Ethno-nationalist Discourse Research Articles

Humanising History through Graphic Narratives: Exploring Stories of Home and Displacement from the North-East of India

Literature from the North-East has responded to national, global and local issues, including questions on immigration and ethnic violence. They have resisted the colonial framework of representation and have invoked a sense of “cultural and ethnic particularity” (Sarma, 2013). This literature has adopted a multilingual register to respond to 1) patriarchal and 2) ethnonationalist discourses that have a forced and overbearing presence in the everyday lives of people and their stories. These writings evoke an ethno-critical approach that “engages otherness and difference in such a way as to provoke an interrogation of and a challenge” to our familiar realms of experience and is “consistent with a recognition and legitimation of heterogeneity” (Sarma, 2013). Select stories from First Hand (Volume II, 2018) – The Lonely Courtyard (2018), My Name is Jahanara (2018), and A Market Story (2019) by Kumdo Yumnam provide the heterogeneity that is characteristic of the works of literature emerging from the North-East, thereby resisting the homogeneity often indicative of the term ‘North-East’. The analysis will explore how the selected texts negotiate textuality and visuality in a specific manner to present an archive of everyday life that humanises history.

Decolonizing Dance Movement Therapy: A Healing Practice Stuck between Coloniality and Nationalism in Sri Lanka

Creative Arts Educ Ther (2021) 7(2):149–157 DOI: 10.15212/CAET/2021/7/20 Decolonizing Dance Movement Therapy: A Healing Practice Stuck between Coloniality and Nationalism in Sri Lanka Abstract Dance therapy or dance/movement therapy (DMT) in the modern sense is relatively new to Sri Lanka. Recently, there has been an interest in establishing it as a profession on the island. As DMT is in the very early stages in the country, I see the different directions that it can take. As a dancer, dance educator, and researcher, I see the importance and the potential of healing aspects of dance and movements. However, as an emerging discipline, I demonstrate that at least three directions that DMT in Sri Lanka could take—colonial, nationalized, and decolonial. My premise is that DMT becomes colonial, given its history and orientation, when it is introduced to a postcolonial site. As I argue, DMT imposes a particular colonial framework when introduced to a postcolonial site like Sri Lanka. At the same time, some try to frame DMT in an ethno-nationalist discourse by attempting to prove that dance therapy has already existed in Sinhala traditional ritual practices. Focusing on Sri Lanka, this article questions these colonial and nationalized approaches in DMT and suggests that a decolonial approach is possible. Keywords: decolonial, dance movement therapy, Sri Lanka, coloniality, nationalism 摘要 现代意义上的舞蹈治疗或舞蹈/动作治疗 (DMT) 在斯里兰卡是较新的领域。近来, 人们已经有兴趣在这座岛国将其设立为一个专业。由于舞蹈治疗 (DMT) 在该国正处 于早期阶段, 我看到它可以发展的不同方向。作为一个舞蹈家、舞蹈教育家和研究者, 我看到了舞蹈和动作的重要性以及在疗愈方面的潜力。然而, 作为一门新兴学科, 我阐 明了舞蹈治疗 (DMT) 在斯里兰卡至少有三个方向可以发展——殖民化、民族化和去 殖民化。我的前提是, 鉴于舞蹈治疗 (DMT) 的历史和定位, 当它被引入到一个后 殖民地区时, 它就变成了殖民主义。正如我所论证的, 当舞蹈治疗 (DMT) 被引入到 像斯里兰卡这样的后殖民地区时, 它就强加了一个特殊的殖民框架。同时, 有些人试图 通过证明舞蹈治疗 (DMT) 早已存在于僧伽罗的传统仪式实践中, 在民族国家主义话 语中对舞蹈治疗 (DMT) 进行框定。本文聚焦斯里兰卡, 质疑了舞蹈治疗 (DMT) 中 殖民化和民族化的方法, 并提出发展一种去殖民化方法的可能性。 关键词： 去殖民主义, 舞蹈/动作治疗, 斯里兰卡, 殖民主义, 民族主义

