Narratives Of National Identity Research Articles

High fashion in film: Italian identity and global anxiety in Valentino: The Last Emperor and Gomorrah

Abstract The intersection between the Italian high-fashion industry and its relationship to national identity is explored in two 2008 films, Valentino: The Last Emperor (Tyrnauer, 2008) and Gomorrah (Garrone, 2008). The decline of high fashion problematizes Italy’s projection on a global stage of a national identity closely linked to its ‘Made in Italy’ brands and superiority in design. Both films conceptualize fashion as a salient cultural institution that is at the apex of pressing social, political and economic issues facing Italy as the country re-evaluates its construction of national identity. By visually exploiting the tension between the perfect exterior presentation of the fashion industry and the less appealing underlying realities, the directors challenge cinematically the boundaries between fiction and reality in identity construction at both national and global levels. The films showcase the performative creation of national symbols and in both the illusory quality of narratives of national identity emerges in the directors’ generically divergent yet topically convergent emphasis on the fiction of the constructed image.

Muted National Memory

The encoding of female bodies as symbols of the nation is a multifaceted process where some female bodies are uplifted to represent the nation and its honour, but others are abjected. I examine in this article Finnish women who fraternized with German soldiers during the Second World War. The bodies of these women carry historical and political content that could not be reconciled with the Finnish post-war national identity narrative that sought closure. The Finnish national subject came into being through the establishment of ‘Hitler's brides’ as others, and a variety of state-initiated disciplinary mechanisms were used to silence them. The taboo of speech became a lifelong condition that was broken just before the biological deaths of these women. When the taboo was broken their corporeal representations and voices were not simple representations of a past event, but political performances and utterances which intervened in a past and present national context. I show how the agentative figure that emerged was not that of a superstite (survivor) witness with confessional tendencies but that of a parrhesiastes, the one who speaks the truth.

Mapping national identity narratives in Ukraine

Since 1991, the absence of the concept of a Ukrainian nation and national identity has led to a controversial, often ambivalent process of identity formation. The aim of this paper is to analyze and map the widely shared concepts about national identity that exist in Ukrainian society after 20 years of independence. Analysis of 43 interviews with Ukrainian political and intellectual elites reveals five different shared narratives: (1) dual identity; (2) being pro-Soviet; (3) a fight for Ukrainian identity; (4) a recognition of Ukrainian identity; and (5) a multicultural-civic concept. Each narrative is characterized by three main features: a coherent structure with strong internal logic and justification of its legitimacy; connection to a specific conception of power and morality; and an opposition to other narratives. All these features lead to the perception of society as a zero-sum game where one narrative must prevail over all others. At the same time, all these features ensure that there can be neither an overwhelming victory of one narrative over others nor a satisfying compromise between them. The results shed light on the complex process of narrative construction of identity and power in newly independent states.

In search of racial types: soldiers and the anthropological mapping of the Romanian nation, 1914–44

ABSTRACT Turda's article explores the diverse ways in which racial research conducted on prisoners-of-war (POWs) and soldiers contributed to the emergence of anthropological narratives of national identity in Romania between 1914 and 1944. It first discusses racial typologies produced by Austrian, German, Italian and Polish anthropologists investigating POWs during the First World War, and then examines how Romanian physicians and anthropologists engaged with these typologies while refining their own scientific and nationalist agendas. An essential corollary to this development was a strong commitment to the cultivation of distinct Romanian racial types. The interwar and Second World War periods witnessed the full flowering of a Romanian race science that accommodated a racial hierarchy as the basis for national difference. Moreover, by identifying the racial types purportedly constituting the Romanian nation, anthropologists not only hoped to develop a systematic racial inventory of Romania's ethnic communities, but also to reinforce the myth of ethnogenesis, which described the Romanians as worthy of their noble European origins and legitimized their territorial claims.

Towards a New Model of Narrative Transformation: From the American Myth to the Green Myth

In this paper, we suggest the “Narrative Spheres of Performed National Identity” theoretical model, regarding the way ad narratives negotiate national identity in the globalization era, and use it to demonstrate how narrative is transformed. Israeli print ads serve as a test case in this qualitative study to demonstrate a transformation from the narrative of Americanization—which has dominated Israeli ads during the 1990s and throughout the beginning of the 21st century—into the “green narrative,” during the mid-2000s. The model, which is comprised of four performance spheres—national, geographic, economic, and cultural—helps in analyzing the transformation of the national identity narrative of a small country under siege by both global and local pressures.

