Humanities

Much of the existing literature on the Rwandan post-genocide diaspora has rightly emphasised trauma, testimony and remembrance as central to preserving historical truth and honouring the victims of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi. Yet an exclusive focus on mourning risks overlooking the cultural practices through which diasporic communities also sustain collective life, transmit identity and imagine futures beyond violence. This article argues that Rwandan Cultural Days in the United Kingdom illuminate a complementary mode of remembrance in which joy functions not as the opposite of memory but as one of its most enduring cultural expressions. Through music, dance, language, storytelling, food and intergenerational participation, these annual gatherings create spaces where cultural continuity and historical remembrance become mutually reinforcing. Drawing on reflections gathered during the Second Rwandan Cultural Day held in Nottingham in 2025, the article interprets participants’ accounts as cultural narratives through which memory, identity and belonging are continually negotiated within the post-genocide diaspora. Rather than treating Cultural Days simply as community festivals, it conceptualises them as forms of diasporic infrastructure: recurring cultural practices that renew relationships, sustain collective memory and enable dispersed communities to recreate Rwanda as a living cultural presence beyond its territorial borders. In doing so, the article demonstrates how everyday cultural practices transform remembrance into an active and participatory process that extends across generations. By bringing memory studies, diaspora studies and postcolonial scholarship into conversation, the article advances the concept of joy as cultural resistance. It argues that collective celebration constitutes an ethical and political response to the legacies of genocide and colonialism by affirming the language, traditions and cultural practices that violence sought to erase. Remembering through joy, the article concludes, is not a departure from mourning but a way of ensuring that remembrance remains a living practice of belonging, resilience and cultural continuity.

This article investigates female representation in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot (1869), employing interdisciplinary approaches such as Stuart Hall’s Encoding/Decoding theory and Joan Scott’s feminist historiography. The issue of female subjectivity is situated within the context of the nineteenth-century Russian women’s rights movement and its impact on women’s roles in society. The research relies on qualitative methods, specifically interpretive research and textual analysis. Using Hall’s theory of dominant, negotiated, and oppositional positions, the respective ideological positions of the female characters are examined. Moreover, Scott’s theory is employed to explore the structures and directions of power through which gender subjectivity is constructed and conveyed. Hall’s model of polysemy demonstrates how femininity can be interpreted in multiple ways, while Bakhtin’s theory of polyphony highlights the coexistence of diverse voices and perspectives within the text. The findings suggest that Alexandra, Adelaida, and Varya Ivolgina largely comply with prevailing gender norms, whereas Lizaveta Prokofyevna negotiates between tradition and social change. Aglaya and Nastasya Filippovna, in turn, articulate positions that challenge socially accepted notions of women’s behavior. Thus, the article presents a fresh perspective on The Idiot (1869) through the prism of cultural studies, Bakhtin’s polyphony and feminist historiography, contributing to the broader academic development of gender issues, ideology, and literary representation in nineteenth-century Russian literature.

This article reads René Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy as both a sequence of philosophical arguments and a narrative performance of subject-formation. It asks how changes in the meditator’s epistemic and ontological configuration reorganize the form of the six Meditations, and what becomes of this epistemic-narrative configuration when skeptical scenarios recur in cinema. Combining close reading with a limited use of Paul Ricoeur’s concept of narrative configuration, Constantin Noica’s processual understanding of consciousness, and scholarship on Cartesian rhetoric and first-person discourse, the analysis traces a movement from the situated but unexamined self, through the doubting subject and the Cogito as a turning point and provisional foundation, toward res cogitans, finite and relational subjectivity, responsible judgment, intelligible material structure, and finally an embodied composite restored under qualified conditions to body and world. The article argues that narrative transformation follows subject transformation: each new configuration of the meditator requires a different discursive operation. In this interpretation, Meditation VI supplies the sequence’s structural closure by reconstructing, without rendering infallible, the relations among embodiment, sensation, memory, judgment, and worldly continuity. A comparison with The Matrix and The Truman Show then identifies a transmedial recurrence of the skeptical configuration and examines its media-specific reconfiguration as technological captivity, institutional surveillance, bodily awakening, and struggles for agency. The films are treated neither as adaptations nor as evidence of direct reception history. The article contributes an integrated account of philosophical inquiry, subject transformation, narrative form, and selected cinematic reconfigurations.