Разделение власти и формирование национального сообщества: Осмысление боснийского опыта

The article explores the experience of power-sharing, i.e. consociational democracy, established in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) after the end of the ethnic war a quarter century ago. The authors’ attention is aimed at identifying a balance between the broad autonomy of the three major ethnocultural groups (segments) and the formation of a national community and common civic identity. Knowing this balance makes it possible to determine the prospects for political stability and development. For this purpose, the system of political institutions in BiH is considered, and its specificity is highlighted. Data-based analysis allows to define a number of negative trends in the Bosnian political process, in particular, the weakening of the democratic potential of the political regime, as well as the deterioration of the quality of governance and civil society’s activities. The observed rise in political participation is assessed as ineffective, since it hasn’t been accompanied by an increase in authorities’ responsibility and ability to solve acute political and socioeconomic problems. In particular, despite widespread support for the European perspective, party leaders haven’t been able to agree on the constitutional reform that is required to obtain official EU candidate status. The BiH parties’ analysis reveals their interest in promoting the ethno-nationalist discourse for keeping control over the economic and political resources of their communities. It is also noted that the role of international actors in BiH is of a dual nature: they maintain the required level of stability, but some of their decisions provoke strengthening of the nationalist forces. In the framework of the Bosnian case, the importance of the elites’ consent to joint participation in power and cooperation can be viewed as the most important condition for the successful implementation of power-sharing institutions and practices in post-conflict societies.

Eurasianism and Post-Soviet Political Geography

Books review: Bassin M. The Gumilev Mystique: Biopolitics, Eurasianism, and the Construction of Community in Modern Russia. Cornell University Press, 2016. 400 p.; Bassin M., Pozo G. (eds). The Politics of Eurasianism: Identity, Popular Culture and Russia's Foreign Policy. Rowman & Littlefield, 2017. 384 p.; Clover Ch. Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia's New Nationalism.Yale University Press, 2017. 360 p. The review considers three works on Eurasianism, the theoretical geography of Lev Gumilev and contemporary Russian ethnonationalism. It places the reviewed works in the context of the historical ideological evolution of Eurasianism. The principal argument in all three reviewed texts is that there are three forms of Eurasian ideology: classical Eurasianism, Gumilevian Eurasianism and neo-Eurasianism. This essay argues that instead of a rank appropriation of Eurasian ideology into contemporary Russian ethnonationalist discourses, there remains a great intellectual and theoretical power in Gumilevian Eurasianism that could yet be applied to contemporary Eurasian and Russophere geographies in a more positive and empowering manner than the current misappropriated form of Russian ethnonationalist Eurasianism. While neo-Eurasianism is a misappropriation of Gumilevian Eurasianism, a revival of a new fork of neo-Gumilevian Eurasianism could diffuse the contemporary Russian misappropriation and return to a more objective and inclusive Eurasian ideology.

Are education and nationalism a happy marriage? Ethno-nationalist disruptions of education in Dutch classrooms

Following Gellner, citizenship education has often been framed in terms of nationalism. This framing is supported by methodological nationalism that legitimizes nationalism as either functional (civic nationalism) or natural (ethnic nationalism). Based on a triangulation of qualitative and quantitative data, this study of the dynamics in the classes of a Dutch faculty of social professions highlights the disruptive impact of nationalism on citizenship education, spilling over to other courses as well. Ethno-nationalist discourses in Dutch media and politics as well as in multiculturalism approaches used in citizenship education fuel conflicts between non-migrant students and students with a migration background that disrupt education. It is argued that in globalized settings like these classes, a more viable approach to citizenship education would take an institutional instead of communitarian perspective.

