Construction Of Nation Research Articles

Theorizing Black (African) Transnational Masculinities

Just as masculinity is crucial in the construction of nationhood, masculinity is also significant in the making and unmaking of transnational communities. This article focuses on how black African men negotiate and perform respectable masculinity in transnational settings, such as the workplace, community, and family. Moving away from conceptualizations of black transnational forms of masculinities as in perpetual crisis and drawing on qualitative data collected from the members of the new African diaspora in London, the article explores the diverse ways notions of masculinity and gender identities are being challenged, reaffirmed, and reconfigured. The article argues that men experience a loss of status as breadwinners and a rupture of their sense of masculine identity in the reconstruction of life in the diaspora. Conditions in the hostland, in particular, women’s breadwinner status and the changing gender relations, threaten men’s “hegemonic masculinity” and consequently force men to negotiate respectable forms of masculinity.

МИГРАЦИИТЕ И МОБИЛНОСТТА – ФОКУС В ИЗСЛЕДОВАТЕЛСКИТЕ ТЪРСЕНИЯ НА СЪВРЕМЕННАТА БЪЛГАРСКА НАУКА

The article analyzes the development of interest in Bulgarian communities abroad in recent decades, focusing on clarifying the different terminology and typological problems in this area and as well as important research contributions of scientists from the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Studies with Ethnographic Museum at BAS to development and deepening of our knowledge of the Bulgarian presence in other countries. Further, the article presents the results of the research on the labor mobility on the Balkans, conducted by the scientists of the IEFSEM during the past two decades. Presenting the various methodological approaches towards the problematic field of migration, the text also analyses the difficulties accompanying the academics in their work, such as: lack of statistical data in historical perspective, the hardship of understanding the construction of identities and methodological nationalism in the context of the study of transborder migration

Intra-Cultural Variation, Zone of Acceptance and Managerial Discretion: A Theoretical Discussion

This paper examines the theoretical relationship between intra-cultural variation and managerial discretion. Research into the degree of discretion, or latitude of actions, has primarily focused on the individual-, organizational-, and industry-level factors, which either allow or constrain executives to take strategic actions. Despite, the recent attempt to discover the impact of national culture, mainly values, on managerial discretion, culture has been studied on an aggregate level by assuming spatial homogeneity within a country. However, recent evidences have shown that intra-cultural variation could be as salient as or sometimes even more than inter-country variation, yet there has been no discussion on its potential association with managerial discretion. As such, we address this gap and investigate the relationship of this cultural aspect with managerial discretion. Using institutional, stakeholder and upper echelons theories, our study proposes a strong relationship between intra-cultural variation and managerial discretion. Therefore, our study contributes to the strategic management and culture literature by providing a more nuanced understanding of such relationship and most importantly by introducing a new national construct that could play an important role in the strategic decision making of business executives.

Review of Thomas Turino. 2000. Nationalists, Cosmopolitans, and Popular Music in Zimbabwe . Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Tom Turino begins his most recent book, Nationalists, Cosmopolitans, and Popular Music in Zimbabwe, by discussing interactions between “the global” and “the local.” Turino concerns himself here with the dynamics of such interactions in urban popular music production in Harare, Zimbabwe, from the 1930s through the 1990s. He writes that his main goal “is to clarify the continuities and parallel cultural effects of colonialism, nationalism, and cosmopolitanism-three phenomena often understood in opposition to each other” (4). He contends that an ideologic opposition as such commonly proves to be ephemeral among Zimbabweans themselves, who experience and embody globalizing processes more at the level of their own “lifeways,” cultural values, and sense(s) of identity. Turino writes that while this analysis is not unique to Zimbabwe, it is of particular impact there due to the “historical proximity and rapid pace” of such processes of global interaction in Zimbabwe. It is likely that Turino’s prior interest in performing on mbira, a Zimbabwean musical instrument, has also affected his choice of locale in which to perform ethnography, and thus to interpret these specific histories and constructions of nationalism and cosmopolitanism.

Communities of mourning: negotiating identity and difference in Old Delhi

In this article, I examine how Old Delhi’s Shias construct community across religious and sectarian lines to live with others in contemporary India. I focus on the Islamic month of Muharram, when Shias ritually mourn the death of Imam Husain and his companions at the Battle of Karbala. Often a period marked by sectarian violence and tension in South Asia, here I focus on everyday attempts to bridge difference, diffuse tensions, and enable broader understandings of community amongst Old Delhi’s Muslims, and between Muslims and Hindus. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted amongst diverse groups of Muslims residing in Old Delhi, I examine how religious practices and narratives during and immediately after Muharram, provide an arena for new ways of positioning Shias in Old Delhi, and in India today. I argue that Shii rituals and narratives during Muharram, while marking religious and sectarian distinctions, simultaneously enable forms of identity that challenge exclusionary constructions of community and nation and allow Old Delhi’s diverse communities to live with difference in contemporary India.

