Almost immediately after the end of the Second World War (WW II) and the declaration of the Iron Curtain policy, the Cold War broke out between the socialist and capitalist countries: the so-called opposition between the Eastern and Western bloc. The most acute confrontation between the USSR and the USA was manifested in such areas as the arms race, space exploration, struggle to expand spheres of influence. In 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the world was on the brink of nuclear war. After the occupation in 1940, Latvia was part of the Soviet system, and therefore was exposed to the Soviet ideology and propaganda. Most of the inhabitants of Latvia (like of the whole USSR) had practically no opportunity either to visit the USA or to obtain reliable information. Periodicals of the USSR imposed on the Soviet reader their image of America and the Western world in general; a huge role in creating this image was assigned to satirical publications. The article reveals the principles of representation of the USA image in the magazine “Dadzis” [The Thistle] and “Dadža kalendars” [The Thistle Almanac] using imagological and cultural-historical approaches. The research focuses on the textual and visual representations of the phenomenon under study both in feuilletons and caricatures created by Latvian and foreign authors and published in the 1960s Latvian satire. The study reveals that the static image of the USA consisting of a certain “set” of stereotypes was implanted in the Latvian society of the above-mentioned period and later.

“No one finds it easy to live uncomplainingly and fearlessly with the thesis that human reality is constantly being made and unmade, and that anything like a stable essence is constantly under threat.” These were the words used by Edward Said in the late 1970’s in the context of introduction of the new paradigms for the identity of the people, communities and societies in the East and the West, as well as the world as a whole. He was ahead of a wider decades long process of re-evaluating and reimagining of our identities and values, leading to exposure of serious and numerous misconceptions and illusions in the perceptions and analyses of the self and the other. The growing tendencies of scientific relativism and constant re-evaluation of the key paradigms, especially in social sciences and humanities, of the last decades, were further emphasized by the massive waves of globalisation, that have shaken societal traditions, norms, and principals all over the world. One of the key aspects of this transformative process in the West was the confrontation with the societal and scientific biases created by the Eurocentric views of the world and human history, connected to the dominant classicistic traditions in both society and academia. This paper provides a novel multidisciplinary approach in thinking about our classical traditions and examines if the classical principals, ideals, and “wisdom” are still relevant in confronting contemporary challenges of the world and reimagining our own identity and our vision for the future.

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Loanwords are the words that are borrowed from other languages to be incorporated into a recipient language to be part of its linguistic system. Using loanwords is influenced by different factors and differs from one language or dialect to another. The current study compares the usage of loanwords in the written texts of two dialects of Kurdish, namely, Northern Kurmanji dialect (NK) and Middle Kurmanji dialect (MK) to identify which dialect uses loanwords more frequently. “Avro” and “Khabat”, the two local dailies, are used representing NK and MK respectively. The content of some of their articles are analysed according to the topics, i.e. politics, economics, law, science, arts and sport and the loanwords of each topic are categorized according to the number of occurrence, donor language and part of speech. The results reveal that MK dialect uses loanwords more frequently compared to NK. There are inter and intra-dialectal variation according to factors such as the topic and donor language while no differences have been noted according to the part of speech. Thus, the current study reveals that adopting and using loanwords are significantly influenced by different factors such as dialect, topic, linguistic category and donor language.

The mode of nostalgia for past happiness is central in contemporary accounts of earlier epochs, and it becomes particularly visible in British prose fiction set in the first half of the twentieth century. I argue that in such accounts memories and recollections are shaped by the mode of nostalgia. This paper focuses on the aspects of reflective nostalgia as recently theorized by Svetlana Boym. It opens with a short introduction into the history of nostalgia and the experience of war for generating a nostalgic longing for the past. It also elaborates on the etymological issues and implications suggested by concepts of nostos [the return] and algos [pain]. I would argue that memories featured in British twentieth-century prose fiction are influenced by the workings of nostalgia which may be either idealizing or imbued with pain and sorrow. Consequently, I claim that the focus placed on the act of nostos promotes the interplay of nostalgia and the pastoral mode; by contrast, the expression of algos rather selects the elegiac mode. Thus, the paper seeks to prove that the different foci of nostalgia influence the modality of the twentieth-century prose fiction, as exemplified in “To the Lighthouse” by Virginia Woolf and “The Go-Between” by L. P. Hartley.

By examining the relationship between territoriality and identity construction, this paper aims to provide a comparative analysis of three contexts where encounters between foreign colonial powers and local autochthonous communities took place. The comparison is thus focused on the interaction between Africans and Portuguese in two different contexts (São Jorge da Mina/ Elmina, Ghana between the fifteenth and the nineteenth centuries, and colonial Angola from the 1850’s onwards), on the one hand, and on the encounters between Phoenicians and Autochthonous communities of Southwestern Iberia (Tartessos?) in the first half of the first Millennium BC. This study raises new questions about the role played by sanctuaries and violence in the deconstruction of indigenous territorial perceptions and the subsequent construction of colonial territories in the Iron Age of Southwestern Iberia. Also in examination are the relevance and usefulness of a comparative methodology in the analysis of encounters between diverse cultural actors as expressed in the archaeological record.