Cultural Nationalist Movement Research Articles

Cultural nationalism and the spread of a ‘national language’ among Arabophone, Turcophone and Kurdophone Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, c. 1840 to c. 1860

This article explores the historical moment in which the concept of a ‘national language’ began to spread among Ottoman Armenians. It does so by examining the establishment of educational associations aimed at changing the language practices of non-Armenophone Armenians in three parts of the Ottoman Empire: Aleppo, Kayseri and Diyarbekir. I argue that these associations were part of a larger cultural nationalist movement that gained momentum in urban centers beginning in the 1840s. Through an examination of the founding principles of the associations, I show how they sought to integrate Arabic-, Turkish- and Kurdish-speaking Armenians into the would-be national community by facilitating their acquisition of Armenian. Historiographically, this article shines a spotlight on the unexamined dynamics of Ottoman Armenian cultural nationalism and language-based identity formation.

Contesting the past on the Chinese Internet: Han-centrism and mnemonic practices

Digital technology has brought critical changes to mnemonic practices in China, such as the empowerment of social groups to discover previously underrepresented historical accounts and produce alternative historical narratives. This article examines the mnemonic practices of Han-centrism, a type of ethnic and cultural nationalist movement based on the Chinese Internet. It analyzes how Han-centrist netizens reinterpret national history through their efforts to rediscover forgotten historical narratives of glory and trauma. It suggests that digital technology in China facilitates the emergence of online groups that are dedicated to the struggle for “historical truth” and social-cultural changes, motivated by a crisis of identity. Their mnemonic practices may be partly tolerated by the authoritarian state under some conditions. However, given China’s complicated and conflictual history, such online groups can easily turn the Internet into a battlefield of nationalism. This article highlights the confusion and contestation of memory and identity in contemporary China and the role of digital technology in the long battle.

Inherited “Ancestors’ Collections” of a Devoted Curator: The Museum of African Heritage in Georgetown, Guyana

This essay traces the development of the Museum of African Heritage (MAH) in Guyana, which opened in 1994. The vision for the Museum, however, emerged over a decade earlier within contexts of decolonial cultural nationalist movements in the circum-Caribbean and African diasporic world at large. Exploring particular histories and contemporary functioning of this museum reveals insights into cultural politics of Guyana’s postcolonial nationalist formations, as well as into ways in which museums navigate their often-incongruous political and cultural roles in societies. Museum Director, Jenny Daly, has since the MAH’s inception been the main force behind this institution. Understanding this Museum’s past and current relationships to cultural-nationalist struggles is instructive for historians of Caribbean politics, Africanist scholars, and museologists more generally. Noting how Daly describes her own professional and personal growth realized through relationships forged with artists, their works, and their various communities of engagement can be illuminating. Daly recalls how art served as an effective medium through which she began to engage meaningfully with aspects of her own ancestral heritages, recognizing a profound correspondence between her involvement with the arts and with local Guyanese iterations of African-derived religiosity. Performing and visual arts provide conceptual and practical bridges between African-inflected expressions of devotion, which are generally marginalized in Guyanese society, and positive self-conceptions among African Guyanese individuals and communities. Through didactic means, art holds potentials to demystify stigmatized culture. The MAH is especially well-situated to harness such educational capacities of art, making African Guyanese histories and cultural expressions more accessible to all.

The rise of New Confucianism and the return of spirituality to politics in mainland China

In the past two decades, the revival of New Confucianism in mainland China has accelerated and become a crucial component of the intellectual public sphere. New Confucians have appeared alongside the larger groups of liberals and the New Left, often developing in dialogue or contrast with these intellectual neighbours. As part of the series of research dialogues on mapping the intellectual public sphere in China, this article examines recent discourse from New Confucian intellectuals, particularly dialogue with liberals and the New Left, to highlight the major debates and leading figures that define the cultural nationalist movement of Mainland New Confucianism. We show that, despite the immense difficulty of finding power as a minority voice in contemporary China, an integration of the religious and political dimensions of Confucianism in mainstream Chinese social, political, and intellectual culture remains the primary ideal that fuels and unites these intellectuals in the 2010s.

