Discourses Of National Identity Research Articles

Nation Branding in Romania After 1989: A Cultural Semiotic Perspective

This paper discusses four nation branding post-communist campaigns initiated by the Romanian Government, from a cultural semiotic perspective, as developed by the Tartu-Moscow-Semiotic School. In so doing, it focuses on analyzing advertising and national identity discourses inside the semiospheres. Moreover, the paper investigates how elements of neoliberal ideology are addressed in the governmental campaigns, considering the “marketization of public discourse” (Fairclough, 1993). Nation branding in post-communist Romania is a distinctive phenomena, compared to other countries, especially from Western Europe. In transition countries, nation branding is often mentioned because of the constant need to reconfigure national identity by dissociating from the communist past (Kaneva, 2012). In Romania, nation branding is also a public issue discussed in the media, connected to the ways in which the international press portrays the country or to the migrants’ actions. In this context, Romania’s nation brand represents a cultural space and the campaigns mobilize cultural symbols as systems of signs necessary for the existence and functioning of advertising discourses.
 Using a semiotic analysis linked to the field of cultural semiotics (Lotman, 2005/1984), this article analyzes four nation branding campaigns initiated by the Romanian Government (Romania Simply Surprising – 2004, Romania Land of Choice – 2009, Explore the Carpathian Garden – 2010, and Discover the Place Where You Feel Reborn – 2014), considering elements such as semiotic borders, dual coding and symbols. The results show that the campaigns are part of four different semiospheres, integrating discursive practices both from advertising and public diplomacy when communicating the national image to the internal (citizens) or external (international) audiences.

The Relation between National Identity and Globalism in Korean Social Studies, 2009-2014

근대국민국가의 주체 형성에 기여 해온 사회과는 소위 글로벌 시대를 맞이하여 외부세계와의 상호작용 속 인간형성의 논리를 고민해야 할 처지이다. 이에 본 연구는 초등학교 사회과교육과정에 나타난 국민정체성과 글로벌리즘 사이 관계 양상을 분석하여, 그시사점을 도출하였다. 분석결과, 우선 사회과 교과 목표상의 의도는 한국인으로서의 정체성 형성과 세계시민으로서의 소양을 병행하여 기를 수 있도록 의도하고 있었다. 즉 국민정체성 및 글로벌리즘의 텍스트성이 모두 나타남을 확인하였다. 국민정체성과글로벌리즘 사이 관계성을 분석한 결과, 배타적 영역화와 개방적 영역화의 추세가 나타났다. 전자의 사례는 국민정체성과 글로벌리즘이 충돌하는 상황인데, 단일민족신화와 다문화사회론의 대립, 배타적 민족감정과 글로벌시민론의 대립이 그 사례이다. 후자의경우 양자 사이 긍정적인 관계설정이 가능한 경우인데, 지속가능론의 측면에서 행해진 국토지리인식, 비교문화학습을 통한 주체성의 횡단, 교류와 전파의 역사지리에 기초한트랜스내셔널 주체의 형성이 바로 그것이다. 글로벌 시대 한국 사회과는 국민정체성과 글로벌리즘의 긍정적 관계 설정을 강화하는 방향으로 좌표 설정을 도모해야 할 것이다.This study analyzed the relation between national identity and globalism in the curriculum of social studies and examined the current status of globalism in social studies curriculum. As a result, the goal of the social studies literally shows that social studies was to build up the identity as a Korean and also as a Global citizen. That is, national identity and Globalism are both appear in the context of national curriculum. Second, in the history section, a typical discourse of national identity that emphasize a homogeneous and a single-race nation was captured. Third, the global awareness education could be found in the world geography unit and generate globalism somewhat. Finally, closed territorialization could causes tensions between national identity and globalism, and constant effort should be made to extend open territorialization examples, alternatively. Social studies should play a important role to establish a positive relation between national identity and globalism. To this end, it is necessary to pursue open territorialization and develop the contents, methods and cases of various citizenship education that extend to the world starting from East Asia.

