Tomochic: Nationalist Narrative, Homogenizing Late Nineteenth-Century Discourse and Society in Mexico

In this article, I illustrate how the national narrative in Canada's Museum of History has evolved over 50 years. Located in the national capital of Ottawa, the new Canada's History Hall presents a concise overview of a nation, stretching from time immemorial to the present. It was opened on 1 July 2017 as a signature exhibition in celebration of Canada's sesquicentennial. It also represents a fourth manifestation of a national museum narrative for Canada. From humble beginnings in 1967 (when Canada celebrated its centennial), the narrative has changed substantially in response to national policies and societal values. Adopting a critical discourse analysis methodology, and drawing from archival evidence, I analyse how this national narrative has evolved. Canada's History Hall presents Canadian students with a concise national template for remembering Canada's past. Over the past 50 years, this narrative has changed, as curators have employed artefacts and museum environments to construct patriotic pride in their nation. Until 2017, this narrative was blatantly exclusionary of Indigenous voices. More recently, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada has called for reconciliation in education, including public forums for education. The Canadian Museum of History has responded to this call by weaving Indigenous voices into the national narrative of the new Canadian History Hall. In so doing, I argue, the museum has successfully entwined patriotism with reconciliation against past wrongs.

Fully-formed nationalisms do not emerge from nothing. Nor are they inextinguishable expressions of pre-modern forms of identity and political aspirations. The argument in this paper is that if they are fully formed, they have to emerge from ethno -nationalism; that is, out of ethnic identification-writ-large, where ethnic identification becomes ‘mapped’ onto that larger thing called a ‘nation’. Ethnic identification, however, requires a transformation in modes of consciousness and atavistic ethno-histories before ethno-nationalism and then full-blooded nationalisms can come into being. The argument is made in relation to the Karen nationalist movement in Burma. Karen nationalism emerged out of ethno-nationalism that was fostered by Christian missionary interest and ethnological attempts to set out a Karen ethno-history. Missionary writings offered Christian-educated Karen, in colonial times, the basis for a ‘narration of nation’ and for viewing themselves not merely as an ethnic group but a ‘nation’. This paper sets out the ceaseless unfolding of this ‘narration of nation’ that began in the nineteenth century and now tragically occurs in refugee camps in Thailand because of drastically altered politico-military conditions in Burma since the late 1980s. These narrations can only be understood in terms of their discursive history and how this history has been shaped. These narrations are examined with a view to addressing some key theoretical issues contained in more recent studies of nationalism and nation-state-making as modern phenomena and how ethno-nationalism is transformed into nationalism.

This chapter attempts to critique the use of the woman figure in the narrative of Indian nationalism, especially as it appears in Raja Rao's collection of short stories, The Cow of the Barricades (1947). It undertakes an exploration of Hindu iconography which was the blueprint for creating figures like 'Bharat Mata' [Mother India] on the one hand and the low social status of women in India on the other. An attempt is made to bring together these two dominant strands in the short stories with the intention of juxtaposing the transience of the emerging nation-state against Rao's ironic treatment of the rigidity of tradition. The influence of Gandhi is overarching, beginning from his own employment of religious tropes in the political discourse of the time, to his popular projection as a divine character in the epic that is the freedom movement.

This paper examines how the Sydney Olympics Games’ opening ceremony presented images of a linear, multicultural, and chronological narrative of Australian history. However, the ceremony's attempts to manage difference produced multiple narratives of the Australian nation. Textual analysis of the Australian Channel 7 broadcast and newspaper coverage of the Olympics show how the ceremony's narrative of a united Australian nation responds to the increasing disintegration of nation-states’ boundaries in the context of globalization.