Stories States Tell: Identity, Narrative, and Human Rights in the Balkans

Jelena Subotić explores how the states of the Balkans construct their “autobiographies“—stories about themselves—and how these stories influence their contemporary political choices. By understanding where states’ narratives about themselves—stories of their past, their historical purpose, their role in the international system—come from, we can more fully explain contemporary state behavior that to outsiders may seem irrational, self-defeating, or simply, inexplicable. Subotić specifically addresses ways in which states of the western Balkans have built their state narratives around the issue of human rights. She explores, first, how a particular narrative of state and national identity produced—or made locally comprehensible—massive human rights abuses. She then analyzes why contemporary identity narratives make postconflict human rights policies very difficult to institutionalize. The article focuses specifically on the human rights discourse, practices, and debates in Serbia and Croatia.

“A Revolution of Love”: Ramón Emeterio Betances, Anténor Firmin, and Affective Communities in the Caribbean

This article examines the revolutionary politics of Puerto Rican intellectual and physician Ramon Emeterio Betances (1827–98) through an inter-Caribbean lens that goes beyond teleological and insular narratives of national liberation and identity. An under-examined figure in Caribbean intellectual history, Betances stood out among his fellow Cuban and Puerto Ricans revolutionaries for his singular experiences of dislocation: he lived most of his life in France, he included Haiti within his vision of a Caribbean federation, and he was of African descent. The article focuses on Betances’s resignification of the Haitian Revolution within the transatlantic context of the Ten Years War in Cuba, looking at two key pamphlets: his translation of US radical abolitionist Wendell Phillips’s encomiastic biography of Toussaint Louverture, “Touissant L’ouverture” (1869), and “A Cuba libre,” an account of the life of Haitian revolutionary general and president Alexandre Petion (1871). Though Betances aligns himself with Phillips’s prophetic brand of abolitionism, his distinct romantic discourse concerning the Haitian Revolution and Petion is ultimately linked to his affinity for French republicanism. I also explore Betances’s friendship with the Haitian intellectual and politician Antenor Firmin (1850–1911) and the latter’s musings about Betances, Haiti, and the Caribbean in Letters from Saint Thomas (1910), showing how the uses of community in Betances and Firmin signify an incipient “Latin” form of identification.

Negotiating Postcolonial Spaces

The postcolonial political order in South Asia marked the diffusion of a sense of territoriality and with it the consolidation of a new geographical order. Borders marking the limits of territory—sometimes arbitrarily drawn or carved out—defined the landscape of states and became rigid markers of the identity of nations. Along with challenges to the legitimizing narratives of national identity and nation making, the absolutist notion of territoriality also underwent changes in postcolonial state construction. The constructed geography of the state has been challenged by indigenous communities which, by negotiating borders, constantly deconstruct them. The fishing community along the coasts of Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka exhibit the process of negotiating such postcolonial spaces by straying across designated borders. The history of Kachchativu reveals the complexity created by close, undefined borders: interstate connectedness and disjuncture between members of a community that share history and resources across the border.

Colluding with the Enemy?: Nationalism and Depictions of “Aboriginality” in Canadian Olympic Moments

