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AbstractDeforestation, advancements in healthcare technology and the diminished concern of younger generations in preserving ecological wisdom, particularly ethnomedical practices, raise concerns about the potential extinction of such practices within the Sarolangun Malay community (henceforth abbreviated as SM). Against this backdrop, this ecolinguistic article explores and documents medicinal plant terminologies and their representation in incantations employed by traditional healers in their ethnomedical practices. Data were derived from ethnographic interviews employing rapport techniques with shamans. The study reveals that out of 63 medicinal plants used, they fall into seven terminological categories: color, shape, location, taste, aroma, function and gender. Meanwhile, the incantations used in healing processes are categorized into two: general and specific. These incantations encapsulate biological (flora and fauna), cultural (religion and agriculture) and social dimensions (relations with fellow humans and nature). This study concludes that the SM community perceives healing from ailments as an interplay of multiple inseparable elements: nature, supernatural forces and religion. This research plays a vital role in fostering and cultivating positive attitudes among various parties (including the government, capitalists and local communities) toward nature, a crucial source of raw materials. Furthermore, the research also contributes significantly to deepening the understanding of the relationship between local wisdom, language in oral literature and medicinal plants, all working together to heal various diseases. Serving as a pilot study for ecolinguistics in the SM context, this research offers preliminary insights for future scholars to discuss the diverse lexicon within incantations in comparison to other types.

AbstractThis paper examines the nexus between Nigeria’s foreign policy and glocalisation. Glocalisation is an emerging concept in foreign policy discourse, with the sole intent of forging a synergy between globalisation, global governance, and local relations, hinging on domestic peculiarities. As it were, foreign policy has largely projected the interest of the ruling class and other private interests rather than the greater good regardless of the gains for the ruling elites, as posited by Jeremy Bentham. The concentric model was the theoretical framework used by the study to explain the levels of relation from the core to the periphery, a globalised foreign policy to a glocalised foreign policy. Qualitative research methods were adopted for this study, using secondary sources of data collection, and textual analysis. While little or no attention has been paid to glocalisation efforts in foreign policy discourse in Africa, it has been on the table of discussion for the western world, notwithstanding the current level of development occasioned by diplomatic relations worldwide. Progressively, within foreign policy discourses, the need to glocalise foreign policy cannot be overemphasised, as it marks the beginning of real polity as explained by Aristotle, as against simply focusing on the localisation of globalisation.

AbstractCoordination has been thought to be a reliable test of constituency; thus all the cases of apparent non-constituent coordination (noncanonical coordination) were assumed to be derived via reduction: movement or ellipsis. This view has been challenged by facts from the semantics of non-canonical coordination, particularly scope ambiguity in gapping and non-constituent coordination. I provide here an analysis that accounts for this type of ambiguity. I propose that the ambiguity that arises in non-canonical coordination is structural; that is, the cases of coordination are derived from two sources (a vP source and a CP source), where each source is derived via AT B movement or ellipsis. I spell out an analysis in terms of left-to-right syntax, in which copying of displaced elements is allowed to be minimal under some circumstances, which facilitates the wide scope reading of scope-taking elements in non-canonical coordination. The analysis confirms the assumptions about constituency and structure in phrase structure grammars, such as Generative Grammar, by providing a purely syntactic analysis of the scopal peculiarities of non-canonical coordination. This result has implications on how syntactic chunks are produced and processed in the human brain, which can in turn benefit fields, such as psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, or even computational linguistics.

AbstractThe (re)production of women in isiXhosa literature cannot be disjointed from the social realities that women experience. Young girls are no exception to this view. In fact, women’s issues could be regarded as pertinent to such an extent that dialogues concerning them ought to be initiated within isiXhosa scholarly discourses, among other platforms. This is against the reality that women have often been sidelined, especially in African literature as well as in the broader African social context, thus, there is an urgent demand to celebrate their voices today and tomorrow. With this in mind, this article aims to critique how women are depicted in Indlal’Inamanyala (Obscenity) (1994). By the same token, the objective is to comprehend how women’s realities are made visible and/or invisible in this isiXhosa drama. An African feminist theory is applied to uncover and discourse identified women’s issues and their (un)silenced voices. The findings and discussions indicate that women’s constructive contributions to society continue to be downplayed because of certain legacies of colonialism, apartheid, and traditional systems. The conclusion underlines the necessity to draw an interconnectedness between women and isiXhosa literature in an effort to address and mitigate the persisting injustices that adversely affect women in South Africa and elsewhere in the global village.