In Australia, questions surrounding national identity often feature in public discussions on asylum seekers. Using qualitative interview data collected from 40 participants in an ongoing study of young people in Queensland, we explore the connections between young people’s understandings of Australian national identity and their attitudes towards ‘boat people’. We identify distinct points of interconnection and disjuncture between participants’ notions of being ‘Australian’ and their thoughts on how Australia should respond to asylum seekers. With respect to the asylum seeker debate, we find narratives of Australian nationhood are flexible in interpretation and can serve contrasting and competing functions.

In its theoretical framework this thesis relies on the discussion of the existing approaches towards the study of nationalism such as the perennialist, the modernist/constructivist and the ethno-symbolist. The ethno-symbolist approach by Anthony D. Smith, however, is chosen as the most appropriate for examining Belarus's nation-building process and therefore, its ability to explain different expressions of Belarus's national narratives is emphasized. The empirical discussion of Belarus's post-independence nation-building process explains the peculiarity of the Belarusian case in which the official national narrative coexists with the alternative national narrative in Belarus's public sphere. The research question, however, is centered on the problem of the Belarus's national narrative - as it is outlined in Belarus's history textbooks - and its representation of Lithuania with regard to the medieval past of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which is shared by the both modern republics of Belarus and Lithuania.;With the analysis of Belarus's national narratives and history textbooks as a case study, the thesis responds to concerns of some Lithuanian historians and answers the question whether Belarus's national narrative and the representation of Lithuania presented in the textbooks are contesting and "rewriting" the Lithuanian past, particularly in terms of Lithuanian input in the creation and maintenance of the Grand Duchy from the mid-thirteenth century until the late eighteenth century. The aforementioned research provides an unprecedented analysis of Belarus's history textbooks in regard to their representation of another national group during the particular period of a shared medieval past.

National Narratives and the Colonial Politics of Historiography Rochelle Raineri Zuck (bio) Old Canaan in a New World: Native Americans and the Lost Tribes of Israel elizabeth fenton New York University Press, 2020 272 pp. Mourning the Nation to Come: Creole Nativism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature jillian j. sayre Louisiana State University Press, 2019 264 pp. Colonizing the Past: Mythmaking and Pre-Columbian Whites in Nineteenth-Century American Writing edward watts University of Virginia Press, 2020 292 pp. Many scholars have highlighted the role that literature plays in the development and maintenance of collective national identities. Benedict Anderson famously defined the nation as an "imagined political community," the rise of which was linked to the development of print capitalism, which allowed disparate individuals, separated by space and time, to see themselves simultaneously as part of such an imagined community (6).1 Important work in literary studies has since focused on the development of "national narratives" (to borrow Jonathan Arac's term) and how such narratives allowed individuals in what had been loosely confederated colonies to imagine themselves as citizens of the United States.2 Key examples include Priscilla Wald's Constituting Americans (Duke UP, 1995), David Waldstreicher's In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes (UNC P, 2012), Robert [End Page 907] Levine's Dislocating Race and Nation (UNC P, 2009), and Jonathan Arac's The Emergence of the American Literary Narrative (Harvard UP, 2005). Waldstreicher in particular attunes us to the way the ascendance of certain national narratives is predicated on the collective forgetting or active suppression of other stories: "The nation' is never just an idea or a thing; it is also a story, an encompassing narrative or set of narratives with the potential to crowd out other narratives that may have rather different political implications" (142). Throughout the process of nation-making in the "New World," some stories have gained traction while others have been "crowd[ed] out" or suppressed. A trio of recently published works—Jillian J. Sayre's Mourning the Nation to Come (2019), Edward Watts's Colonizing the Past (2020), and Elizabeth Fenton's Old Canaan in a New World (2020)—attends to these national narratives and, through their engagement with issues of temporality, reminds us that such stories exist in time and, particularly in the context of settler colonialism, participate in the creation of an organizing temporal logic that positions readers as national citizens in time. These three impressive works of scholarship not only engage important currents in the field such as the transnational and temporal "turns" but also model a hermeneutic that reveals how some of the most trenchant national narratives positioned readers as participants in an unfolding national temporality informed by both sacred and secular understandings of history. Mourning the Nation to Come, Colonizing the Past, and Old Canaan in a New World explore the ways European colonists and their descendants crafted national narratives through the retelling or co-optation of histories (sacred and secular) so as to advance their colonial aims and subvert the territorial sovereignty of Indigenous Americans. They attend to the stories that gained prominence as settler nations were formed in the Americas and those that were ignored, reconfigured, and/or suppressed. All three of these works, to varying degrees, engage Anderson's work as part of their explorations of collective fantasies that sought to resolve the tensions between the settler status of Europeans in the Americas and their desire to claim territorial sovereignty by presenting themselves as somehow "indigenous" to the lands they sought to colonize. These works offer fresh perspectives on literary expressions of the Vanishing Indian trope by emphasizing that the ways narratives of Indigenous "vanishing" circulated alongside (and were informed by) recovery projects that sought to produce histories [End Page 908] that could be put in service of the colonial project. In addition to the Vanishing Indian trope, there are other points of connection between these works, and, to an extent, they consider some of the same primary source materials, including the "Lost Tribe" theory of American Indian origins, the Mound Builders, the Book of Mormon and other Church of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) writings, historical romances like those of James Fenimore Cooper, and...