Belgian Constitutional Court Adopts National Identity Discourse

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Review of Uta G. Poiger. 2000. Jazz, Rock, and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture in a Divided Germany . Berkeley: University of California Press

Over the last several years, cultural historians have looked to jazz music as a way of talking about national identity. For historians of the United States, the logic is easy to understand. Jazz is, unquestionably, an integral part of the American story. But more importantly, as historians continue to rework the narrative of U.S. history to incorporate the issue of race more completely, jazz must be discussed as a crucial point of connection between whites and blacks in this country. To exclude jazz-not just as a musical form, but as a cultural phenomenon-would be historically inaccurate, and it would give a skewed view of how American national identity has evolved in the twentieth century. Understanding how jazz fits into definitions of European national identity, however, is a bit trickier. In the U.S., the early popularity of jazz challenged views of America as a country with distinctly “white” and “black” or “high” and “low” cultures that rarely ever met, and the music quickly came to be seen as an essential part of American life (Leonard 1962; Levine 1993). In Europe, however, the consequences of jazz’s popularity were more complicated for critics and cultural commentators-for Europeans, jazz was a “foreign” music. Therefore, it not only evoked conflicts about race and the boundaries between “high” and “low” culture (which were already subject to debate by the 1920s), it also raised questions about “Americanization” and the invasion of foreigners at a time when discussions of national identity had been energized by war and propaganda that saw “others” as enemies. Jazz quickly became a part of the “culture wars” of many countries in the 1920s and 1930s as they tried to renegotiate their sense of nationhood. At that moment, war, Depression, changes in international diplomacy, immigration, and the expansion of a global economy where goods and ideas easily crossed borders, all called older definitions of the nation into question. Jazz did not help to make things clearer. As in the U.S., the early debates about jazz in Europe were rarely only about the music itself. Rather, they doubled as complex attempts to reimagine national identity.

Editor's Introduction

Editor's Introduction Hazel Sheeky Bird (bio) It is, perhaps, a given that the Lion and the Unicorn (L&U) would mark the centenary of the First World War with a special edition because it has been in the consciousness of many children's literature scholars for a number of years, including co-editor Jacquilyn Weeks and myself. Indeed, Stacy Gillis and Esther MacCallum-Stewart opened their introduction to the 2007 L&U special edition on Children's Culture and the First World War by noting the centenary's approach. Likewise, major international projects such as the Leverhulme International Research Network, which hosted conferences in the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia between 2011and 2013, drew together a significant body of work, demonstrating the variety and complexity of current scholarship on children's literature and culture of the First World War.1 Writing about Britain in the 1920s and 1930s, Dan Todman observes that the First World War was "a cornerstone of British culture" (17). The articles in this special edition remind us that it was, and perhaps continues to be, a cornerstone of not just British culture, but also the cultures of many nations, and for many different reasons. This is often because writing for children about the First World War was, and frequently still is, embedded in discourses of national identity, either alone or in contradistinction to that of other nations and, as Peter Hunt observes of Western children's literature about the war, "local historical differences make generalizations difficult to sustain" (319). Consequently, it behooves us to try, as far as our linguistic skills will allow, to situate our knowledge of any particular nation's writing on and of the First World War within and against that of other nations. Many of the essays in this special edition are concerned with the ways in which national politics and culture directly shaped the way that the war was presented to young readers. Taking a comparative approach, Laura Leden's contribution examines issues of politics and gender in Nordic translations of L. M. Montgomery's Rilla of Ingleside (1921). Whereas Montgomery's original novel presents women as heroic figures on the home front, and [End Page v] depicts the First World War patriotically, Leden sets out the changes that are evident in Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Danish, and German translations of the source text. By examining censorship and purifaction in the texts, Leden highlights how discourses pertaining to nationality, pacifism, female heroism, and cultural didactic norms resulted in very different adaptions of the novel, differences that reveal each country's experience of the war, as either an ally, an occupier, or an occupied nation. In her piece, Lindsay Myers points to the relationship between Italian national identity myths and the presentation of the war in Lia Levi's historical novel, Cecelia va alla guerra, first published in 2000 and yet to be translated into English. Pointing to the reawakening of a national rhetoric in the late 1990s, Myers argues that Levi's book refigures the conflict as a war between the Austrians and the Italians, with the end of the war being parochially marked by Italian Unification rather than a European armistice. What Myers' contribution reminds us of, then, is that the act of commemoration is far from universal. Moreover, while we might expect young readers today to be presented with novels that encourage them to question the "truths" of the First World War, and to recognize and interrogate its continued cultural legacies, this, unfortunately, is not always the case. Rather than highlighting a unified national voice, Anthony Pavlik's contribution points to a multiplicity of voices in American boys' series fiction of the war. Looking closely at two series in the years leading up to America's entry into the war in 1917, Pavlik argues that some American children's literature spoke back to British propaganda that aimed to draw America into the war and resisted crude depictions of German combatants. In doing so, the books reveal the conflicting and shifting ideologies that characterized diverse American attitudes in the years leading up to 1917. While Pavlik notes the presence of resistance to British propaganda in American series fiction for boys...