Conceptual art plays a crucial and continuous role in the generation and development of contemporary art, and thus is also the reference point of contemporary art. Conceptual art is an art centered on ideas, and it is dominated by the use of language. These two characteristics have induced three important tendencies of de-materialization, anti-formalism, and anti-visual aesthetics in contemporary art. It is these three tendencies that have led to a new understanding and evaluation of the value of work or labor in contemporary art. Put briefly, contemporary artists pay more attention to the concept value, process value, and Complex Polysensoriality value of art work, rather than the physical object value, commodity value, and visual aesthetic value in the past. These changes are not only caused by art itself, but also have root and basis in techonology, philosophy, society, and the existing condition of human beings, which raises further questions.

Nas últimas décadas, os manuais escolares têm sido objeto de um intenso debate académico em todo o mundo. Principalmente em torno do seu papel na transmissão de conteúdos e conhecimentos educativos.Este artigo analisa a imagem e a representação do colonialismo europeu ocidental e do colonialismo português, stricto sensu, no manual História da Guiné e Ilhas de Cabo Verde, publicado pelo Partido Africano para a Independência da Guiné e Ilhas de Cabo Verde (PAIGC) em 1974.Na ânsia de desafiar e contestar a lógica colonial e o domínio português na Guiné (Bissau), o PAIGC investiu, praticamente desde o início da luta armada de libertação nacional, num ensino cujo objetivo primordial era excluir a reprodução da mentalidade colonial através da publicação de manuais com novos conteúdos. O objetivo era desconstruir um certo passado colonial “glorioso”, desafiar o imperialismo europeu e construir uma nova narrativa baseada em novos atores e protagonistas da história e do discurso. Textbooks have been the subject of intense academic debate in recent decades worldwide. Mainly around their role in transmitting educational content and knowledge.This article analyses the image and representation of Western European colonialism and Portuguese colonialism, stricto sensu, in the textbook História da Guiné e Ilhas de Cabo Verde, published by the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and the Cape Verde Islands (PAIGC) in 1974.In its eagerness to challenge and contest the colonial logic and Portuguese rule in Guinea (Bissau), the PAIGC invested, practically from the beginning of the armed struggle for national liberation, in teaching whose primary objective was to exclude the reproduction of the colonial mentality through the publication of textbooks with new content. The aim was to deconstruct a certain “glorious” colonial past to challenge European imperialism and build a new narrative based on new actors and protagonists in history and discourse.

Reflections on the collective traumas that have shaped Japan’s more recent history (primarily the triple disaster of Fukushima) have ignited a new boom in dystopian productions that have achieved an unprecedented success. These narratives explore themes that deal with the erosion of the ecosystem in which humans live – but also of the human body itself. However, it is not only human beings who play a part in some of these dystopias: the city of Tokyo also plays a key role within them. The purpose of this paper is to explore this peculiar role of Tokyo in three selected case studies: namely, Adou (2021-) by Amano Jaku, Soundtrack (2003) by Furukawa Hideo, and The Emissary (2013) by Tawada Yōko. Destroyed and rebuilt in multiple media productions over the last seventy years and at the center of psychedelic futuristic visions, Tokyo becomes either a swarming center of human life or an abandoned wasteland, an urban skeleton that stands as a reminder of the impending or preceding catastrophe, forcing the reader to think about the actual future of our urban spaces – and whether it will include us humans or not. DIVE-IN – An International Journal on Diversity and Inclusion, V. 3 N. 2 (2023): Before the after: narrative distopiche nel presente della catastrofe

This paper investigates the representation of bodies in two contemporary Japanese works, namely Murata Sayaka’s Seimeishiki (生命式 , Life Ceremony, 2013) and Ono Miyuki’s Karada o uru koto (身体を売ること “Selling the Body,” 2020). Both novellas are set in the future and share the trope of the ‘uncanny,’ heightened through the transgression of boundaries thanks to the presence of what I refer to as ‘consumed bodies,’ and female protagonists as an ‘unhinged woman,’ the anti-heroine interpreted as a feminist icon recently emblazoned in social networks. In Life Ceremony, the Japanese government has approved anthropophagy as a social practice; in “Selling the Body,” healthy flesh bodies are sold to survive in polluted environments and replaced by robotic ones. Present anxieties concerning the control over bodies and their reproductivity, as well as the fear of objectification are expressed through the practices of cannibalism and cyberization. Consequently, readers are forced to rethink the human nature and ethics in a posthuman dialectic within a hyper-capitalistic society. DIVE-IN – An International Journal on Diversity and Inclusion, V. 3 N. 2 (2023): Before the after: narrative distopiche nel presente della catastrofe