Articulation Of National Identity Research Articles

Contrasting media representations of race and national identity: The case of England and Italy at the Union of European Football Associations Euro 2020

The continuous growth of international sport events as media spectacles has magnified their ability to project ideas of nationhood. In media coverage, the athletes/players are portrayed as the embodiment of the ‘nation’, but this process is far from linear. Historically, mass media have constructed highly gendered and restricted ideas of the nation, placing women and ethnic minorities at the margins or erasing them altogether. The analysis of the coverage of the England and Italy men’s teams at the Euro 2020 brings to the forefront the persistence, but also the evolution, of such tensions. Combining critical discourse analysis with theories of race and racialisation, this article aims to unpack the often-overlooked role of ‘race’ in the articulation of national identity in Europe. While the England team proudly embraced the ethnic diversity of British society, Italy was the only Western European team not to select players with an immigrant background or ethnic minorities. By looking at a British popular newspaper, Daily Mail, and at an Italian one, Corriere della Sera, this article provides a necessary update to the understanding of the function of mass media as ‘gatekeepers’ of the nation.

Not Just ‘Somewhere South of Sovereignty and East of Equality’: Indian Strategizing in the Age of Transnational Solidarities

South Asia witnessed a number of transnational solidarities, some of which it was home to, others that drew the region into their ambit. Articulations of national identity, evident in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, marked shifting definitions of the politico-cultural community in South Asia. Concurrently, there was a congealing of ideological connections that straddled continents such as the leftist solidarity Afro-Asianism epitomized. How did social imaginaries such as these, variously imbued with nationalist and internationalist ethos, influence India’s self-image? What role did sub-diplomatic solidarities forged by non-state actors such as activists and intellectuals play? In what ways had subnational activism contributed to some of these contested fraternities? Such questions were moot to India’s assessment of its own state capacity in the 1980s and beyond. The article takes as its focus two critical sites of postcolonial India’s international relations: transnational solidarity networks and domestic politics. In doing so, it attempts to offer a granular analysis of the ‘imagined collectivities’ India espoused and the multiplicity of agendas these stood for and which it helped shape.

Bordering and Othering: Encounters at Shrine of Chamliyal at the India-Pakistan Border

ABSTRACT The paper examines the dynamics of bordering and othering at the shrine of Chamliyal situated at the India-Pakistan border in the Jammu region of Jammu and Kashmir, India. The shrine is believed to be more than three-hundred-year-old, represents the social and cultural ties that predate the political differences and territoriality implicit in the India-Pakistan border. The reverence towards the shrine from people in adjoining villages on both sides of the international border present it as an “outlier” seemingly contrary to the formal and popular articulations of nationalist identities evoked by the India-Pakistan border. Following a constructivist approach, the paper explores how the border is socially constituted by the borderlanders in their narratives and practices at the shrine. In the borderlands, these narratives and practices present an array of characteristics that oscillate through assertion, negotiation, and challenge the hegemonic articulations of national identity.

Contributors’ Notes

Contributors’ Notes

What does “Global” in “Global Indian” mean?: cultural production and new urban subjectivities in world-class Mumbai

ABSTRACT Through an examination of the stand-up comedy scene in Mumbai, India, this paper analyzes what “global” means in the context of new articulations of Indian-ness. I argue that emergent urban art forms, such as stand-up comedy in Mumbai, allow the articulation of a world-class urban subjectivity, which comes to define meanings of “global Indian-ness”. Thus, this article contributes to our understanding of how the growing role of global cities in capturing transnational flows of capital shapes contemporary articulations of national identity. Specifically, media productions facilitated by the production of cities like Mumbai as world-class produces a new subjectivity that informs national identity. Stand-up comedy in Mumbai is one such emergent media production, because it is made possible by Mumbai’s media infrastructure, which in turn is facilitated by the reorganization of Mumbai as a world-class city.

