Blog post by Ruxandra Ana, University of Łódź, Poland

​My Identities article, ‘Modes of embodiment: exercising agency through Afro-Cuban dance’, was inspired by a conversation with Alvaro, a Berlin-based dancer and dance instructor and one of my research participants after the opening of the exhibition O Quilombismo: Of Resisting and Insisting. Of Flight as Fight. Of Other Democratic Egalitarian Political Philosophies, hosted in 2023 by the House of World Cultures in Berlin. One of the installations in the exhibition, Table of Goods by Portuguese visual artist Grada Kilomba, consisted of a pyramid of soil surrounded by candles, indented with notches filled with coffee, sugar and cocoa, to symbolize the violence that facilitates modern pleasures, and serving as a metaphor for trauma and the colonial wound.

Alvaro spoke enthusiastically about this particular installation, which resonated with our on-going conversations about the fetishization of Black and Brown bodies as part of broader processes of commodification of Cuban music and dance on the island and in European contexts. Our talks inevitably touched upon the experience of racial discrimination in Berlin and the German desire and occasional positive valorization of Blackness, almost unequivocally connotated negatively in Cuba, and Alvaro was not an isolated example.

Blog post by Muhammad Habib Qazi, University of Central Punjab, Pakistan

Punjabi, the language of Pakistan’s largest ethnic community, continues to face marginalization despite its deep-rooted cultural and historical significance. This linguistic relegation is not merely the result of state policies but is also reinforced at the societal level, particularly by Punjabi women. Their role in fostering linguistic cringe has been a crucial yet underexplored phenomenon. The term linguistic cringe refers to one’s feeling of embarrassment about their linguistic and cultural products vis-à-vis those of dominant languages and cultures (Phillips 2006). My Identities article, ‘Ethnic languages conundrum in postcolonial Pakistan and the role of women in fostering Punjabi linguistic cringe’, investigates the ways in which postcolonial socio-political structures and internalized stigmas have led Punjabi women to distance themselves from their mother tongue.
​
Based on a mixed-method approach, the study draws on data from 312 randomly sampled Punjabi women through semi-structured interviews and questionnaires. The findings reveal that colonial legacies and postcolonial nation-building efforts have led to the assertion and imposition of Urdu and English as superior languages, pushing Punjabi to the periphery. This imposed linguistic hierarchy has contributed to Punjabi women’s reluctance to pass the language on to their children, reinforcing its decline and strengthening the perception of Punjabi as a ‘backward’ or ‘rural’ language (John 2015; Asif 2005).