Imagined National Community Research Articles

Local and National Approaches to Nature Preservation: The US Virgin Islands National Park on St John and Beyond

National parks constitute powerful focal points in the building of national communities, both as concrete areas of land that offer a commons shared by members of a larger society, and as particular landscapes that symbolise certain cultural values and social relations. The commons, which is envisioned and cherished by members of a larger imagined national community may, however, be quite different from the commons that is used and experienced by members of a local community that has emerged and been sustained in close interaction with a particular natural environment. This paper discusses the uneasy relations between the generalised ‘wilderness' commons of the American Virgin Islands National Park, and the local commons of marginal estate land, village resources and family land that have played a central role in the African-Caribbean community on St John through time. The analysis is based on historical and ethnographic research on the Virgin Island of St John, carried out from 1974 to 1996.

Popular Music and Identity in Quebec

Introduction In his book Banal Nationalism, Michael Billig demonstrates that nationalism is by no means a peripheral phenomenon, present in ethnic separatist movements but removed from common states. (1) Instead, citizens are perpetually reminded of their national identities by symbols such as flags, coins, national anthems, and political discourse. are constantly bombarded with competing political discourse regarding whether Quebec is a nation or a distinct society and whether form a people, but such explicitly political discourse is not really nationalism. Billig writes: The metonymic image of banal nationalism is not a flag which is consciously waved with fervent passion; it is the flag hanging unnoticed on the public building. (2) Perhaps the most visible arena of symbolic conflict occurs in the battles over flags in Quebec, but popular culture is another arena where differences between Quebecers and Canadians manifest themselves. Others have noted the importance of popular culture in reinforcing a Quebecois identity. In particular, the development of language television has led to the emergence of a class of Quebecois celebrities and television shows that appeal almost exclusively to Quebecers. Louis Balthazar writes that television has enabled to see a new image of themselves transmitted--an image that serves to reinforce a common identity, one that excludes Francophones outside of Quebec. (3) Furthermore, most of these shows probably have little audience among Anglophones within Quebec, who have a far greater choice of television options in their own language. Thus, television may serve to reinforce linguistic differences. This article will consider how popular music also influences perceptions of national identity in Quebec. Francophone have increasingly identified themselves as rather than as French or simply as Canadian. (4) Self-identification as Quebecois(e) has been linked to support for sovereignty. For example, in one survey of college students, 82 percent of those students who considered themselves to be more Quebecois(e) than Canadian supported sovereignty, whereas only 4 percent of those considering themselves to be more Canadian than Quebecois(e) and only 12 percent of those sharing both identities equally supported sovereignty. (5) At the societal level, the constant reinforcement of a Quebec-centered identity is undoubtedly crucial for sustaining an environment where sovereignty is viewed as a reasonable alternative. In Quebec, where two identities are in competition, the ever-present markers of Quebecois, rather than Canadian, identity are an important asset for those who argue that Quebec should be sovereign, and the question of how a Quebec-centered identity has become ascendant within Quebec deserves study. Music and National Identity Benedict Anderson famously describes nations as and emphasizes the importance of newspapers in defining such communities by providing their readers with a shared stock of common national referents. (6) More recently, Tim Edensor has argued that radio and television are critical in situating individuals within a national imagined community. (7) Popular songs tell about social groups--stories that form part of a narrative that helps individuals find their place in the world and develop a political identity, creating what Bruno Roy describes as the collective imagination of a group. (8) Maureen Whitebrook writes that persons understand their own lives as stories and that without the structure of life would be unintelligible. (9) A song that tells a compelling story about one's group may have more impact than would an account in a history book. For example, the (sometimes) fictional individuals whose are told in songs often serve as role models for how real individuals should act. …

Multinationalizing the multicultural: The commodification of ‘ordinary foreign residents’ in a Japanese TV talk show

This paper analyses the representation of foreign residents in Japan in the popular television variety show Kokoga hen dayo nihonjin (This Is So Bizarre, You Japanese). It discusses ways in which the increasing presence and visibility of foreign residents in the Japanese public space enhances the commercial value of ‘ordinariness’. In this process the boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them-within-us’ are sharply re-demarcated in an international framework and the intensifying multicultural situation is subtly turned into a multinational media spectacle, in a way in which the national imagined community is not fundamentally displaced.