Concepts Distorted by Ideologies. A View on Medieval “Romanian” Art (1945-1989)

The role of medieval art in national-identity discourse has received too little attention in the historiography of Romania’s totalitarian regime of 1945 to 1989. Analyzing the concept of “Romanian ...

Remixing Reggaetón: The Cultural Politics of Race in Puerto Rico by Petra R. Rivera-Rideau

Reviewed by: Remixing Reggaetón: The Cultural Politics of Race in Puerto Rico by Petra R. Rivera-Rideau Francisco D. Lara Remixing Reggaetón: The Cultural Politics of Race in Puerto Rico. By Petra R. Rivera-Rideau. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. [xii, 224 p. ISBN 9780822359456 (hardcover), $84.95; ISBN 9780822359647 (paperback), $23.95; ISBN 9780822375258 (e-book), varies] Notes, bibliography, index. Petra R. Rivera-Rideau's Remixing Reggaetón presents an insightful reading of reggaetón as a discursive cultural practice inextricably linked to the experience of blackness in the African diaspora. In her analysis of reggaetón artists, song lyrics, music videos, and media coverage, she describes how the genre's origins and development, representation, and perception at the same time illuminate, challenge, reify, and transform conceptions of blackness and national identity in Puerto Rico. Well written and organized, and convincingly argued, her timely study resonates with and contributes significantly to current aca demic understandings of music, race, gender, sexuality, and nation, and their intersections within the context of the African diaspora. Reggaetón presents a rich and unique lens through which to explore these intersections. A discursive and multivalent genre with local roots and transnational linkages connecting Puerto Rico, New York, Jamaica, and Panama, reggaetón resists facile categorization, thanks to its multiple racial, ethnic, and national associations. At the same time, and as a result of its origins and popular association with blackness, the genre is discursively linked to hegemonic racial hierarchies reified in dominant discourses of race and national identity in Puerto Rico, the United States, and throughout much of the African diaspora. Thoughtful in its approach, Remixing Reggaetón consists of five chapters plus an introduction and a conclusion. While the introduction and conclusion serve to contextualize the study and outline the limitations of the analysis, the five remaining chapters each explore a different aspect of reggaetón's development, addressing its complex origins, reception, key figures, and diverse manifestations as they relate to the dynamics of race and racism that inform political, popular, and academic perceptions of the genre in Puerto Rico and the United States. In her introduction, Rivera-Rideau presents the major questions, issues, and theories that fed her research, as well as her primary arguments and a chapter outline. In the process, she problematizes the Puerto Rican myth of racial democracy and reggaetón's perceived association in the popular imagination with either blackness or Latinidad. She argues instead for an understanding of reggaetón as a "cultural practice of diaspora" (p. 11), or a multivalent form of expressive culture that allows its practitioners to challenge and reshape local notions of blackness in making meaningful connections with other marginalized communities in diaspora. As Rivera-Rideau argues, reggaetón "constitutes a space for Puerto Rican youth to engage in practices of self-fashioning that respond to local [End Page 81] racial politics and express an affinity with African diasporic populations" (p. 13). In subsequent chapters, Rivera-Rideau meticulously bears out this argument through her analysis while also noting the limitations of reggaetón's ability to upend racial stereotypes. Chapter 1, "Iron Fist against Rap," explores global diasporic connections and local dynamics of race and racism in the formation, representation, and reception of underground, a genre of Puerto Rican urban rap considered a precursor of reggaetón. Originating in the late 1980s and early 1990s, underground emerged from the Puerto Rican caseríos, the predominantly black urban public housing developments that became the focus of a governmental anti-violence campaign referred to as mano dura contra el crimen (iron fist against crime) during the 1990s. As Rivera-Rideau shows in the first third of the chapter, underground's characteristic musical elements, associated cultural practices, and aesthetics reveal the complex links between Puerto Rico, Jamaica, Panama, and New York City that resulted from migration and transnational circuits of cultural exchange. Establishing underground as an "exemplary circum-Carribbean music" (p. 33), Rivera-Rideau proceeds to show, through an analysis of newspaper articles and underground song lyrics and music videos, how underground artists made use of the resources of the diaspora in challenging perceptions of blackness and Puerto Ricanness. At the same...