Of crofters, Celts and claymores: theCeltic Magazineand the Highland cultural nationalist movement, 1875-88

This article examines the cultural nationalist movement in the Scottish Highlands during the period 1875–88, through the lens of the Celtic Magazine, a source which has been overlooked by historians. The cultural nationalist movement resulted from the intertwining of the crofters' land reform movement with a Celtic cultural revival. It was propelled by intellectuals who promoted the distinctive Celtic nature of the Highlands and demanded recognition from the government. An imagined Highland nation, distinct from the rest of Scotland, arose from the cultural nationalist movement but fitted within a wider ‘unionist-nationalist’ identity.

Cultural or Political Nationalism?: Exploring Trans-Border Chewa Identity

Cultural nationalist movements have globally been on the increase especially due to globalisation factors. However the boundary between cultural and political nationalism has always been contentious and unclear. Due to this unclear boundary, some movements claim the cultural agenda when consciously or unconsciously they are pursuing a political agenda. Due to a unique and complicated historical experience of state building in Africa as argued in Ekeh’s ‘Two publics’ thesis, cultural nationalism warrants special attention. The paper focuses on the contemporary Chewa ethnic group of Malawi, Mozambique and Zambia which in the pre-colonial period belonged to the Maravi Empire. The contemporary Chewa movement was revived in the 1990s and its King who is based in Zambia is recognised as a traditional and cultural overseer of Chewa interests in all the three countries. Using focus group discussion, key informant interviews, review of literature and periodicals, the paper argues that the contemporary Chewa movement has, depending on the situation, pursued both: political and cultural agendas. However, the political agenda was not pursued with intention of seeking political autonomy as political nationalism may suggest, but it was pursued to promote and enhance cultural interests of the Chewa. The trans-border setup of the movement further limits the potentiality for excessive politicisation of the movement. The findings confirm what other scholars have always stated that the boundary between cultural and political nationalism is often blurred.

What the Sands Remember

Saint-Pierre and Sainte-Anne sit on opposite shores—both territorially and symbolically—of Martinique, a French territory in the Caribbean Sea. During the nineteenth century, Saint-Pierre was known as the “Sodom” of the Antilles, as a cosmopolitan city where decadence and liberal sexual mores were at the heart of bourgeois and elite culture. In 1902 Mount Pelée, the volcano that sits just above the city, erupted—killing Saint-Pierre's population of over thirty thousand within five seconds. Today, the black, volcanic sand beaches that line the coast remind visitors to Saint-Pierre of the city that once was. Sainte-Anne is a town with a far different reputation. During the 1950s it was known as a refuge for rebels, for people who contested the continued dominance of white and mixed-race elites in the lives of ordinary (mostly black) Martinicans, and was the center of the island's small cultural nationalist movement. Nearly fifty years later, the town retains that reputation—but Sainte-Anne is known for another reason, too, for it is home to one of Martinique's few meeting spaces for men who have sex with men, a secluded section at the end of the commune's most popular beach, Les Salines. This essay seeks to cross temporal, scalar, and disciplinary boundaries while revisiting tropes of queer invisibility that mark representations of same-sex desire in the Caribbean. Cycling from the world described in the 1901 erotic novel Une nuit d'orgie à Saint-Pierre, Martinique to field notes taken in 2010 among men who frequent Les Salines, this essay unites, in a provisional way, a scattered archive of same-sex desire on the island, while relating these desires critically to place. These archives ask us to reconsider a narrative that insists on movement—away from Martinique, away from the Caribbean, away from the global South—as the grounding force for a radical queer (of color) politics. Instead of privileging diasporic subjectivities, these markers of local presence and emplacement offer an alternative framing of what it means to stay put. They give us access to modes of queer relationality that resist documentation, but are indicative of the kinds of lives that certain subjects live: shot through with ambiguity and grounded in a refusal of fixed identity politics. Sand emerges as a compelling metaphor for this kind of theoretical and ethnographic intervention, as its ability to be diffuse yet still irreducibly material provides a model for one way to understand the memory of same-sex desire and gender transgression. Making use of fragments, then, this essay thinks simultaneously through the sexual politics of memory and landscape, linking queer presence to the sands of both Saint-Pierre and Sainte-Anne.