In this final chapter, we conclude the study by addressing the way in which the struggle for the national narrative is important for domestic politics and Indonesia’s international behaviour. In the first part of the chapter, we consider how national narratives have shaped political competition, and particularly how we understand competition for the presidency in Indonesia. We then turn in the second section to focus on how the national narratives covered in this book shape governance. Here we use an example from late 2019 that demonstrates the challenge of governing at the national level in Indonesia, and what this means for maintaining a hegemonic national narrative. This case is important to consider as the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic and other issues in the 2020s increasingly impact Indonesian society. In the third section we consider how national narratives are a part of the ongoing contentious politics that take place both during and between elections. In the fourth section, we address how national narratives shape foreign policy and especially the practice of ‘grand strategy’. Finally, we consider what the competing national narratives might mean for the future of democracy in Indonesia.

Reviewed by: The Nature of Narrative Lisa Sternleib Scholes, Robert, James Phelan, and Robert Kellogg. The Nature of Narrative. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, 336 pp. $17.95. I recently asked a graduate class how many had read Tom Jones. None had. Nor had any read The Mill on the Floss, Dombey and Son, or The Bostonians. Few had read The Secret Agent, Ulysses or Howards End. I mention this because Tom Jones is the novel most frequently referred to in The Nature of Narrative by Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg. Scholes and Kellogg wrote the book in 1966, and Oxford University Press has reissued it as a fortieth anniversary edition with a long afterword by James Phelan on the development of narrative theory over the last forty years. Scholes and Kellogg argue for a continuum between ancient writing and the novel by showing how the plot of Tom Jones is "essentially a Greek-romance plot"(68); they use characters in Tom Jones to illustrate varieties of characterization and Fielding's narrative persona to distinguish among histor, bard, and maker. Tom Jones appears in nearly every chapter of the book to illustrate the classical heritage of modern narrative, meaning in narrative, character in narrative, plot in narrative, and point of view in narrative. Thus, the authors assume that the reader of their book is familiar with Fielding's masterpiece. They assume that their readers are also familiar with The Iliad, The Odyssey, Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales, St. Augustine's Confessions, Paradise Lost, Middlemarch, Ulysses, Plato's Republic, The Aeneid, and Madame Bovary. I found this assumption of a shared language the most moving part of reading The Nature of Narrative. Scholes and Kellogg draw on their vast knowledge of Western literature to argue that the history of narrative is a long one and should not be limited to the study of that very recent invention, the novel. The result is a magnificent book that makes lovers of the novel hungry to learn more about its connections to the writings of Thucydides, Ovid, and Boccaccio, "sacred myth, folktale, epic, romance, legend, allegory, confession, satire," and history (3). The authors devote more space to thirteenth-century Icelandic narratives than they do to Dostoevsky or Dickens. In a sense, then, The Nature of Narrative underplays the importance of the novel while it is clearly written for those who deeply love and intimately know the novel. Yet in their last pages Scholes and Kellogg lament the very real possibility that the novel will disappear altogether, that cinema will take its place, that "the older forms of story-telling, including the great achievements of the novel's golden age-the nineteenth [End Page 137] century-may cease to be viable for the practitioners of narrative. It seems heretical now, or visionary, to suggest that written narrative may become, quite literally, a thing of the past. But so, in a very real sense, it may" (281). Of course, forty years ago the authors could have had no idea what competition the nineteenth-century novel and its offspring would face. Narrative theory now grapples with the Internet. English departments hire specialists in digital media. And as James Phelan demonstrates in his afterword, narrative study need no longer have anything to do with the written word-"Cognitive narratology takes classical narratology's fundamental question, what are the underlying rules of narrative's textual system? and revises it to ask, what are the mental tools, processes, and activities that make possible our ability to construct and understand narrative? In addition, cognitive narratology focuses on narrative itself as a tool of understanding, that is on how narrative contributes to human beings' efforts to structure and make sense of their experiences" (290). Phelan begins his contribution to the book with the following paragraph: "Focalization, prolepsis, analepsis, homodiegetic, heterodiegetic, intradiegetic (are we having fun yet?), heteroglossia, the narrative audience, tensions and instabilities, disclosure functions, character zones, fuzzy temporality. Who else is ready to cry, 'Hold, enough!'?" (283). I deeply appreciate Phelan's cogent, clear, incisive history of narratological trends. Indeed, I highly recommend it to anyone interested in understanding how vast and intricate a field narratology is. And I am also thrilled...