Critical geopolitics on Russian foreign policy: Uncovering the imagery of Moscow’s international relations

The pragmatic and imperialist frames have dominated the analyses of Russian foreign policy. Despite the glaring similarities of Russia’s international conduct with expectations of pragmatism and expansionism, this study argues that Moscow’s foreign policy has been informed by more nuanced and dynamic conceptions of international relations. To uncover the imagery of global politics, as conceived by Russia’s top foreign policy makers, this study employs a critical geopolitics perspective. The latter views foreign policy as a social, cultural, discursive, and political practice of constructing, defending, and living the alternative claims about the ‘truths’ of international relations. The study illuminates Russia’s spatial conceptions of the world, its views of the international actors, and its national identity discourse. It shows how this imagery enters Russia’s geopolitical reasoning that provides the Russian government with ‘rationality’ for projecting soft and hard power in the neighborhood and beyond.

From Bern to Rio: Soccer and National Identity Discourses in Germany

This article interprets German national identity discourses through the lens of soccer. Germany’s four World Cup championships came in a roughly 20-year rhythm and happened at critical moments and turning points in its post-World War II history. Looking at the four World Cup wins in 1954, 1974, 1990, and 2014 allows one to trace changes in German national identity that were reflected in the winning teams themselves as well as in the relationship of the celebrating public to the team and the country. International soccer events offer an opportunity to discern continuities and discontinuities in German national identity discourses. This article contributes to the literature by providing a comparative interpretation across six decades of soccer/national identity discourses. In such a comparative perspective, it becomes easier to see the changes and continuities that have characterized these discourses.

British national identity and the Anglo-American special relationship

Why are successive UK governments so staunchly committed to the ‘special relationship’ with the US? One common answer – a part of an answer at least – evokes the role of identity and identification. The UK supports the US because the UK’s ruling elite believe that the Americans and the British are birds of a feather. This article examines this hypothesis from a ‘national identity as a variable’ framework developed in constructivist International Relations theory. The main argument presented is that UK support for the special relationship is rooted not simply in elite beliefs but rather in a wider societal acceptance of the global hegemony of ‘American’ democratic neoliberalism. Multiple national identity discourses exist, but none of them calls on Westminster and Whitehall to chart a path that would be at odds with a world centred on Washington, DC.