Empire of Hope: The Sentimental Politics of Japanese Decline by David Leheny

Reviewed by: Empire of Hope: The Sentimental Politics of Japanese Decline by David Leheny Eiko Maruko Siniawer (bio) Empire of Hope: The Sentimental Politics of Japanese Decline. By David Leheny. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 2018. xiv, 230 pages. $39.95. We have just begun to reckon with the last 30 years—how to understand and name what in conventional shorthand has been called the lost decades. Some scholars of contemporary Japan have taken to putting "lost decades" in quotation marks to acknowledge both the moniker's insufficiencies and [End Page 556] the lack of compelling alternatives. Others subtly perpetuate or even actively embrace the popular characterization of this period as one marked overwhelmingly by loss and decline. In this rendering, decline is a particular kind of loss—of a past assumed to be better than the present, often measured by stubbornly fixed yardsticks such as economic growth, marital status, and fertility rate. A prevailing and unchanging sense of malaise is assumed to be rooted in lived experience, with little clarity about what was lost, when, and by whom. With refreshing originality, Empire of Hope: The Sentimental Politics of Japanese Decline complicates simple narratives of loss. David Leheny illustrates how expressions of decline and loss were laced with the rhetoric of hope, if not so confident as to be audacious, then substantive enough to affirm that the stories of postbubble Japan have not only been of doom and gloom. He gives examples of narratives that look ahead to a future, one in which, and over which, Japan has agency to become something better. The very imagination of a future that is somehow good challenges the notion that the ability to see beyond the present and to believe in progress has been utterly lost. In pointing out how such narratives have been tinged with feelings of hope, Leheny offers more than valuable observations about the articulation of national identity in contemporary Japan. The book does something much more innovative: it examines the intersection of narratives and emotion in Japanese political life. Empire of Hope is about how emotions operate in politics: not how they themselves are a motivating force, but how representations of emotions are important elements in the creation of stories that a nation tells itself about itself. The book shows how political ideas, claims, and goals gain traction when they appeal to what is presented as national emotion and are connected to what is presented as a shared national narrative. Japan's shared national narrative, argues Leheny, is that the country's earlier, extended period of economic growth was brought about by "collective national effort" (p. 11). In a time of prolonged economic stagnation, the more optimistic prognoses about Japan's future have stemmed from the belief that the country might once again come together to realize "national success" (p. 12). Each of five body chapters focuses on one case study to forge a distinct piece of the book's fundamental argument about the inextricability of emotions and narratives. The first takes up the immediate aftermath of the tragic collision of the U.S. nuclear submarine USS Greeneville with the Ehime Maru, a Japanese fisheries training boat, in 2001. Examining how the Japanese and U.S. governments portrayed feelings about death in relation to the question of whether the boat should be raised to recover the bodies, the chapter illustrates how the description of national emotions was used to preserve a shared story about the triumph of cooperation and mutuality over [End Page 557] cultural difference in the U.S.-Japan relationship. In this chapter that is more about international politics than any other, Leheny introduces an important point about how national emotion and narrative can defuse the explicitly and uncomfortably political, in this case, tensions and resentments about the power differential between the United States and Japan. National emotion and narrative are also shown to elide the complexities of individuals' emotions. In the negotiations over the fate of the Ehime Maru, the construction of a national grief that could be adequately addressed through concrete action was incongruent with the grief of victims' families which could not be so neatly resolved. The four subsequent chapters are not concerned with...

Fascism, National Socialism, and the 1939 New York World’s Fair

Abstract This article considers the involvement of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. It considers the form, function, and content of the Italian Pavilion designed for this fair and asserts that the prefabricated monumental structure would be best interpreted, not in isolation, but as an element of the larger architectural conversation which continued to unfold across contemporary fascist Europe. Such reconsideration of this building makes it possible to evaluate the relationship between Fascist design, the assertion of political will, and the articulation of national identity and cultural heritage within a larger, transnational context. The author also investigates the American exhibition committee’s earnest and persistent, yet ultimately unheeded, solicitation of Nazi German participation and argues that motives behind German withdrawal from this event had as much to do with the threat of popular protest as economic pressure.

China is a hare: The articulation of national identity in Year Hare Affair

National identity is dynamic and dialogic, and its maintenance and reproduction have become increasingly fragmented and fractured. Although recent studies have discerned different modes of articulating national identity, very few studies have focused on youth culture and the maintenance and reproduction of national identity in China. Therefore, this study analyses metaphors, discursive practices and ideologies in the Chinese animation Na nian na tu na xie shi er (Year Hare Affair) using a coherent theoretical framework of multimodal metaphor and critical discourse analysis. First, four genres of multimodal metaphors are identified in animation. Next, this study analyses the ideologies and discursive practices of metaphors and argues that elements of what is called ‘ACG subculture’ – due to its focus on animation, comics and games – articulate elements of dominant culture by raising semantic conflicts in metaphor scenarios. The practice of articulation-produced national identity is informed by the conceptual metaphor CHINA IS A HARE. This metaphor, suggesting historic endurance and the lineage of the Chinese spirit, is an ideologically vested euphemism for national identity that embraces a dual notion of identity that is both national and individual. Finally, the novel reproduction of an endogenous and heterogeneous national identity in animation provides us with space to re-imagine the interplay between national identity, dominant ideology and Chinese youth.