Postcolonial identity politics, language and the schools in St. Lucia

In the postcolonial era, a cultural nationalist movement has sought to elevate the status of St. Lucia's creole vernacular, Kwéyòl, and with some success – it is now the most visible symbol of St. Lucian national identity. This relatively new development has altered somewhat the historic linguistic status quo between the official, high status English and the historically marginalised Kwéyòl. Postindependence public debate on the role of Kwéyòl in the nation has included a focus on a possible expanded role for the language in St. Lucian schools. However, to date colonial language-in-education policy remains unchanged and Kwéyòl remains officially barred from the classroom. This paper examines colonial educational policy, the development of postcolonial identity politics and the interplay between these politics, on the one hand, and organised efforts and public support to expand Kwéyòl into the formal educational domain, on the other.

Writing and Re-Writing National Theatre Histories (review)

Reviewed by: Writing and Rewriting National Theatre Histories Patricia Ybarra Writing and Rewriting National Theatre Histories. Edited by S. E. Wilmer. Studies in Theatre History & Culture Series. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2004; pp. xi + 277. $42.95 cloth. S. E. Wilmer's anthology takes on the theoretical and practical challenges of writing national theatre histories in various sites around the globe. Emerging at a moment of renewed interest in "nations, nationalisms and the construction of national identities and the processes of nationalism" (x), this volume is an important addition to contemporary theatre historiography. Writing and Rewriting begins with three general historiographical essays (Fischer-Lichte, Wilmer, and Sauter), followed by ten case studies from Russia, Slovenia, Belgium, Canada, the US, Mexico, Israel, India, Indonesia, and South Africa, which explore more specific methodological problems. Erika Fischer-Lichte's opening piece asks the most basic question: what is theatre history? She addresses the difficulty of defining the object of study, as conceptions of what constitute theatre are historically and culturally determined and in constant flux. Going on, she unpacks the term history, offering a succinct genealogy of historiographical movements as they have impacted the field, ultimately arguing that the partial perspective "is the condition of possibility of writing theatre history" (6). Wilmer's essay follows, discussing more fully how particular categories of analysis—namely, geography, language, ethnicity, and aesthetics—can affect what makes its way into national theatre histories. Willmar Sauter advocates framing theatre as "playing culture" so as to analyze the theatre event as event, rather than simply reproducing exclusionary director- and author-driven narratives. Together, these essays eloquently summarize [End Page 550] the theoretical issues most relevant to the subsequent national case studies. Many of the essays concentrate on analyzing how and why national theatre histories have performed exclusions in their various sites. Barbara Pusic analyzes not only how past cultural nationalist movements in Slovenia removed non-Slovene language theatre and ideologically suspect works from view, but also how more contemporary national movements have worked to erase the less purely Slovene recent past. She closes with a meditation on the struggle to write theatre history in an emerging nation state marginalized within Europe. Frank Peeter's essay on Belgium focuses on that country's language politics, examining how the rejection of French culture that was part and parcel of national identity construction led theatre historians to mythologize theatres related to Flemish Solidarity, de-emphasize popular forms with links to French culture, and marginalize French-language theatre, effectively making "[a]ll existing theater histories in Belgium . . . half-told stories" (99). Stuart Day also writes about cultural nationalism, exploring how past Mexican theatre histories have supported the country's revolutionary rhetoric and reproduced its centrist spatial ideology by concentrating almost exclusively on Mexico City theatre. Hopeful, he champions both the Mexican playwrights working outside of the capital who critique NAFTA and governmental violence against indigenous people, and the historians who are writing them into Mexican theatre history. Rakesh Solomon and Alan Filewod address the problems inherent in organizing theatre histories into discrete movements and/or forms instead of tracing "performance genealogies." Solomon surveys the spectrum of Indian theatre histories to show how both colonial and postcolonial histories have ignored the relationship between divergent popular theatre forms and between popular and "elite" professional ones. Filewod, meanwhile, discusses how Canadian theatre history's organization into discrete "waves" and "movements" often excludes First Nations performances that do not follow mainline Canadian teleological narratives, arguing that this omission is a form of cultural genocide. Loren Kruger's essay on South Africa also implicitly argues for a more genealogical approach to South African theatre history given the syncretic nature of performance there. Along the way, she critiques histories that have compartmentalized "apartheid theatre" such that South African theatre narratives often start with Athol Fugard rather than the African National Theater of the 1930s. Laurence Senelick's contribution problematizes a different "re-imagining": the one brought on by the trauma caused when a sudden rush of theatrical documentation uncovered in the post-Soviet period led historians to try to cure the amnesia of the Russian theatre's past with a recovered memory, a project rife with possibilities...