‘Crimea is ours’: A discursive history

Russia could have annexed Crimea anytime in the last 25 years. The fact that it did so only in March 2014 is a puzzle. I argue that the predominant discourse of Russian national identity by 2014 made the annexation of Crimea and military intervention in eastern Ukraine both thinkable and natural to Moscow. A history of the discursive terrain of Russia from 1992 to 2014 shows how Russia’s national identity has evolved over the years, both in response to Western inactions or actions and domestic developments. But Russian identity is not a sufficient explanation for Russian behavior in Ukraine. For that, we must pay attention to the event itself: Western support for the Maidan protestors, Western failure to adhere to the February 2014 agreements reached with Moscow on a transitional government in Ukraine with Yanukovych at its head and new elections in November, the presence of disgruntled Russians in Ukraine, and perhaps most important, over a decade of US unilateralism in foreign affairs.

Introduction: A Place for Networks in Asian Politics

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)This volume of essays explores the roles and significance of political in a variety of Asian-and particularly Southeast Asian-settings. The essays collectively have four modest aims. First, they set out to show that a networks approach can capture the dynamism and resilience of political interactions where actors are operating in different contexts. Second, the emphasis placed on of politics in this volume complements the wider attention that analysts based in anthropology, sociology, and economic development have paid to social within Asian studies. Third, the volume is intended to demonstrate that certain basic conditions of apply to different locales, times, and conditions. For example, communications and technologies, albeit very different in their development or sophistication over decades, remain crucial factors in networks. Finally, the essays collectively emphasize the roles of individuals and personalities in the formation of political networks. In quantitatively oriented network theory, the nodes and links of are taken to be interchangeable or display the same character. That does not hold in the realm of politics, where human agency may be uniquely important. Where he or she forms a node, each politician, activist, or comrade has a personal character, different from that of other nodes, such that their human interactions frequently shape the strength, influence, or effectiveness of the links among them. Thus, while two articles in this issue show some direct engagement with ideas developed by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi (2003), the investigation and analysis of actual political must go beyond abstract principles of network theories to a critical understanding of the personal peculiarities, ideological tendencies, and even career constraints of the actors involved.I Big Pictures and Large CategoriesIt is not difficult to see why other categories and units of analysis may have been preferred over as academic analyses of Asian politics engaged with the social, economic, and political fortunes and misfortunes of states in the region. Once past the 1970s, when struggles for independence, wars of national liberation, and Cold War conflicts had mostly entered the annals of history, studies of Asian politics were dominated by thematic issues linked to the occurrence of the Asian Miracle (World Bank 1993)1) in its different subregional and national variations. The foci of research appeared, accordingly, to be redirected toward the political economy of late (export-oriented) industrialization (Amsden 1989; Haggard 1990; Doner and Hawes 1995; Jomo et al. 1997), the growing integration of national economies with global markets, regional initiatives in economic cooperation and integration, and so on. With the 1997 financial crises, however, it was evident that even East Asian pathways of hopeful structural transformation could end in painful structural adjustments (Jomo 1998; Robison et al. 2000), with both being paved as much with latent contradictions and disruptive conflicts as with the technocratic implementation of rationally formulated policies and plans.In late twentieth century East Asia, moreover, no less than in other regions at other times, deep and extensive economic transformation produced winners and losers at the same time that it generated growth and development. Besides, winning and losing social classes and groups were liable between them to produce tumultuous surges of antiauthoritarian opposition (Boudreau 2002; Heryanto and Mandal 2004), organized pressures for democratization (Anek 1997; Uhlin 1997; Case 2002), mobilization around populist appeals (Mizuno and Pasuk 2009), and pushes toward many permutations of power realignment and redistribution. Occasionally launched to preempt those political trends but more often conducted in response to them were repressive strikes or military coups in Burma, China, the Philippines, South Korea, and Thailand; exercises in oligarchic reconstitution (Anderson 1998, Chapters 8 and 9; Pasuk and Baker 2004; Robison and Hadiz 2004); and the assertion of different statist or hegemonic discourses of national identity, ethnicity, and religion (Brown 1997; Callahan 2005; Khoo 2005). …

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.