The Articulation of National Identity in Early Twentieth-century East Asia: The Intertwining of Discourses of Modernity and Civilisation

This article examines the ways in which national identity was articulated by intellectuals in Japan, China and Taiwan in the first half of the twentieth century as a first step to reviewing the standard western-centric and diffusionist account of nationalism. Conventional accounts of nationalism regard nationalism as intrinsically European, rooted in developments such as the Enlightenment and the Westphalian system of states, and consider non-western cases as examples of diffusion from the “centre” to the “periphery”. Even though the discourse of the nation and national identity produced by East Asian intellectuals in the early twentieth century was shaped by social and political theories developed in the West, their frequent use of civilisational referents suggests that they were subjectively engaged with a project of self-definition that drew on their own sources, which undermines diffusionist assumptions. The article briefly examines the discourse of national identity articulated by the Kyoto School of philosophy, Sun Yat-sen and Tsai Pei-huo as the first step in exploring the possibility of multiple origins of nationalism.

The mioritic nation - an alternative approach to Moldovan national identity

Moldova has been widely argued to be a failed nation-building project, with two national identity discourses coexisting within Moldovan society and amongst Moldovan elites: Romanianism and Moldovanism. Challenging the dominance of these discourses in the literature, this article argues that in spite of its absence from the nationalism debate in Moldova, the ballad Mioriţa is a key element for the Moldovan articulation of national identity. The analysis employs a discursive approach focused on language as a constituting phenomenon and draws from Mioriţa's appeal to the grass roots level, its banality in day-to-day life, and, more importantly, its promotion by Moldovan cultural elites. This latter part focuses specifically on the writings of novelist Ion Druţă. Druţă places Mioriţa at the very center of his construction of Moldovan national identity. He highlights its links with Moldovan history, culture, religious thinking, and geographical space, both reproducing a structure similar to the two national identity discourses, Romanianism and Moldovanism, and building on their similarities. But more importantly, Druţă's representation of national identity sheds light on the possibility of an all-encompassing Moldovan identity, overcoming the existing cleavage, and a series of mechanisms that can be employed to achieve this.

‘Has Aboriginal art a future?’ Leonhard Adam’s 1944 essay and the development of the Australian Aboriginal art market

This article examines how foresight, hindsight and perception are enabled, modified and compromised by competing intellectual traditions and by social and professional exigencies. Focusing on the example of one scholar, Dr Leonhard Adam, and his essay ‘Has Aboriginal art a future?’ this article charts the trajectory of this question from obscurity to celebration. It explores why such a significant question was unable to ignite debate, at a time when there was considerable interest in the role of Aboriginal art in the articulation of national identity. It examines the intellectual and social conditions that framed Adam’s contribution and explores what enabled him, as a relative outsider, to develop such a prescient understanding of the future of Australian Aboriginal art.

Cross-Gender Shakespeare and English National Identity: Wearing the Codpiece (review)