From an Inconsequential Legacy to National Heritage: Revisiting the Conservation Approaches Towards the Ottoman Buildings in British Colonial Cyprus

Cyprus came under British control in 1878. At this time the Western-based orientalist mind-set, which saw ‘Ottoman’ as a synonym for stagnation was at its zenith, and this view was strategically disseminated as the European empires expanded. This also coincided with the evolution of the ethnic-nationalism that facilitated the formation of national heritage constructs. By analysing the case of Cyprus, a place which is entangled with British colonial governance as well as revolutionary Turkey, this paper aims to widen the discussion on the conservation trajectory of the Ottoman built heritage in post-Ottoman environments. Approaches to the restoration, interpretation, and management of Cyprus’s Ottoman buildings between 1878 and 1960 are dissected, assessed and categorized through British-era archival collections. The history of conservation practices is contextualised in changing political and professional perspectives, which reveal the role of Eurocentric paradigms of orientalism and nationalism in managing the perception and treatment processes of Ottoman-built heritage.

Becoming patriots in Russia: biopolitics, fashion, and nostalgia

The article seeks to explore the common ground between biopolitics, fashion, patriotism and nostalgia. Taking off from the Foucauldian notion of biopolitics as a control apparatus exerted over a population, I provide an insight into the modern construction of the Russian nation, where personal and collective sacrifice, traditional femininity and masculinity, orthodox religion, and the Great Patriotic War become the basis for patriotism. On carefully chosen case studies, I will show how the state directly and indirectly regulates people's lives by producing narratives, which are translated (in some cases designers act as mouthpieces for the state demographic or military politics) into fashionable discourses and, with a core of time, create specific gender norms – women are seen as fertile mothers giving birth to new soldiers, while men are shown as fighters and defenders of their nation. In the constructed discourses, conservative ideals become a ground for the creation of an idea of a nation as one biological body, where brothers and sisters are united together. In these fashionable narratives, people's bodies become a battlefield of domestic politics. Fashion produces a narrative of a healthy nation to ensure the healthy work- and military force.

ЛІТЕРАТУРНА КРИТИКА ЯК СПОСІБ САМОАКТУАЛІЗАЦІЇ ІНТЕЛЕКТУАЛА (НА МАТЕРІАЛІ ЛИСТУВАННЯ Й ПРАЦЬ ЮРІЯ ШЕВЕЛЬОВА ТА БОГДАНА РУБЧАКА)

In this article was made an attempt to reconstruct continuous creative and intellectual dialogue of two well-known Ukrainian modern humanitarians – Yurii Shevelov and Bohdan Rubchak. Author relies on their letter’s collections between each other, which are being stored in Bakhmeteff archive in the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library at Columbia University (USA), and also relies on their critical performances.Tetiana Shestopalova proves that dialogue is being based on deep spiritual affinity of these two intellectuals. It is being reflected by different in emotional tone greetings in their letters. These greetings imply the literature family’s theme, but not as the meaning of creative succession, as it was typical for Ukrainian literature in 19th century, but in the meaning of joint building national modern culture construct by intellectuals, who were strategically thinking. Bohdan Rubchak’s and Yurii Shevelov’s articles, which are dedicated to the same poetry book of Natalia Livycka-Kholodna, are transferring epistolary dialogues to the level of basis, methodology, meanings of literary criticism. Formal way of poetry comprehension, which was taken by Bohdan Rubchak, Yurii. Shevelov characterized as a method of approximation to its essence. Instead poetry essence itself needs critic’s “real sense”, his perception of art’s phenomenal core, which has no name.Finally, both of them were interested in “the variants of critical discourse”, which, as we know, are being dictated by the methods of criticism, so that, by variants of critical thinking. Epistolary dialogue, which caused from the beginning by Yurii Shevelov’s interest in modern poetry of Bohdan Rubchak, subsequently reaches culmination in common understanding of literature and poetry as a method for realization of own creative and intellectual essence.