Mise en perspective chiasmique des histoires de l’art global au Canada

This article offers a critical perspective on the pedagogical direction of what I call “global art histories” in Canada by addressing the apparent impasse posed by the notion of what is euphemistically called “ethnocultural art” in this country. It examines different interpretations of the latter chiefly through a survey of course titles from art history programs in Canada and a course on the subject that I teach at Concordia University in Montreal. Generally speaking, the term “ethnocultural art” refers to what is more commonly understood as “ethnic minority arts” in the ostensibly more derisive discourses on Canadian multiculturalism and cultural diversity. The addition of the term “culture” emphasizes the voluntary self-definition involved in ethnic identification and makes the distinction with “racial minorities.” “Ethnocultural communities,” along with the moniker “cultural communities” (or “culturally diverse” communities), however, is still often understood to refer to immigrants (whether recent or long-standing), members of racialized minorities, and even First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples. Not surprisingly, courses on ethnocultural art histories tend to concentrate on the cultural production of visible minorities or ethnocultural groups. However, I also see teaching the subject as an opportunity to shift the classification of art according to particular geographic areas to consider a myriad of issues in myriad of issues in the visual field predicated on local senses of belonging shaped by migration histories and “first” contacts. As such, ethnocultural art histories call attention to, but not exclusively, the art of various diasporic becomings inexorably bound to histories of settler colonialism and Indigenous sovereignty. This leads me to reflect on some aspects of Quebec’s internal dynamics concerning nationalism and ethnocultural diversity that have affected the course of ethnocultural art histories in the province. I argue that the Eurocentric hegemonic hold of ethno-nationalist discourses on art and art history can be seen with particular clarity in this context. Moreover, I suggest that these discourses have hindered not only the awareness and study of art by so-called culturally diverse communities but also efforts to offer a more global, transnational, and heterogeneous (or chiastic) sense of the histories from which this art emerges. In today’s political climate, the project that is art history, now more than ever, needs to address and engage with the reverse parallelism that chiastic perspectives on the historiography of contemporary art entail. My critique is forcefully speculative and meant to bring together different critical vocabularies in the consideration of implications of the global and ethnic turns in art and art history for the understanding of the other. I engage in an aspect less covered in the literature on the global turn in contemporary art, namely the ways in which the mutual and dialectical relation between “cultural identity,” better described as a “localized sense of belonging” (Appadurai) and the contingency of place may shape, resist, or undermine the introduction of world or global art historical approaches in specific national institutional sites. I argue a more attentive politics of engagement is required within this pedagogical rapprochement to address how histories not only of so-called non-Western art but also diasporic and Indigenous art are transferred holistically as knowledge, if the objective is to shift understandings of the other by emphasizing points of practice in art history as a field, rather than simply the cultural productions themselves. I propose the term “global art histories” as a provisional rubric that slants the study of globalism in art history to more explicitly include these kinds of located intercultural negotiations.

Forging and negating diasporic linguistic citizenship in ethnocratic Malaysia

This paper analyzes contradictory tensions in the linguistic citizenship of Chinese- and Indian-Malaysian youths. Malay ethnonationalism describes the languages of the local Chinese and Indian minorities as immigrant. A sociological perspective, however, tells us it is difficult to see these communities as diasporic. They hold Malaysian state citizenship, they may have no contact with China and India, and in some cases their ancestors settled in Malaysia centuries ago. This paper analyzes how, in that sociopolitical context, a cohort of Chinese- and Indian-Malaysian youths constructed their linguistic citizenship within a series of 16 semi-structured folk linguistic group discussions about multilingualism in contemporary Malaysia. The paper reveals two parallel discourses. Malay ethnonationalism has prompted discourses of linguistic allegiance to China and India as prescribed, if not impractical, homelands. However, the youths also divorced their languages and communities from India and China to instead forge a non-diasporic linguistic citizenship. In doing so, they negated Malaysia's linguistic hierarchy, despite Malay ethnonationalist discourses, by describing their unique interethnic language practices as quintessentially Malaysian and as an interethnic leveller. Malaysia showcases how linguistic citizenship in the diaspora can be both vexed by historical sociopolitical processes as well as empowered by sociopolitical resistance, resulting in contradictory discourses.