Miscegenated Whiteness: Rebecca Harding Davis, the "Civil-izing" War, and Female Racism

This essay examines Rebecca Harding Davis's resistance to the Civil War discourse in the Atlantic Monthly in order to complicate the relation between nineteenth-century racism and sentimental fiction. While much revisionary work has been done on nineteenth-century women'sfiction and how it reinforced racial ideologies, the misleading question often asked is whether white women did or did not participate in the public arena of race. Yet this initial framing of the question denies the alternative possibility: that white women might have engaged in their own gendered forms of racial activity, or in a "female racism" (to use Vron Ware's term), that did not correspond to or act in complicity with a racism that is by default seen as public and masculine. By imagining her heroine as a "woman from the border" inWaiting for the Verdict (1868), Davis works to oppose and overturn a particular regional and gender-based inscription of whiteness that was being disseminated amid the war crises as an emergent New England-based national identity. In contrast, Davis creates a particular feminine and liminal version of white racial power, or a "miscegenated whiteness." But this fantasy of an imagined national community based on the "white mulatto" finally undoes itself in the novel's moments of narrative crises about a free and open female sexuality, and Davis'snovel seeks to restore the white female body to its "purity."

Imperilled Communities in Edward P. Jones's 'Lost in the City' and Dagoberto Gilb's 'The Magic of Blood'

Abstract Proceeding from the notion that short-story sequences construct semblances of 'community' through their interweaving of distinct but related fictional voices, we examine the 'visions of community' offered in these two recent story sequences. Portraying, respectively, the African American inhabitants of Washington, DC, and the dispersed Chicano peoples of the Southwest, Jones's and Gilb's collections depict the tensions experienced by minority groups between assimilationist desires and dreams of ethnic identification and continuity. Ultimately, each collection constructs a vision of community whose values and desires reflect an ironic, supplemental relationship to the national narrative of the United States. The semblance of community in the short story sequence, its tendency to produce a collective metanarrative through a series of discrete, multivoiced tales, gives this form peculiar relevance to the social transformations of the millennial era. Continuing population shifts and border crossings in a 'polyethnic, diasporic world' (to borrow Frederick Buell's phrase) make the concept of community in its various linkages with multiculturalism, ethnicity, and postmodern nationhood crucial to both cultural theory and to critical readings of contemporary sequences. Many recent collections of stories represent minority peoples inhabiting what Homi K. Bhabha calls the 'unsettling space' between 'the phantasm of rootedness and the memory of dissemination'.[1] If all communities are inherently 'imagined' and socially constructed, as Benedict Anderson has insisted, they nevertheless determine the production and definition of social identity by marking the convergence of shared memories, beliefs, and cultural practices, developed in relation to specific places, landscapes, or homelands. Because story sequences 'construct tenuous fictive communities' through their aggregation of separate yet conjoined narratives, producing at least a simulacrum of composite unity (e pluribus unum), each sequence thus also replicates in microcosm the formation of an imagined national community and the coalescence of its sustaining narrative.[2] Story sequences that emerge as minority discourse consequently have a doubled, paradoxical relationship to the national narrative from and against which they are written, representing community narratives that challenge even as they supplement the dominant discourse of nationhood. Two recent American story sequences, Edward P. Jones's Lost in the City (1992) and Dagoberto Gilb's The Magic of Blood (1993) illustrate this ironic, supplementary relationship to the national master-narrative, which in the United States idealizes New World settlement ordained by God, heroic revolution against colonial oppression, and establishment of a democratic republic ensuring pursuit of the 'American Dream' of prosperity. These ethnic counter-narratives (both first books by winners of the PEN/ Hemingway Award), present alternate versions of minority life in the United States in the late twentieth century. Without essentializing either African American or Chicano experience, respectively, we can read these texts against each other as articulations of specific histories and cultural identities that differ from each other even as they differ from the 'mainstream' Euro-American narrative of the nation. Each sequence evokes a particular geography and an ambiguous sense of community, one 'located', the other disseminated. Neither text features a recurrent protagonist or interwoven fictive lives (characters from one story encountered briefly in another); both, however, imply commonalities of experience through repetitions of character type, circumstance, and event. In short, both subtly construct from disparate stories an overarching narrative that registers the practices and rituals, the conjunctions and disjunctions, of an ethnic group distinct from the dominant culture. Through the hybrid form of the sequence (between short story and novel), the metanarratives of Jones and Gilb recall the 'strategies of hybridisation' defined by Bhabha: 'They deploy the partial culture from which they emerge to construct visions of community, and versions of historic memory, that give narrative form to the minority positions they occupy: the outside of the inside: the part in the whole. …