The Macaquitos Affair

From 1919 to 1921 sportswriters in a popular Buenos Aires tabloid gleefully unleashed an anti-Brazil campaign rooted in racial invective. This campaign ultimately provoked an international incident involving political and sports authorities, at the highest levels, in both Argentina and Brazil. This article uses this macaquitos affair to explore a larger pattern in which the nascent Argentine popular press disseminated negative racial portrayals of Brazil as a means of affirming a Euro-descended Argentine racial heritage. While this article highlights the mutually constructed notions of racial difference taking place on a transnational scale, it also emphasizes the centrality of mass media and soccer in both countries' efforts to claim racial success. In addition, the macaquitos affair lays bare ongoing conflicts between new, popular mass media of the 1912–30 period and the Argentine state, which in the macaquitos affair moved quickly to suppress these transgressive discourses of national identity.

Designing for India: Government Animation Education and the Politics of Identity

This article examines animation education at the two Indian government design schools, the National Institute of Design (NID) and Industrial Design Centre (IDC), looking beyond the transfer of skills to the negotiation of social and professional identity. The accounts of faculty, students and graduates express symbolic values of local relevance and cultural continuity rooted in a tradition of ‘purposeful design’ as a tool for post-independence national development. Moreover such testimony not only reveals fraught discourses of national, regional, class, and gender identity, but also creative independence and entrepreneurship. By placing design instruction in a context of communities of practice, the author argues that this reflects an overt politicised effort on the part of educators and students to respond to the current industrial conditions of Indian animation, rejecting market-driven labour standardization in favour of ideologically-based professional networks of their own devising.

Huacayñán (1952–1953) and the biopolitics of in(ex)clusion

The foundation of the modern Ecuadorian State in the 1940s and early 1950s coincides with a series of attempts to synchronize and incorporate certain “problematic” sectors of the population that were supposedly resistant to progress and whose forms of life were incompatible with modernity, a capitalist economy, and a cohesive nation. This biopolitical project for the modernization and governance of the population also had repercussions on—and analogous manifestations within—the discourse of national identity, the design of cultural policies, and the production of State-sponsored national art. This article analyzes Huacayñán / El camino del llanto / The Way of Tears (1952–1953), a collection of FIGURE 3 aintings by Oswaldo Guayasamín that was commissioned by the government of Ecuador in 1951. Huacayñán was conceived within the ideology of mestizaje as an instrument of aesthetic cultural modernization and as a visual artistic showcase of the harmonious integration of ‘Ecuadorians.’ Despite, or even because of its governmental overdetermination, however, this article shows how Huacayñán instead materialized the exclusionary logic of the syncretic and biopolitical policies of the State, displaying dystopic visions of violence and exclusion, and of a fractured nation inhabited by monsters and resistant to mestizo-ization.

Common Narratives in Discourses on National Identity in Russia and Japan

ABSTRACTThis article discusses some common narratives found in discourses on national identity in Russia and Japan, and their temporal transformations reflecting the needs of a nation as it becomes a colonial empire. National identity discourse is examined from the viewpoint of national antagonism arising from an external threat. Russian and Japanese intellectuals, with their vastly different historical and cultural heritage, have dwelled upon similar issues pertaining to modernization of the state and adoption or rejection of foreign ideas and ways of life. There are several themes in Russian and Japanese discourses on national identity that share a significant overlap, particularly themes of national uniqueness and a ‘special path’, deterministic worldviews, imperial cosmopolitanism/messianism and criticism of ‘Western’ philosophical systems and concepts. This article elucidates the shared aspects of these narratives and philosophical inquiries in Russia and Japan and puts them into a historical context.