Stavropol as “Russia’s Kosovo”? Nationalist mobilization and public response in a Russian region

Russian nationalism after Crimea is commonly depicted as aggressive and expansionist – but few Russian ethno-nationalists would accept this description. Quite the contrary: they would argue that ethnic Russians as the majority population find themselves under “under siege” from ethnic minorities. A case in point, they hold, is Stavropol Krai in the North Caucasus. In local ethno-nationalist circles this region is depicted as “Russia’s Kosovo,” a glaring example of the Kremlin’s betrayal of ethnic Russian interests. This article presents a case study of the under-researched regional dimension of Russian nationalism. The purpose is twofold: to map regional ethno-nationalist discourse and, drawing on survey data, to explore to what extent this discourse is reflected in general attitudes toward the influx of migrants and plans for own migration. We find that local ethno-nationalists have succeeded in mobilizing support at the national level, but that, despite increased ethnic tensions in Stavropol Krai, few Russians contemplate leaving.

Human rights and the ethno—nationalist problematic through the eyes of Greek-Cypriot teachers

The present article aims to examine the interplay between the transnational discourses of human rights and the particularities of local constructions and conceptualisations of human rights within the context of an ethnically divided society, Cyprus. Specifically, this interplay is examined through a qualitative study of Greek-Cypriot primary school teachers’ understandings of human rights and human rights teaching in Greek-Cypriot schools, focusing on the tensions that seem to arise between transnational and ethno-nationalist discourses of human rights. The findings show that Greek-Cypriot teachers seem to ‘reframe’ universalist perspectives of human rights in response to local demands that foreground conflict-related violations suffered by the Greek-Cypriot community, while backgrounding human rights violations experienced by ‘others’. A few teachers, though, realize how conflict may limit understandings of human rights and project a different interpretation that acknowledges the suffering of the ‘Other’. The implications for human rights teaching are discussed, especially in the context of conflict-affected societies.

To be Karen in the Thai–Burma borderlands: identity formation through the prism of a human rights discourse

Current debates on Karen identity have tended to focus on the development of a nationalist construct of a pan-Karen community. This article moves beyond this notion to explore a Karen identity that is being recast in the form of a human rights discourse where the Karen construct, adapt, and reify the social aspects of their political identity in order to establish a claim to a political self, where they protest the persecution and discrimination waged against them as well as larger claims around governance and political representation. This human rights discourse is framed by increased emphasis in the Thai–Burma borderlands on a human rights framework to address Burma’s ongoing conflict. Such an argument has the potential to move current debates beyond the more militant ethno-nationalist discourses of the Karen identity and develop an adequate framework for the practices of identity, which occur among displaced Karen in the Thai–Burma borderlands.

Linguistic mudes: how to become a new speaker in Catalonia

Abstract New speakers of Catalan have come to represent, from a demolinguistic perspective, a substantial part of the community of speakers. Of those who presently speak Catalan as an “habitual language”, 41.6 percent are native speakers of Spanish. In this article, we shall follow up the various ways in which native Castilian speakers incorporate Catalan into their lives. This happens, as we will show, in specific biographical junctures that we call mudes, a Catalan term referring to (often reversible) variations in social performance. Our analysis is based on a qualitative study that included 24 interviews and 15 focus groups covering a total of 105 people of different sexes and linguistic, educational, social and residential backgrounds. We shall give a general overview of these mudes as we typified them: when subjects entered primary school, secondary school, the university, the job market, when creating a new family and when they had children (if they did). The study of linguistic mudes provides, in our view, a new and productive perspective on how people develop their linguistic repertoire, their attachment to specific languages and the significance of these aspects for social identity. It facilitates a processual, time-sensitive analysis that allows to contextualise and critique ethnonationalist discourses that have often saturated our understanding of language use.