História da Vida Privada no Brasil. Volume 2História da Vida Privada no Brasil. Volume 3História da Vida Privada no Brasil. Volume 4

História da Vida Privada no Brasil. Volume 2História da Vida Privada no Brasil. Volume 3História da Vida Privada no Brasil. Volume 4

Closing the Telenovela's Borders: "Vivo Por Elena's" Tidy Nation

The popularity of the Latin American telenovela has engendered a number of studies that range in focus from content analysis to the consideration of the audience's reception. The ideological and economic interests of cultural production have also been considered, with a particular and well-developed focus on the representation of women and sexuality. However, while there have been some critics who have begun to delineate the national character of specific telenovelas (particularly in regards to Brazilian soaps), the telenovela has yet to be considered a site where nationality, nationalism, and Nation are produced and reproduced.1 In other words, no extended critical work has examined how the telenovela defines and reiterates a specific national community/' whose meanings change over time and are capable of being transplanted and consciously enacted (Anderson 4). Nationality appears in the telenovela as the marker by or the degree to which individuals inscribe themselves within the national imagined community. Oftentimes these questions of nationality emerge, Eve Sedgwick notes, unbidden and unremarked,,' and are merely assumed as the defining limits of our public or private identities (143-44). This seems particularly patent in Mexican telenovelas, a genre which until recently was produced primarily by one corporation (Televisa) that has had strong ties to the Mexican state (through the PRI, for instance).2 I would like to offer five approaches to understand the complexity of Nation-construction that occurs in Vivo por Elena, a recent Televisa telenovela. (1) Mazzioti (1993) has argued that Mexican telenovelas are?in contrast to the Latin American genre as a whole?more playfully melodramatic, the scenery more baroque, the narrative fuller of pathos and more inclined towards tragic heroes. I will consider the melodramatic aspect?taken up in other authors, but always abandoned?and consider whether Mexican telenovelas present a specifically National melodrama. (2) Telenovelas present a limited number of characters and only a few sets to the audience. These characters only interact with each other and seem to have no knowledge of larger social, political events. They therefore present a closed community which is complete and autonomous unto ^he notable exception is Ana Lopez's excellent article on Latin American telenovelas which argues that *'the telenovela can be understood as an agent for and participant in the complex processes of Latin American modernization, nation-building, and increasing transnationalization (Our Welcomed Guests 257).