The perils of national narratives

The debate about building a national narrative for the state of Pakistan could be seen among academia, think tanks and media personnel for the last few years. It is believed that 'national narratives' help project the world-view of a nation, which is considered important in the contemporary world. The paper in hand pleads that narrative-building is a delicate exercise, which needs a major intellectual effort. Narratives encompass the ideological, historical, socio-economic and cultural perspectives of any nation. Pakistan is a State which had the narrative beforehand the inception of the state. The paper argues that there is a need to constitute a 'Committee of top academics, intellectuals and religious scholars of the country', who should deliberate and build a comprehensive national narrative, allinclusive in approach and leaving out no segment of the society. Meanwhile, the paper presents a few recommendations, which proffer some measures to address the prevailing security concerns.

The decline and fall of the Communist regime in the Soviet Union provoked intense apocalyptic expectations even as it opened new possibilities for religious believers. In 1990, a new law on freedom of conscience transformed the religious landscape by legalizing movements that had once existed only underground, by encouraging new interest in old religious institutions, and by creating the conditions for the emergence of many new religious movements. At the same time, the radically new political and social situation of post-Communist Russia provoked a vigorous debate about the future of the Russian nation— a debate that religious believers actively engaged. Orthodox Christians in particular tried to develop a new national narrative that could chart a future for Russian society and make sense of the Soviet past, including the church’s ambivalent relationship to the atheist state. In 1989, a new apocalyptic prophet, Ioann (Veniamin Iakovlevich Bereslavskii), founded the Center of the Mother of God [Bogorodichnyi tsentr] and began publicly proclaiming his own national and eschatological narrative, one he had received from Mary herself. Deeply influenced by the literature and methods of the Catholic Marian apparition movement, Ioann (since 1992 Archbishop Ioann) has been receiving his own special revelations since November 1984 when Mary first warned him of an impending divine judgment on the world. Creatively improvising, Ioann has drawn from both the right and the left wings of the political spectrum to fashion his own national narrative for Russia. Like liberal Westernizing democrats, Ioann rejects the official Orthodox hierarchy as hopelessly compromised; he dismisses these bishops as pharisees. Strongly anti-Communist, Ioann also generally supports democratic reform and has sought contacts with the West.2 But at the same time, like the right-wing nationalists, Ioann insists that Russia has a messianic role to play in the post-Communist world order.3 Especially favored by the Mother of God, Russia is at the center of an apocalyptic struggle against Communists and Satanists—a struggle that marks the beginning of a new age, the Age of Mary.