Colluding with the Enemy? Nationalism and Depictions of “Aboriginality” in Canadian Olympic Moments Jennifer Adese (bio) After the Indians had their moment in the spotlight, they danced back into history, making way for miners, cowboys and settlers of all races to do-se-do together (as if that ever happened in that place and time). Only the Indians were missing from the hoedown in Salt Lake. But these are just symbols, you say? Well, yeah. Mega-bucks worth of symbols. Symbology that reaches millions of people around the world and leaves a lasting impression in the place of reality. Suzan Shown Harjo, “Indians in the Olympics Ceremony? Postcard from the Past” As a fair-skinned âpihtawikosis-âniskwéw (Cree-Métis woman), I am one of many Indigenous peoples who have been, as Emma Larocque writes, “hounded and haunted by White North America’s image machine.”1 I became interested in researching Indigenous involvement in the Olympics after one of my cousins forwarded to me in September 2009 the application to attend the Indigenous Youth Gathering (iyg) to be held from January 30 to February 14, 2010. The Vancouver 2010 Olympics were slated to start on February 12 and run until February 28; since the iyg was to end just a couple of days after the opening of the games, it was clear that applicants were being tapped to play some role in the opening of the games. Given the involvement of Indigenous peoples in previous Olympic opening and closing ceremonies (in 1976 and 1988), it was not a stretch to assume we would play a role in Vancouver’s opening ceremony. This was made clearer by the fact that the application form requests [End Page 479] that we include two full-length color photographs of ourselves wearing traditional clothing, clothing that we would be expected to bring with us to the gathering. The application encourages youth to, “where applicable,” incorporate accessories such as roaches/masks, hair ornaments, face or body paint, earrings/pendants, arm or leg bracelets or bands, skins/furs/bark, footwear, and instruments or drums and rattles. The application asks, however, that applicants “not wear non-traditional clothing” (a.k.a. “contemporary” clothing) in the photos.2 This was the first gathering application, out of the many that I’d seen, that required a picture to be included in the application. Having my moccasins, my Métis sash, and my dad’s moosehide jacket, I wasn’t sure that even with all this and my “Homeland Security: Fighting Terrorism Since 1492” T-shirt I’d be “Aboriginal enough” to be selected, and I wasn’t sure that I wanted to find out—or that I wanted anyone affiliated with the Olympic organizing committee to decide whether or not I was. This experience has inspired me to question more deeply the nature of Indigenous involvement in the 2010 Vancouver Olympic opening ceremony. Indigenous peoples have been involved in each of the Canadian-hosted Olympics (to varying degrees), and, given my encounter with the 2010 iyg application form, I came to question the nature of organizational committees’ motives with regard to Indigenous performance in ceremonies. Why are we so popular? The 1976 Montréal Summer Olympic closing ceremony, the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympic opening ceremony, and the 2010 Winter Olympic opening ceremony in Vancouver each placed Indigenous peoples at the heart of its expressions of regional, provincial, and Canadian national identity in one form or another. Why is it that organizing committees view Indigenous peoples as central to Olympic ceremonies and as so seemingly central to the narratives of national identity produced during them? What is Canada trying to say about itself by insisting on Indigenous presence within the Olympic ceremonies when in so many other spaces in Canadian society we are purposefully invisibilized? I argue that while earlier national narratives alluded to the racial superiority of “white” Canadians and their hand in subjugating/civilizing Indigenous populations, in recent decades it has become far less fashionable to insinuate such things. Canada has thus consistently drawn on the multiculturalist rhetoric (of equality) as a framework for narrating Canadian-Indigenous relations. The amplified international attention brought by the Olympics has [End...

The Heavens on Earth: Observatories and Astronomy in Nineteenth-Century Science and Culture (review)