Print Advertisements and Nation Making in Metropolitan Papua New Guinea

Print Advertisements and Nation Making in Metropolitan Papua New Guinea Robert J. Foster (bio) Foster, Robert J. 1995. Print advertisements and nation making in metropolitan Papua New Guinea. In Nation Making: Emergent Identities in Postcolonial Melanesia, ed. by Robert J. Foster. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 151–181. Reprinted with the permission of The University of Michigan Press. In May 1985, the National Parliament of Papua New Guinea passed the Commercial Advertising Act, initiated by Ted Diro. 1 According to this act, all commercial advertising in Papua New Guinea must be locally produced by local agencies employing local talent-designers, artists, models, and so forth. Infractions are to be treated as criminal rather than civil offenses. Letters to the weekly Times of Papua New Guinea (hereinafter TPNG) by two critics of the act, both expatriate advertising managers, provoked responses from Moale Rivu, then executive officer for Diro. 2 “In a TPNG article on 12 April 1986, Rivu defended the act as a deliberate effort by the government to promote “nationalism” and “nation building.” He asked: Is it any wonder that we still find it difficult to be self sufficient in such basic foodstuff as rice and peanut butter? When the Markham factory was in operation it had to compete against imported peanut butter whose agents on numerous occasions used ready-made ads from overseas to promote their products. That, in essence, is the bottom line in this debate on the Advertising Act. Rivu’s nationalism was motivated by mainly economic concerns, the famous “bottom line.” It is hardly contentious, however, to maintain that advertising and mass consumption in general are inevitably deeply cultural matters. This is not only a question of cultural imperialism, of resisting “Coca-Colonization”— the flow of images and objects emanating from various dominant regional centers. It is equally a question of the instrumental effects of mass-consumption practices in nation making, that is, a question of the potential for advertisements to present constructs of “the nation” and perforce to define the terms of membership in “the nation.” I address this broad question through a consideration of print advertisements taken from several sources: two newspapers, a billboard, and an in-flight magazine. How do these ads construct “Papua New Guinea” and “Papua New Guineaness”? How do these ads and the consumption practices that they publicize enable (if not exhort) the steadily growing population of school-educated, urban-dwelling, wage-earning citizens to imagine themselves as “Papua New Guineans”? To what extent is an emergent urban consumer culture implicated in the processes of nation making in Papua New Guinea (see Jourdan this volume)? Advertising and “the Nation” I use two complementary approaches in considering the relationships between advertisements and “the nation” - “the nation” understood here as an imaginative construct (see this volume’s introduction). The first approach emphasizes the sociocultural linkages brought about by the spread of mass-consumption practices. Social historians have long observed, for example, that the formation of an imagined national community in the United States during the late nineteenth century was co-eval with the birth of modern consumerism (Boorstin 1973; Bronner 1989; Ewen and Ewen 1982; Fox and Lears 1983). Department stores assembled within their palatial confines thousands of big-city dwellers; chain stores replicated these gatherings on a smaller scale in towns across the country; and mail-order catalogs functioned to connect the most remote farmer’s family to this expansive network of consumers. The proliferation of images and objects of mass consumption brought the most diverse audiences, including newly arrived immigrants, into not only a developing marketplace, but also an emergent set of shared understandings, memories, tastes, and habits. The growth of an advertising industry figured largely in this process, inasmuch as advertisements mediated the anonymous encounter between buyers and sellers. Advertisements became important vehicles for the imagination of a community of consumers whose shared consumption practices and ideals put them in experiential unison with each other. Orvar Löfgren (1989a, 373) made this point in reviewing a history of American advertising in the 1920s and 1930s: Reading the same ads, listening to the same radio personalities, or watching the same movies created a shared frame of reference for those...

Fifty Years of Indonesian Development: "One Nation," Under Capitalism ...

In Indonesia much uncertainty remains in the wake of the dramatic changes that unfolded in the latter half of the l990's. By the end of the 20th century, the Indonesian economy was in ruins. The concept of democracy remained contested. The transportation and communication system that once at least minimally linked the diverse and at times disparate areas and peoples of the Indonesian archipelago into an Andersonian imagined national community collapsed, making more likely movements for regional autonomy, in turn, making the status of an Indonesian nation itself uncertain. One thing that is certain, however, is that Socharto, the "Father of Development," is history. As political and economic policy makers in Indonesia, the United States, and around the world, and more importantly, Indonesia's men, women, and children pick up the pieces, it is our responsibility to look back and consider the past fifty years.