Governmentality, Modernity and the Historical Politics of Ọ̀yọ́-Hegemony in Yorùbá Transnational Revivalism

Keywords: history, power, geotemporality, race, Yoruba, [Symbol Not Transcribed]Oy[Symbol Not Transcribed]otunji, African villageRed blood splattered throughout the oval-shaped room. Robed in his best African clothes and by pulling the trigger of a borrowed shotgun, one of [Symbol Not Transcribed]Oy[Symbol Not Transcribed]otunji's young men had fallen to his death. The news of the suicide rang throughout the community. His last words inscribed on paper expressed how much he tried and wanted them to be proud of him, how much he hurt and how much he could not deal with the addictions that haunted him, how much he continued to fail those who he loved the most. His solution saddened the residents as they scrambled to explain how it could have happened, wishing that they had only paid more attention to the signs; if only they had tried harder. The lack of experience dealing with death in [Symbol Not Transcribed]Oy[Symbol Not Transcribed]otunji, a three generation-old community, left residents with a numbing powerlessness and malevolent curiosity about how the leaders would deal with a life taken in this way.The emotional inclination of many, regardless of the cause of death, was to honour with a special ritual the life of their friend and brother in the religion. During the first few hours members of the [Symbol Not Transcribed]Oy[Symbol Not Transcribed]otunji community scurried in search of the appropriate ritual procedure. They called the city of Beauport authorities, consulted the ancestors through the use of divinatory rituals, telephoned knowledgeable practitioners outside of [Symbol Not Transcribed]Oy[Symbol Not Transcribed]otunji, and consulted various historical texts in which Yoruba were documented. Although in the midst of a crisis, they not only sought the advice of their ancestors by conducting divination readings to determine the course of action, but they conducted literary research in search of the protocol of traditional burial practices among the Yoruba of Southwestern Nigeria who committed suicide.Over the course of the development of the black cultural nationalist movement, as it moved from Harlem, New York to South Carolina, African Americans disillusioned with Christianity converted to Yoruba practices in an attempt to revive their African past. At the beginning of bi-weekly town meetings and other formal events, in an attempt to enact the social, religious and political life of Yoruba ancestors, [Symbol Not Transcribed]Oy[Symbol Not Transcribed]otunji revivalists have attempted to recreate their understanding of Yoruba cultural practices by educating themselves about Yoruba history and cultural practices. This has ranged from pursuing ritual apprenticeships, learning the divinatory corpus, attending workshops about Yoruba cultural practices and reading and studying texts about the history of African peoples. Most of the texts that document Yoruba traditional practices and are used in [Symbol Not Transcribed]Oy[Symbol Not Transcribed]otunji today were published prior to 1955. These include various early 20th century Yoruba revivalist classics such as Samuel Johnson's The History of the Yoruba and N.A. Fadipe's The Sociology of the Yoruba. These texts form the source of knowledge for African American ancestral history and despite the apparent stability of these written historical forms, Yoruba revivalists participate in shaping norms of acceptability by basing their terms of practice on renditions of those accounts.Despite the attempts of various leaders within the community to focus on historical customs and traditions documented in Yoruba history texts, the friends and relatives of the deceased who lived in [Symbol Not Transcribed]Oy[Symbol Not Transcribed]otunji mourned the loss of their compatriot. Disappointed in the traditionalist prohibitions against suicide, they disputed the actual relevance of applying Yoruba funeral rites in present day circumstances. …