Canadian Graphic: Picturing Life Narratives ed. by Candida Rifkind and Linda Warley

Reviewed by: Canadian Graphic: Picturing Life Narratives ed. by Candida Rifkind and Linda Warley Olga Michael Candida Rifkind and Linda Warley, eds. Canadian Graphic: Picturing Life Narratives. Wilfrid Laurier up, 2016. 305 pp. $29.99. Canadian Graphic: Picturing Life Narratives is a collection of ten essays edited by Candida Rifkind and Laura Warley. Together with Rifkind and Warley's introduction, these essays shed light on the alternative comics scene in Canada, focusing on print book-length graphic life narratives produced from 1980 to 2011, created by five white men, three white women, one Indigenous man, and one Black Canadian man (Rifkind and Warley 4). Because of its inclusivity in terms of creators' backgrounds and subject matters, the collection provides access to a diverse body of Canadian [End Page 199] graphic life narratives, offering nuanced readings that foreground the richness and complexities of the comics representation of issues both specific to the Canadian culture and extending beyond it. The collection is a much-needed tool for students and scholars interested in life writing and comics studies because it successfully demonstrates how and why comics is a fertile medium for verbalizing and visualizing unspeakable stories. These concern relationality and the deconstruction of identity through Alzheimer's, trauma and loss, failed white masculinity, masculinity and military culture, abject female sexuality, the suffering of Indigenous populations, and the role of gender in colonial Canada. In addition, we come across an analysis of an alternative re-presentation of (Martin Luther King as) a political figure, the image of the child in relation to the Canadian nation, and the educational potential of graphic biographies for young people. Canadian Graphic is groundbreaking not only in its variety of analyses that successfully blend various theoretical backgrounds and examination of the verbal and visual components of these texts but also in how it opens the door into controversial issues as those are depicted via the language of comics. Rifkind and Warley's introduction situates Canadian Graphic in life writing studies and sets the comics scene in Canada in a very detailed and insightful way, starting by naming Sylvie Rancourt's Mélodie, her semi-fictionalized comics about her life "as a nude dancer in [Montreal's] infamous strip clubs," as "a first, if not the first, Canadian comics autobiography" (1–2). While acknowledging female contribution in the field and foregrounding Rancourt's controversial subject matter, the introduction never feels like it focuses on a specific aspect of the Canadian graphic life narrative. Contrarily, it provides information about the development of comics both in Francophone and Anglophone Canada, its web and print outputs. Additionally, it refers to the history of the Canadian comics publishing industry as well as to the reception of comics within and outside academia, mentioning university courses devoted to the medium, gallery exhibitions, the establishment of the bilingual Canadian Society for the Study of Comics, and the annual international conference attached to the Toronto Comics Art Fair (6–7). After providing an overview of the development of Canadian comics, Rifkind and Warley proceed to aptly state what the following essays illustrate: that "remembering in comics can extend beyond the personal and can be a pedagogical project connected to constructions of nation, gender, and race" (11). The collection is composed by three sections, each starting with a cover page including its title and a comics illustration—an excerpt from [End Page 200] one of the primary texts analyzed in the following chapters. This, together with its cover, makes the book as attractive in terms of presentation as it is thought-provoking in terms of contents. The first part, "Confession and the Relational Self," starts with an essay by Kevin Ziegler that introduces "a category of formal composition [called] comics confession," a genre that renders the reader an intimate listener of shameful stories (23). Closely reading excerpts from Chester Brown's Yummy Fur (1983–94), Julie Doucet's My New York Diary (2013), and Sarah Leavitt's Tangles (2010), Ziegler foregrounds "comics confession" as "a distinct model of personal address" that "engages readers and asks them to participate in a dialogue through a strategy of formal intimacy" expressed via the visuality of comics, which evokes affect in the relationship...

Tentativas sobre cine y nación: género, estilo y puesta en escena de la “Colombianidad” / Attempts on film and nation: genre, style and staging of “Colombianness”

<p>Se indaga la relación entre cine y nación en el contexto colombiano, examinando los aportes de la cinematografía y su evolución como dispositivo que media la construcción de referentes de nacionalidad. Teórica y metodológicamente, se asumen las películas como discursos sociales, como imágenes múltiples de fragmentos de la historia y de la cultura, cuyos sentidos pueden rastrearse en un cruce de caminos entre las experiencias de lo nacional, las configuraciones narrativas y variadas formas expresivas. Estudiamos tres producciones cinematográficas en las que la mediación genérica y/o estilística es clave para la resignificación de ciertos hechos o temas de la historia nacional colombiana: Cóndores no entierran todos los días (1984), Bolívar soy yo (2002), y Retratos en un mar de mentiras (2010). Concluimos que sus diversas maneras de representar eventos, personajes y fenómenos nacionales históricos y contemporáneos y la disposición narrativa que les da forma, ofrecen claves para entender el dinamismo de la representación de lo nacional y las disputas en torno a dicha representación.</p>

Comparative Study on Policy of Improving Innovation Ability of Colleges and Universities between Domestic and Overseas

Enhanced the innovation capacity of colleges and universities is of great significance for the construction of innovative nation and human resources. Introduced policy situation and characteristics of the innovation ability of colleges and universities between domestic and overseas, and carried on the comparison and analysis. Pointed out that compared with the world’s leading innovative countries, China’s relevant policy is not perfect enough. Finally, put forward suggestions about the policy of improving innovation ability of colleges and universities to our country.