El tiempo entre costuras: Colonial Nostalgia in the European Cultural Economy

El tiempo entre costuras: Colonial Nostalgia in the European Cultural Economy Adolfo Campoy-Cubillo The success of María Dueñas’s El tiempo entre costuras (2009) is the culmination of a gradual reconciliation of the Spanish national imaginary with the requirements of the postnational European cultural market. In this article, I explore the different ways in which Dueñas’s novel normalizes historical memory of the Spanish colonization of Morocco in order to discard notions of Spanish exceptionalism and emphasize Spain’s cultural proximity to Europe. I also argue that Dueñas’s ambivalent narrative combines the postnational drive towards a normalized Spanish identity and a nostalgic evocation of Francoist imperialism. This dual drive (postnational and imperialistic) allows Dueñas to offer Spaniards a novel that manages to satisfy the desire for Spain to be fully integrated in the European Union while appeasing the anxieties that such an integration entails for Southern European countries like Spain. María Dueñas’s novel El tiempo entre costuras, the story of a poor seamstress that moves to the Spanish Protectorate of Morocco following her lover and manages to build a successful business serving the European colonial elites while working as a spy for the British, has enjoyed outstanding commercial success selling over a million copies shortly after being published in 2009 (Doria). Dueñas’s novel was successfully adapted to television by Boomerang TV and Antena 3 Television in 2013 obtaining record viewership ratings at several points throughout its broadcast. Its final episode had a viewership of over five million spectators (27.8% market share) (“Datos de audiencia”). The commercial success of the novel and of its television adaptation can be attributed to a complex set of factors, in this article, I consider the success of El tiempo entre costuras as an example of the ongoing efforts to normalize discourses of Spanish national identity to make them pliable to the requirements of its integration in the European Union. I contend that it is not a coincidence [End Page 257] that after decades of historical amnesia, the Spanish Protectorate of Morocco would become one of the focuses of attention of the Spanish cultural field precisely at the time when efforts to consolidate the European Union have intensified. Unlike the colonization of Latin America, which brings to mind the Black Legend of Spanish exceptionalism, the colonization of North Africa can be presented as a historical event that is shared by Spaniards with other fellow Europeans. In this sense, the surge of interest in the Spanish Protectorate of Morocco that began with Ignacio Martínez de Pisón’s Una guerra africana (2000), Lorenzo Silva’s El nombre de los nuestros (2001) and Carta Blanca (2004), Marian Izaguirre’s El león dormido (2005), seems to have reached a climatic point with the publication El tiempo entre costuras. The adoption of the euro as the European single currency in 2002, and the contested attempt to approve a European constitution in 2004, among other events, made the supranational project that the European Union represents a tangible reality for millions of Spaniards and has triggered attempts to rearticulate Spanish national identity in an effort to comply with or resist the demands of an evolving European identity. To the extent that the consolidation of the European Union promotes downplaying national idiosyncrasies and favors the adoption of a common European identitarian discourse, we can argue that we are witnessing a postnational turn. I do not understand this postnational turn, however, as a radical abandonment of national categories. My reading of this process is deeply informed by Yasemin Soysal’s argument that what defines postnationalism is precisely the different levels of membership in and allegiance to existing national identities. “These postnational forms,” Soysal argues, “can be explicated . . . in European Union citizenship, which represents a multitiered form of membership; and in subnational citizenships in culturally or administratively autonomous regions of Europe (e.g. Basque country, Catalonia, and Scotland)” (334). Postnationalism, accordingly, is characterized by the fact that individuals develop simultaneous attachments to different supranational, national, and subnational identities. In this sense, the rearticulation of Spanish national identity of which Dueñas’ novel is a prime example is, as I...