Education and Ethnicity

This article examines the policy pursued by the Commissioners of National Education in Ireland regarding the Irish language following their establishment in 1831 until the achievement of Irish independence in 1922. In particular, it focuses on the implications of the policy of the exclusion of the Irish language from the primary schools for pupils whose home and only language was Irish. The curricular policy adopted by the Commissioners in the early decades was one which stressed the politieal acculturation and socialisation process of post‐Act of Union (1801) policy of the English administration in Ireland. The article highlights efforts made to get the policy amended and the legitimation of the Irish language within the schools. However, the Commissioners were adamant that no change of policy would occur. With the rise of the cultural nationalist movement in the last quarter of the nineteenth century significant pressure was placed on the Commissioners to change their policy. They rejected the arguments made in favour of the language, but felt forced to make minor concessions in 1879 and in 1883. The establishment of the language revivalist Gaelic League in 1893 brought a more persistent criticism to bear on the Commissioners. However, even this had no influence on the new curriculum introduced for primary schools in 1900. Yet, continued pressure won the acceptance of a bilingual policy for schools in Irish‐speaking areas in 1904. This was a landmark development in the conflict. The paper notes that the sustained opposition of the Commissioners was one of the reasons why people considered that a changed political administration, inspired by a cultural nationalist ideology, would be able to achieve language revival through the schools following political independence in 1922.

Relating feminisms, nationalisms and imperialisms: ireland, india and margaret cousins's sexual politics

Abstract From 1907 to 1913 Margaret Cousins was one of the most prominent leaders of the Irish Women's Franchise League, the most militant of the various Irish suffragist groups. A Theosophist, Cousins left Ireland in 1913 for Theosophical headquarters in Madras, spurred by her commitment to “the cause of womanhood the world over”. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s Cousins played a central role in certain forms of Indian feminist and cultural nationalist movements. This article attempts to sketch some of the ways in which Cousins's class and imperial situation provoked and limited her feminist ideology.

Relating feminisms, nationalisms and imperialisms: Ireland, India and Margaret Cousins's sexual politics

Abstract From 1907 to 1913 Margaret Cousins was one of the most prominent leaders of the Irish Women's Franchise League, the most militant of the various Irish suffragist groups. A Theosophist, Cousins left Ireland in 1913 for Theosophical headquarters in Madras, spurred by her commitment to “the cause of womanhood the world over”. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s Cousins played a central role in certain forms of Indian feminist and cultural nationalist movements. This article attempts to sketch some of the ways in which Cousins's class and imperial situation provoked and limited her feminist ideology.

Herder and ethnography.

The source and nature of the ethnography of the important eighteenth century thinker Johann Gottfried Herder can in large part be understood through his relationship to his own society and especially through his part in the German cultural nationalist movement of the day. Herder's long involvement with the literature of travel led him to an understanding of many ideas now associated with cultural anthropology; he often recounts ethnographic information in a plain and impartial way. He also gives frequent moral judgements of native cultures. These judgements, often favorable and occasionally negative, may be traced to his announced political sympathies.