Escuela normal-sociedad Una nueva relación de identidad y tradición en la formación de maestros

<p>Por razones históricas, la escuela normal y el maestro, fueron pensados como instrumentos para cohesionar a la sociedad civil con la sociedad política; en el viejo país, la normal fue una identidad para consolidar la construcción de la nacionalidad con una nueva ética ciudadana. Esta fue la base de su tradición y de su identidad en la historia del oficio de maestro, sobre la cual se construyó la primera relación normal –sociedad. El normalismo en Colombia como en América Latina, es parte de un gran relato que ayudó a sostener y darle fortaleza, a los grandes proyectos de desarrollo y de democracia, pero las nuevas políticas, derivadas de los recientes modos de producción, lo la desplazaron, debilitaron y marginaron hasta su casi desaparición. Hoy, desde la reestructuración y acreditación se construye una nueva relación normal –sociedad necesaria para una nueva sociedad y nueva educación.</p>

Gender representations in politics of belonging: An analysis of Swiss immigration regulation from the 19th century until today

The literature increasingly recognises the importance of gender in defining the boundaries between national societies and migrants. But little is still known about the history and changes of mechanisms that shape the role of gender as category of difference. Based on a critical case study of Switzerland, this article examines how gender is implicated in the politics of migrant admission and incorporation and underlying notions of ‘the other’. Drawing on theories of boundary work, we show that gendered representations of migrants are mobilised by different actors to advance their claims and calls for certain forms of immigration control and migrant integration. Since the late 19th century, gendered representations of Swiss nationals and migrant others shift from classical gender ideas to culturalised post-colonial interpretations of gender roles and, most recently, to normative ideas of gender equality. As part of these changes, migrant women moved from the periphery to the core of public and political attention. Concomitantly, categories of difference shift from the intersection of gender and social class to an intersection of gender, culture and ethnicity. Local particularities of Switzerland – the idea of ‘overforeignisation’ and the system of direct democracy – play a significant role in shaping categories. But Switzerland’s embeddedness in transnational fields emerges as equally important. The article expands on recent research and illuminates how changing dynamics of categorisation and othering facilitate the construction of nations and national identities in a transnationalised world.

Occitan Music Revitalization as Radical Cultural Activism: From Postcolonial Regionalism to Altermondialisation

The resurgence of Occitan popular music traditions in France is coterminous with the emergence of postcolonial regionalism during the 1970s Larzac protests, following the wave of decolonization in the 1960s and anticipating the anti-globalization movement in subsequent decades. Situated within this continuum of postcolonial and transnational cultural activism, Occitan music practitioners are uniquely positioned to embody a radically inclusive conception of Occitan identity by embracing the intercultural dimension of their Mediterranean musical heritage. Reconciling regional specificity and cultural hybridity can thus offer creative ways of resisting nationalist constructions of identity and neoliberal representations of global culture.

Better a Warm Hug than a Cold Bath: Nationalist Memory and the Failures of Iranian Historiography

This paper assesses the extent to which the modern historiography of Iran is indebted to a nationalist construction of Iran’s past, rather than proceeding from impartial and critical historical research. The paper pursues this aim by applying the distinction between history (as a scholarly discipline) and memory (as a nationalist construct) to one of the central tropes of the country’s historiography. According to that trope, Iranian history can be summarized as a succession of violent invasions by foreign “races,” which never stamped out Iran’s separate ethnic identity. This resilience is attributed to Iranian civilization’s inherent superiority, which Iranianized the invaders and thus ensured Iran’s survival as a primordial nation. The analysis shows that—counter-intuitively—twentieth-century Iranian historians, instead of subjecting this narrative to critical assessment, have in fact played a central role in developing it into a self-serving historiography. Special attention is given to Zarrinkub’s seminal Two Centuries of Silence.

