruit, and preserve the breadfruit and pandanus. They come together and do it. Same as fishing, building houses, building canoes. They use and speak the language often spoken by the older people. There are words that people in the outer islands use and understand language regularly applied by the elderly. Respect elderly and leaders more i.e., chiefs (iroj), commoners (alap), and the workers on the land (ri-jerbal) (social layer under the commoners). All the kids, they gather with their families, and go and visit the chiefs and alap, and take gifts from their land, first produce/food from the plantation (eojōk). Tommy Almet The people are more connected to the culture in the outer islands because they help one another. They don’t have to always buy things by themselves, everyone contributes to the occasion. For instance, for birthdays, boys go fishing, others contribute and all share with everyone. Kanne Lobal is a practice that can bring people together – leaders, teachers, stakeholders. We want our colleagues to keep strong and work together to fix problems like students and teachers’ absenteeism which is a big problem for us in schools. Demetria Malachi The culture in the outer islands are more accessible and exposed to children. In Majuro, there is a mixedness of cultures and knowledges, influenced by Western thinking and practices. Kanne Lobal is an idea that can enhance quality educational purposes for the RMI. We, the school leaders who did GCSL, we want to merge and use this idea because it will help benefit students’ learning and teachers’ teaching. Kanne Lobal will help students to learn and teachers to teach though traditional skills and knowledge. We want to revitalize our ways of life through teaching because it is slowly fading away. Also, we want to have our own Marshallese learning process because it is in our own language making it easier to use and understand. Essentially, we want to proudly use our own ways of teaching from our ancestors showing the appreciation and blessings given to us. Way Forward To think of ways forward is about reflecting on the past and current learnings. Instead of a traditional discussion within a research publication, we have opted to continue our bwebwenato by sharing what we have learnt through the Graduate Certificate in School Leadership (GCSL) programme. Our bwebwenato does not end in this article and this opportunity to collaborate and partner together in this piece of writing has been a meaningful experience to conceptualise and unpack the Kanne Lobal framework. Our collaborative bwebwenato has enabled us to dig deep into our own wise knowledges for guidance through mediating and negotiating the challenges in education and leadership (Sanga & Houma, 2004). For example, bwe-jen-lale-rara reminds us to inquire, pay attention, and focus on supporting the needs of others. Through enra-bwe-jen-lale-rara, it reminds us to value cultural exchange and reciprocity which will strengthen the development and maintaining of relationships based on ways we continue to honour each other (Nimmer, 2017). We not only continue to support each other, but also help mentor the next generation of school leaders within our education system (Heine, 2002). Education and leadership are all about collaborative partnerships (Sanga & Chu, 2009; Thaman, 1997). Developing partnerships through the GCSL was useful learning for us. It encouraged us to work together, share knowledge, respect each other, and be kind. The values of jouj (kindness, love), kautiej (respect), and jouj eo mour eo (reciprocity) are meaningful in being and becoming and educational leader in the RMI (Jetnil-Kijiner, 2014; Miller, 2010; Nimmer, 2017). These values are meaningful for us practice particularly given the drive by PSS for schools to become accredited. The workshops and meetings delivered during the GCSL in the RMI from 2018 to 2019 about Kanne Lobal has given us strength to share our stories and experiences from the meeting with the stakeholders. But before we met with the stakeholders, we were encouraged to share and speak in our language within our courses: EDP05 (Professional Development and Learning), EDP06 (School Leadership), EDP07 (School Management), EDP08 (Teaching and Learning), and EDP09 (Community Partnerships). In groups, we shared our presentations with our peers, the 15 school leaders in the GCSL programme. We also invited USP RMI staff. They liked the way we presented Kannel Lobal. They provided us with feedback, for example: how the use of the sail on the canoe, the parts and their functions can be conceptualised in education and how they are related to the way that we teach our own young people. Engaging stakeholders in the conceptualisation and design stages of Kanne Lobal strengthened our understanding of leadership and collaborative partnerships. Based on various meetings with the RMI Pacific Resources for Education and Learning (PREL) team, PSS general assembly, teachers from the outer islands, and the PSS executive committee, we were able to share and receive feedback on the Kanne Lobal framework. The coordinators of the PREL programme in the RMI were excited by the possibilities around using Kanne Lobal, as a way to teach culture in an inspirational way to Marshallese students. Our Marshallese knowledge, particularly through the proverbial meaning of Kanne Lobal provided so much inspiration and insight for the groups during the presentation which gave us hope and confidence to develop the framework. Kanne Lobal is an organic and indigenous approach, grounded in Marshallese ways of doing things (Heine, 2002; Taafaki & Fowler, 2019). Given the persistent presence of colonial processes within the education system and the constant reference to practices and initiatives from the US, Kanne Lobal for us provides a refreshing yet fulfilling experience and makes us feel warm inside because it is something that belongs to all Marshallese people. Conclusion Marshallese indigenous knowledge and practices provide meaningful educational and leadership understanding and learnings. They ignite, inspire, and transform thinking and practice. The Kanne Lobal conceptual framework emphasises key concepts and values necessary for collaborative partnerships within education and leadership practices in the RMI. The bwebwenato or talk stories have been insightful and have highlighted the strengths and benefits that our Marshallese ideas and practices possess when looking for appropriate and relevant ways to understand education and leadership. 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