Reviewed by: Cross-Gender Shakespeare and English National Identity: Wearing the Codpiece Jason E. Cohen Cross-Gender Shakespeare and English National Identity: Wearing the Codpiece. By Elizabeth Klett. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Pp x + 208. $80 (cloth). Elizabeth Klett's Cross-Gender Shakespeare and English National Identity considers the impact of women performing central male roles in Shakespearean productions across a recent decade (1995-2004) of English theatre. This trim package of six chapters includes an appendix of production details, and taken together, it provides teaching faculty or students of theatre with an introduction to recent concerns relating to cross-gender casting and performance. It will supplement contemporary assessments of gender, nationality, class, and race on stage. Klett's insights about cross-cast performance are sensitive first to the power dynamics of characterizing women as powerful and motivated men, and second to news media and scholarly reactions to these English experiments in gendered representation. Klett's argument expands on her discussion of all-female productions at the Globe in James Bulman's 2008 edited volume, Shakespeare Re-dressed (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press), which situates cross-dressed and cross-gendered casting variously across contemporary performance and political categories. While the current volume remains in conversation with Bulman's collection, [End Page 485] the extended treatment Klett offers in Cross-Gender Shakespeare exchanges the breadth of Bulman's volume for a critique focused on what Klett sees as the "androgynous" double-gendering of cross-cast female bodies. This book extracts an iconoclastic reading of body politics from conservative male performance and scholarly traditions: that is, by casting women in central male roles, Klett maintains, these performances challenge an understanding of Shakespearean works that associates them with male hegemony, and moreover, disrupts a narrow vision of the avenues open for theatrical innovation on the English stage. Her project is at its best in describing and reviewing the stage productions it studies; unfortunately, the monograph at times lacks the nuance to convincingly develop its twinned central claim that cross-gender casting disrupts the assumption of a continuous English national identity, and, in addition, questions the canonical authority of Shakespearean performance in English stage traditions. The six chapters in Cross-Gender Shakespeare treat each of Shakespeare's dramatic genres: after an introduction, four individual chapters are devoted to discussions of, respectively, Fiona Shaw's title role in Richard II, Kathryn Hunter's in King Lear, Vanessa Redgrave's Prospero in The Tempest, and Dawn French's Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream; the volume concludes with a combined discussion of all-female casting in the Globe Theatre's Taming of the Shrew, Much Ado About Nothing, and Richard III. The analysis, like the chapter structure, situates these performances within the discrete theatrical contexts provided first by gender switching in the central role, and second, by the scholarly traditions associated with interpreting and performing those characters. One wonders why Cross-Gender Shakespeare, given its substantial investment in the politics and ontology of visual representation, lacks production or promotional images from these recent productions as they could supply readers with visual points of descriptive and analytical reference. In addition, when Klett broaches the provocative thesis that recent Shakespearean theatre reflects a fragmented and postcolonial moment in the construction of British national identity, she falls short of establishing a broader historical or social context for her claims about the contemporary implications of Shakespearean productions. The book is nevertheless buoyed up by insightful discussions of cross-casting, including topics such as cross-dressing, androgyny, textual and performative citation, and homoerotic desire. Klett's introductory chapter explores the implications of "wearing the codpiece" (2) as the literal and figural practice of female-to-male cross-gender casting. Cross-Gender Shakespeare finds its theoretical points of reference initially in Judith Butler's conception of gender performativity, and secondarily in Benedict Anderson's articulation of national identity as an imagined community. Klett's strongest assertion uses androgyny to link cross-casting to the "the simultaneous presence of both [male and female] gender identities" rather than to "the lack of sexed characteristics" (11). At times, Klett's formulation remains unclear about the distinction between physical androgyny and a conceptual androgyny represented...

Theorizing Paula Radcliffe: Representing a Nation

In setting the world record at the London Marathon in 2003, Paula Radcliffe not only beat her female competitors but also her countrymen becoming the fastest British runner of the year, male or female, making her the nation’s best hope for the Olympic Games in 2004. From this position, she garnered a significant amount of media attention, becoming Britain’s most famous runner. Yet as a representative of her nation, both symbolically and on the national team, her place remains complicated. Radcliffe’s significant accomplishments, which were in part understood as British success, were also constructed as a foil for the lack of British men’s success in racialized and gendered ways. To explicate mediated articulations of national identity, I examined UK print media constructions of Radcliffe focusing on three major events of her running career: her world record, her failure to finish at the 2004 Games, and her World Championship marathon win in 2005. I found that Radcliffe achieved conditional status as a representative of Britain, while this media coverage also maintained and buttressed gendered and racialized hierarchies in the complex construction of British identity.

Designer nations: Neo-liberal nation branding – Brand Estonia

This article critically examines the emergence of nation branding as a commercial practice at the end of the Cold War by conceptualizing it as a means for nations to redefine and reposition themselves within the master narrative of globalization. It examines the industry literature of the nation branding movement, which seeks to legitimate the practice. It argues that nation branding is an engine of neo-liberalism that explicitly embraces a reductive logic, which privileges market relations (market fundamentalism) in articulations of national identity; also contends that nation branding is a risky business that can backfire, since its success depends, in large part, on the intuitive knowledge of individual industry ‘creatives’. It maintains that the methodology of nation branding, qua methodology, is profoundly anti-democratic. It offers recommendations for making nation branding more transparent and accountable to democratic values, but also explores Umberto's concept of ‘semiotic guerrilla warfare’ as a possible strategy for disrupting nation branding and redirecting initiatives to rethink national identity in more democratic directions.

Patriotism, Order and Articulations of the Nation in Kyiv High Schools Before and After the Orange Revolution

An ethnographic investigation of citizenship education in Kyiv high schools reveals a tendency, manifest in pedagogical practices and disciplines, to pose the ideal Ukrainian patriot as tame, predictable, and obedient to authority. In the course of the Orange Revolution, however, mass mobilization against the government allowed protesters to break from a state-defined national identity that encouraged political passivity. High school pupils' experience of new forms of community and solidarity during the revolution led to the emergence of novel articulations of national identity. National consciousness was therefore an effect rather than a cause of the Orange Revolution.

