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Singlish and the Story of Singapore Nationalism

By Jing Kai Lee and Ashley Tan Figure 1: A side-by-side comparison of posters from the Speak Good English Movement and the satirical Speak Good Singlish Movement. (Source: Speak Good English Movement & thekopi.co) Singlish, a colloquial language widely spoken in Singapore, has become a key component of the Singaporean identity for a significant number of Singaporeans today. As a […]

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Italy vs. Hong Kong: An Olympic Game of Identity

By Vicky Suen Nowhere reveals the crux of identity more profoundly than the fields of the Olympic Games. A comical episode occurred when the Hong Kong fencer, Edgar Cheung Ka-long scored a decisive point in the men’s foil individual gold medal match at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, marking Hong Kong’s victory over Italy’s Filippo […]

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Opening the Games, Stirring Debate: Nationalism and Identity in Paris 2024

By Lorraine Lambert Delalbre Amid the shimmering backdrop of the Seine and Paris’s iconic landmarks, the Paris 2024 Olympics opening ceremony was more than just a display of sporting excellence—it was a carefully staged expression of French national identity. Beneath the celebration of France’s cultural legacy and revolutionary values, however, the ceremony unveiled tensions between […]

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‘Zidane scored two headers, and we weren’t Arabs anymore’: The remembrance of the Black Blanc Beur phenomenon.

By Baptise De Vries Zinedine Zidane was undoubtedly the most popular man in France in July 1998. The French born player of Algerian descent or “Zizou” might still be the most worshiped man in the Hexagon to this day. What he and the French football team achieved was seen both as a sporting and socio-political […]

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Britanni ite Domum – Britons Go Home

By Alexander Sutherland Open a piece of popular media on the Roman Empire, and one will find that most of this media will portray the Romans speaking English with a ‘British’ accent’. For instance, in HBO’s Rome, the Patrician Romans speak in Received Pronunciation, while Roman soldiers and ‘Plebian’ characters speak in more ‘lower’ class […]

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Subverting Colonialist Narratives and The Wicker Man

By Charlie Hinds Robin Hardy’s 1973 folk-horror film ‘The Wicker Man’ tells the story of Police Sergeant Neil Howie investigating a missing child case named Rowan on the fictional island of Summerisle in the Hebridees and has been widely appreciated as one of the greatest horror films ever made. Though this may not sound like […]

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War in the House of Many Mansions

Written by guest writer Charles Khalaf War ravages the Land ! Lebanon is surrounded by monsters destroying the pillars of what historiographer Kamal Salibi once called a house of many mansions. Some are trying to fight them, some are clapping, some are just expressing feelings of hate and agony. Only a small minority understands that […]

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Exposing the supremacist echo chamber of “traditional architecture”

Written by Maxime C Figure 1. The Central Library of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Certain architectural styles lend themselves better to embracing local vernaculars, as is the case here. If you use Instagram or Twitter and are mildly interested in architecture, the algorithm might have fed you posts making a comparison between modern […]

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Aramcoians in Saudi Arabia’s Little America

Written By Jude Al Issa Prior to 2015, modernity was neither welcomed nor believed to have an audience in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. For pious tribal people, camera phones in the early 2000s were an unnecessary luxury, cinemas considered as the works of the devil, and religion was a public activity that must be […]