Women and Democracy in Cold War Japan by Jan Bardsley

Reviewed by: Women and Democracy in Cold War Japan by Jan Bardsley Ulrike Wöhr Women and Democracy in Cold War Japan. By Jan Bardsley. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2014. 224 pages. Hardcover £58.50/$112.00; softcover £24.99/$39.95. This well-written and timely book comes at a moment in history when U.S.-Japan relations, Japan’s postwar democracy, and Japan’s role in the world are at a new stage of social and political contestation, within and beyond Japan. Jan Bardsley provides a fascinating view of cultural politics of the 1950s that shaped the value system and the social order of postwar Japan as well as powerful discourses of national identity. Her analyses of representations of women and, in particular, the postwar ideal of the Japanese housewife, highlight the centrality of gender in these discursive processes. Bardsley focuses on the 1950s as a juncture “when [gender roles] could take several paths, but became naturalized in the housewife-salaryman model” (p. 5). She approaches the housewife (shufu) as a postwar icon of Japanese modernity connoting democratic progress and economic recovery, on the one hand, and modern domesticity, on the other. The housewife is, thus, comparable to earlier and similarly controversial constructs of femininity, such as the girl student (jogakusei), the new woman (atarashii onna), and the modern girl (modan gāru, or moga). In other words, the postwar housewife was, in her time, the latest in a series of female icons at the center of twentieth-century discourses of Japaneseness. The book, as its title suggests, understands 1950s representations of the housewife to be inseparably intertwined with discourses and power structures pertaining to the Cold War. Indeed, Cold War economic and cultural politics continued to hold up the ideal of the modern, emancipated, and sexually attractive American housewife even after the end of Japan’s Allied Occupation (1952), and while Japanese women were exhorted to emulate this model, Japanese men were denounced as a hindrance to women’s emancipation. The author traces the processes and products of such transnational gender politics in a range of sources—texts of various genres from women’s magazines, newspaper reportage, and visual images including photographs and cartoons. Her textual analysis “recreat[es] the theater” of five major disputes, or issues, she singles out from these sources and reconstructs the images and meanings that were attached to the housewife in these [End Page 247] controversies (p. 5). While Bardsley thus treats the housewife in the abstract, as a discursive phenomenon, her narrative also features flesh-and-blood housewives—most of whom identify themselves as such. These women inhabit the “contact zone” (discussed below) of 1950s Japan and participate in negotiations of “competing domesticities” (p. 2) as actors and/or objects in the debate. The introduction (chapter 1) begins with a short look at a 1959 Time magazine feature article on the emancipation of Japanese women, thus highlighting the transnational character of the book’s research subject and approach. As told in the magazine, this process of emancipation—which culminated in the wedding of Crown Princess (and now Empress) Michiko, the first commoner to marry into the royal family—owed its success to the American-led Occupation of Japan. Bardsley then takes up the social and political reality of housewives both in Japan and the United States and introduces the reader to the Cold War rhetoric of American domesticity as well as to a view of early postwar Japan through the lens of Marie Louise Pratt’s concept of the “contact zone” (p. 11). The final part of the introduction argues for the current relevance of Bardsley’s research by pointing out the persistence of competing narratives that evolved or gained prominence in the late 1950s. Among these are the notion of Japanese women being in need of foreign rescue from oppressive Japanese men; the idea of the Japanese housewife as a symbol and guarantor of public order and national identity by virtue of her very domesticity; and, not least, images of royal women and beauty queens as personifications of these contradictory concepts of femininity. Following the introduction, chapters 2 through 6 provide in-depth analyses of single issues that each...

If Anyone Hears This: Confronting Discourses of Immigration in South Mississippi

AbstractLatino immigrants are subject to circulating discourses that produce processes of inclusion and exclusion, and inform expectations of future encounters with local native populations. However, they rarely have an opportunity to answer back. This paper draws on two projects in which immigrants were invited to use photography and writing to document the messages they would like to send to native‐born Mississippians to examine how they mobilize discourses of inclusion and exclusion as they deal with “stranger fetishism” (Ahmed 2000), the notion that immigrants are recognized, but are cast as individuals who do not belong. Immigrant messages show that they at once contest and draw on hegemonic discourses of race and US national identity in their efforts to lay claim to legitimate spaces of belonging. [immigration, discourse, stranger fetishism, representation, Mississippi]