La utopía de forjar una sola raza para la nación. Mestizaje, indigenismo e hispanofilia en el México posrevolucionario

Este artículo estudia distintos proyectos de construcción nacional que durante el México posrevolucionario propusieron forjar una sola raza para asegurar un prometedor porvenir de la nación. Se abordan las ideas raciales de tres de los intelectuales que más destacaron en este ámbito, así como el discurso oficial con cual el Estado mostraba cuál era la “raza mexicana”. En el estudio se utiliza la categoría “utopía”, entendida como todo proyecto a futuro que surge de la crítica y necesidad de superar los problemas del presente mediante una transformación radical. Se considera pertinente este método, pues los debates raciales estudiados tuvieron especial interés en el futuro, proponiendo distintos caminos para reconstruir la nación. Finalmente, se realiza un balance sobre el éxito o fracaso que a largo plazo ha tenido el binomio de raza y nación en México.

Representation of ethnic minorities in socialist China

ABSTRACTThis study examines the fact of representation of ethnicity in the People’s Republic of China. The present ethnic configuration, centred on a re-categorization of the population, came to be accepted by ordinary people in Chinese society as the result of the multiple projects in association with state-making and nation-building. This paper delineates how the projects in question came about, especially the one focused on the investigation of ethnic minority social history. It examines the way in which narrating and representing ethnic minorities officially took place and how the representation of ethnic minorities functions in the construction of the Chinese nation. It argues that representation for ethnicities focused on how to locate each of them at a certain stage of social development, conceptualizing the Chinese nation in a framework of brotherhood in order to include those excluded by the mainstream throughout history.

Guanhua, Guoyu, and Putonghua: Politics and “proper names” for standard language in modern China

ABSTRACTGuanhua (official language), Guoyu (national language), and Putonghua (common language) are generally regarded as different names for the same thing in different eras, but from the perspective of cultural history, there are many subtle semantic differences between these three concepts, symbolizing how different social classes and political groups defined their particular experiences, expectations, and efforts to take action. Guoyu, which replaced Guanhua in the late Qing Dynasty, is closely bound up with the construction of modern nationalism. In the 1930s, leftist intellectuals imbued Putonghua with strong proletariat attributes and overtones of indigenous and ethnic equality, wielding it as a tool for critiques against Guoyu. Although Putonghua returned to certain key positions of Guoyu after the mid-1950s, it putatively emphasized the legacy of the leftist language movement, and represented a new political identity. Through these “proper names” for the standard language, it was possible not only to launch a political and social “revolution,” but also to smooth over the historical rifts that this engendered, by repeatedly revising the concepts of “written” and “standard” to form a linear national narrative.

The Obligation to Return: On Miguel Syjuco’s Ilustrado

This article looks at the emblematic status of the ilustrado in discourses of Philippine nationalism and independence and seeks to redress the associated narrative of repatriation by looking specifically at how the ilustrado’s cosmopolitanism and global worldview produces tensions and elisions in constructions of nationalism and Philippine identity. In particular, this article reads Miguel Syjuco’s 2010 novel, Ilustrado, as symptomatic of the ways in which notions of nation, nationalism, globalism and identity become problematic tropes for interpreting the politics of belonging and foreignness, a problem specifically illustrated by the privileged position that the figure of the ilustrado, as cosmopolitan intellectual, enjoys. Of particular importance here is the status of the literary work, of the novel-form, as the site where anxieties over the homeland—to which the ilustrado seems to have to return—are formalized and made explicit. At stake is the very question of what it means to confront and take stock of how the homeland is given form: what kind of a hermeneutic makes it possible to disclose the politics of literature? The practice of reading is necessarily turned isnto a potentially self-critical activity through which the contradictions of the ilustrado’s globality and privilege are made explicit. This article asks, as the novel does, what role the ilustrado plays in today’s Filipino diasporic politics and what role it plays as an historical figure and trope in constructions of national and diasporic identity. By dramatizing these tensions, this article argues that Syjuco’s novel allegorizes the act of reading as a political practice fraught with aporias, aporias that disclose the limitations of the ilustrado as the meeting point of a set of clashing desires and political and literary critical interpretive practices.

‘Call Us Ms.’: Viva and arguments for Kenyan women's respectable citizenship 1975–80

ABSTRACTDrawing on Viva, the first women's magazine published in East Africa, this article articulates the ways educated Kenyan women actively inserted themselves into public debates and constructions of the new nation. It argues that Viva authors and editors employed rhetorics of nationalism and development to advocate for Kenyan women's right to equal citizenship. They wanted participation in the possibilities, power, and self-reliance that postcolonial nationalism promised its citizens and mobilized images of a productive, modern woman to make their case. Viva's producers appropriated the momentum of 1970s development rhetoric and international women's liberation to show that Kenyan women were already fulfilling mandates to develop themselves and their fellow Kenyans through education, wage labor, consumer habits, and moral respectability. Viva reveals the ambitions, strategies, and desires of Kenya's educated women, not only for themselves but also for their nation and their rural ‘sisters’.