Productive Aliens: Economic Planning and the Lebanese in Ghana, c. 1930-1972

Drawing upon the Ghanaian experience, this article argues that alien immigrant populations in some African countries were channeled toward socio-economic niches by executive decree and legislative mandate dating to the late colonial period. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, British immigration restrictions and trade laws designated the Lebanese as economic agents charged with promoting commerce, while encumbering their political acceptance by restricting residency and naturalization. After independence, economic populism, competing Africanist ideologies, and claims to indigeneity all shaped the passage of laws and legislation that defined and restricted the position of middlemen. Ultimately, the failure of Lebanese political integration in Anglophone West Africa stemmed from the states’ economically-functionalist approach towards immigrants and the ethno-nationalist discourse on autochthony that isolated them. This enduring institutional and statutory legacy explains why the political incorporation of many immigrant groups in Africa remains incomplete.

Flags and traitors: The advance of ethno-nationalism in the Turkish self-image

This paper examines a peculiar change in the Turkish self-image towards an ethno-nationalist discourse in the 2000s. In Turkish public life one may find various manifestations of a self-promoting ethnocentric world view alongside expressions of xenophobic feelings against the so-called enemies within and without. This study explores a certain transition from a modernist and secular self-image to an ethnocentric self-regard with reference to nationalist best sellers, TV series, public displays of slogans, and flagging incidents in the 2000s.

The evolution of Israeli citizenship: an overview

Israel's citizenship discourse has consisted of three different layers, superimposed on one another: An ethno-nationalist discourse of inclusion and exclusion, a republican discourse of community goals and civic virtue, and a liberal discourse of civil, political, and social rights. The liberal discourse has served as the public face of Israeli citizenship and functioned to separate Israel's Jewish and Palestinians citizens from the non-citizen Palestinians in the occupied territories. The ethno-nationalist discourse has been invoked to discriminate between Jewish and Palestinian citizens within the sovereign State of Israel. Last, the republican discourse has been used to legitimate the different positions occupied by the major Jewish social groups: ashkenazim vs. mizrachim, males vs. females, secular vs. religiously orthodox. Until the mid-1980s the republican discourse, based on a corporatist economy centered on the umbrella labor organization – the Histadrut – mediated between the contradictory dictates of the liberal and the ethno-nationalist discourses. Since then, the liberalization of the Israeli economy has weakened the republican discourse, causing the liberal and ethno-nationalist ones to confront each other directly. Since the failure of the Oslo peace process in 2000, these two discourses have each gained the upper hand in one policy area – the liberal one in economic policy and the ethno-national one in policy towards the Palestinians and the Arabs in general. This division of labor is the reason why on the eve of its 60th anniversary as a state Israel is experiencing its worst crisis of governability ever. While Israel's economy is booming and the country's international standing remains high, due to the global ‘war on terror,’ public trust in state institutions and leaders is at an all-time low, so that the government cannot tend to the country's pressing business.

Citizenship and stratification in an ethnic democracy

A theoretical framework of multiple citizenship discourses is proposed for analysing the transformation of the structure of ethnic relations in the yishuv and Israel. An historical overview indicates how Israel's 'incorporation regime' for its main ethnic and religious groups - ashkenazim, mizrachim, Orthodox-Jews, citizen and non-citizen Palestinians - was constituted through a hierarchical combination of three citizenship discourses: a collectivist republican discourse, based on the civic virtue of 'pioneering' colonization; an ethno-nationalist discourse, based on Jewish descent, and an individualist liberal discourse, based on civic criteria of membership. It is suggested that Israel's historical trajectory has consisted in its gradual transformation from a colonial to a civil society, and concomitantly in the gradual replacement of its republican citizenship discourse by a liberal discourse. Finally, the dilemmas of its ethnic and religious groups in choosing between the liberal and the ethno-nationalist citizenship discourses in the current period are charted.