Maîtres à l’épée, Maîtres à danser, Maîtres à penser:Founding French National Consciousness in Russian Exile

Proceeding from Lord Acton’s insight that “exile is the nursery of nationality,” this paper examines a peculiar historical instance of dislocation as a relevant matrix for the articulation of national identity. I inquire into aspects of the elaboration of French national consciousness among French émigrés of the revolutionary period in Russia, approaching the subject at two levels: first, the maîtres à danser, the run-of- the-mill émigrés who abandon cosmopolitan certitudes or pretensions of a “monde français” and abstractions of dynastic loyalty, in favour of nostalgic attachment to a tangible patrie, very much at odds with the Russian otherness into which they have been thrust. Second, the maîtres à penser, those émigré thinkers in whom the Revolution provokes a reconsideration of established universals and who conceptualize Russia in terms of a project to reconcile universal and particular or national values. I examine the dilemmas and ultimate failure of such a projection by focusing on the work of Joseph de Maistre. On both levels, the historical case studied here is an exemplification of the proposition that nationalism is founded on a disenchantment with the world, and that physical estrangement from both the world to which one believes oneself to belong as well as spiritual estrangement from the world in which one treads, may provide a critical context for defining collective identity.

Images of 1812: Ivan Terebenev and the Russian Wartime Lubok

This article explores the articulation of national identity in Russia during the Napoleonic Wars. It examines this expression by focusing on the work of Ivan Terebenev, who produced 48 popular prints known as ‘lubki’ between 1812 and 1815. These images represented one of the first attempts by a Russian artist to redefine Russian national identity in the wake of Napoleon's invasion. By mocking the French emperor and emphasising the strengths of the Russian peasants, Cossacks and the Russian spirit in his images, Terebenev established themes that would continue to appear in prints in future Russian wars. Moreover, this article focuses on the reception of these images in Russia as a means of exploring how Russians who encountered them thought about their Russianness. Terebenev's images of 1812, as this article concludes, left a lasting impression on Russian visual culture and national identity.

Rhetorics of the State: The Public Negotiation of Political Character in Germany, Russia, and Quebec

National identity construction is a fundamentally rhetorical phenomenon maintained and transformed through public discourse. Through the analysis of dramatically rejected state speeches related to national identity and public responses to them, critics can compare competing articulations of national identity against the chronological historical record to identify various instances of strategic memory. By isolating dominant strategies of remembrance, the political character of emergent national identities can be outlined. In this essay, I explicate a critical rhetorical approach to controversial speech called limit work, providing examples of the public negotiation of national identity in 1988 West Germany, 1993 Russia, and 1995 Quebec that illustrate its utility.

Elspeth Huxley: gender, empire and narratives of nation, 1935-64

This article explores the impact of empire on narratives of the British nation during a period of decline of British colonial rule through a study of Elspeth Huxley's successive reworkings of such narratives between 1935 and 1964. It sets Huxley's work in the context of post-1945 anxieties about national decline and their connections with the loss of imperial power, and looks at the difficulties surrounding the articulation of national identity as virile and masculine in post-imperial Britain. Although anxieties about masculinities were often addressed through a misogynistic discourse which showed women emasculating men, Huxley's work suggests the significance of a counter-theme. It indicates not only her own attachment to an imperial identity but also the ways in which this continued to be articulated in the midtwentieth century as an identity with a wide appeal to a metropolitan audience, and one through which women could be incorporated into the story of nation. In exploring the terms of this incorporation, the article considers the opportunities open to women to claim to embody exemplary national qualities through the figure of the doughty, intrepid, imperial female pioneer, and the particular resonance and appeal this figure acquired in the context of the end of empire.

Regendering the Nation: Women and the Nationalist Discourse in Taiwan

Drawing on recent theories of nation and feminism, the author explores the relations between nationalist movements and women's politics in Taiwan. A critical analysis of Taiwan's recent political/nationalist movement and television political advertising campaigns was undertaken. The advertisements are analyzed with an aim to examine how the questions of women are used by the contending political parties in their construction and articulation of national identity. At issue is the ongoing reformulation of national identity as Taiwan deals with (1) increased forces of globalization, (2) a deepening crisis of the self vis-à-vis the Chinese Mainland, and (3) the multiple and conflicted voices in the process of naming and defining the nation.