This essay analyzes the interconnectivity of regional, political party, and national identities and their association with cultural hegemony. The 2004 Republican National Convention Keynote Address by Democratic Senator Zell Miller coupled with his book A National Party No More (2003) created an event that displays how the Southern regional narrative and its role in the national narrative reinforce a white hegemonic view of Southerners and “the South.” This analysis shows that Zell Miller's keynote address and book provided an opportunity for a renewed and more inclusive version of Southern and national identity. However, Miller, political party spokespeople, and media representatives never capitalized on the opportunity but, instead, further entrenched white hegemony into both regional and national identity narratives during the 2004 presidential campaign.

The recent condition of complexity within nation-states, triggered by the visibility of transnational communities and by the political demands of cultural identities, indicates that the traditional tools of national narratives with respect to articulations of identity and membership are exhausted. The debate on postnationalism suggests that unbounding citizenship from its national narrative would create the conditions in which the contentious issues of cultural recognition and representation could be resolved without resorting to the narrow confines of national narratives. This paper argues that that even though the postnationalism debate makes an important contribution in terms of indicating alternative forms of citizenship that are not tied to national discourse, it seriously underestimates the deep political connection between citizenship regimes and national narratives. By separating citizenship from national discourse, the postnationalism debate overlooks the ways in which transnational, ethnic, religious, sexual and other cultural identities interact with national narratives to negotiate their citizenship rights. More importantly, this assumed separation of citizenship rights from national discourse fails to acknowledge that the particular forms of citizenship rights, such as political representation and cultural recognition, and how they are exercised, are intertwined with the cultural hegemony of national narratives. Finally, the tension between citizenship regimes and national narratives provides the political space within which formerly marginalized groups and identities can invoke otherness to negotiate the cultural boundaries of nation-states. In other words, the politics of citizenship invoked by marginalized groups and identities is not simply about legal claims but also includes political attempts to reconfigure national narratives.

Nationalnarrative is a modern political view that still preserves its ideologicaleffect today. Ideologies, frequently, utilize means of communication,particularly the motion pictures, in order to stimulate and canalize thesociety’s reflexes on the thought process. Cinematic narratives, by means ofthe clichés that it enriches, on one hand feed the prejudices and on the other,are fed by these prejudices. In this regard, the memory trajectories, whichwill shape the societal structuring and national identity, sometimes on thegrounds of reality and on other occasions, of fiction, with the stereotypes inthe stories of the movies, are formed. National narrative and national identitycan ensure continuity so long as such are commonized, interchanged andregenerated within the scope of daily life practices. The images, which formthe national narrative and/or national identity, are constituted on the basisof societal gender and incorporate feminine contents rather than a masculinehegemony. Thus, it can be enunciated that national narrative constructs agender-oriented organizational form, which aims to transform social equalities,national identity, national superiority and national power into a resource. Inthis context, the approaches by FloyaAnthias and Nira Yuval-Davis on the rolesassigned to women within the national narratives establish the core feature ofthis study in order to analyze the codes on feminine contents leaked into thedaily life practices. The aim of this study is to reveal by comparison ofmovies, which are the productions of two different countries, Son Mektup(2015) by ÖzhanEren, ÇanakkaleYolunSonu (2013) by SerdarAkarand Çanakkale 1915 (2012) byYeşimSezgin, all of which were shot following the year of 2000, thecontribution of these movies on the Turkish nationalism discourse, how the nationalnarrative was rebuilt by means of the femininity construct and what is theeffect of societal gender roles within the transformation process of identitiessituated by the image repertoires into national identities.