Reviewed by: The Heavens on Earth: Observatories and Astronomy in Nineteenth-Century Science and Culture Pamela Gossin (bio) The Heavens on Earth: Observatories and Astronomy in Nineteenth-Century Science and Culture, edited by David Aubin, Charlotte Bigg, and H. Otto Sibum; pp. xii + 384. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010, $94.95, $24.95 paper, 71.00, 16.99 paper. The work of scholarly editing rarely receives adequate recognition for the fully creative intellectual contributions it makes. Too often it is assumed that the thankless tasks of [End Page 770] critically annotating a key primary text or collecting thematically or topically related essays are—or should be—their own reward. To make such an assumption in the case of this volume, however, would do an immense disservice to the extraordinary skills and insights of these editors and the overall achievement of their final product. In crafting this collection, this well-tuned team of editors never hits a sour note. The apt title serves as a recurrent aesthetic motif as well as a guiding methodological principle and deeply integrated conceptual framework throughout. The diversity of voices represented by the contributors harmoniously matches that of their nineteenth-century subject matter—the people, places, things, and ideas within and surrounding observatory life—not just within the expected contexts of Britain and America, but in Algeria, Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Sweden, and Thailand. The masterful introduction provides a cogent mapping of the collection's contents in relation to its organizational framework. The substantive history-of-science-style footnotes enrich the professional utility and pedagogical value of each chapter, while the bibliography and index reflect the greater and interconnected sum of the parts. Over sixty illustrations and photographs bring to visual life a full range of principal players and their instruments, architectural spaces and settings, and the observation and graphical recording of astronomical, meteorological, and geodesic phenomena for a variety of audiences. As the introduction makes clear, one central purpose of this volume is to dismantle our conventional image of what observatories do and are; it rebuilds our conceptualization brick by brick, emphasizing the multiple roles such spaces played within science, politics, economics, and culture, not the least of which was constructing elements of the "modern western state and society" (2). Our traditional sense of what observatories observed is expanded to include not only heavenly bodies (moon, stars, planets, sun) but also more down-to-earth subjects such as weather, geography, geodesy, geomagnetism, and navigational phenomena. We also gain a more nuanced understanding of the nature of observational science itself, the problematic complexities of developing and employing precision techniques, the gathering and analysis of sensory evidence, and the difficulties of quantifying perception. In several senses, observatories functioned as "representation factor[ies]" (20), developing imaging technologies, interpreting and disseminating their findings, and contributing to and distributing powerful cosmological narratives. Across the nineteenth-century globe, observatories were part lecture hall, part theater, part political stage, demonstrating the many levels upon which the cosmos itself was "contested territory" (24). The first two essays offer intriguing complements to the relatively familiar story of how imperial power and astronomy played out at Greenwich. Simon Werrett describes how the personal enthusiasms of Emperor Nicholas I—"surveillance and spectacle" (52)—shaped the Pulkovo observatory near St. Petersburg into an apparent model of European prestige and scientific patronage that supported a show of military order and control. Massimo Mazzotti offers a complex account of how Angelo Secchi's program of physical astronomy (proto-astrophysics) at the pontifical observatory at the Collegio Romano generated a strong cosmological narrative. The program was supportive of the omnipotence and freedom of the Creator, and was, after 1870, variously appropriated into the processes and narratives of Italian national identity and nation building. The volatile dynamic between individual vision and political forces [End Page 771] also figures strongly in David Aubin's fascinating explication of eclipse politics in France and Thailand, and in Simon Schaffer's poignant morality tale of the fate of the observers and observatory at Paramatta. Another important thematic cluster—Guy Boistel on France, Sven Widmalm on Sweden, and Martina Schiavon on France and Algeria—considers the interrelation of astronomical observatory work with naval...

Urban Futures/Rural Pasts

ABSTRACTThis article discusses the Scottish national identity narrative conveyed in the 1938 Glasgow Empire Exhibition. The event was intended by its organizers to showcase a modern urban nation, fully regenerated after the difficulties of economic depression. The displays presented in the national exhibit, however, relied heavily upon rural Highland imagery and other resonant markers of Jacobite history. Such hackneyed national symbols did not sit easily with the exhibition's agenda of social, civic and industrial progress. In examining the character and construction of the Scottish exhibit, the article explores this central tension and elucidates the complex representational politics surrounding the display.

Chinese National Identity and Its Implications for International Relations in East Asia

This article traces the evolution of heightened Chinese expectations and the resultant spike in national identity in 2010, using a six-dimensional framework: 1) ideological, 2) temporal, 3) sectoral, 4) vertical, 5) horizontal, and 6) intensity. A hybrid ideology rose to the forefront. Forceful historical arguments covered three distinct periods. The triad of economic, cultural, and political identity raised sectoral identity to an unprecedented level. The leadership kept pressing the case for vertical identity in contrast to the West. Above all, it put the spotlight on horizontal identity to draw a sharper contrast with the United States and neighboring states as well. If at the time of the Hu-Obama summit the tone softened somewhat, China continued its risky wager on widening the identity gap. Regardless of whether China's foreign policy is currently assertive, its national identity narrative remains a driving force for divisiveness in the regional and international order.

The Eve of Spain: Myths of Origins in the History of Christian, Muslim and Jewish Conflict (review)

Reviewed by: The Eve of Spain: Myths of Origins in the History of Christian, Muslim and Jewish Conflict Jonathan Burgoyne Grieve, Patricia E. The Eve of Spain: Myths of Origins in the History of Christian, Muslim and Jewish Conflict. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2009. 312 pp. ISBN-10: 0-8018-9036-9 In The Eve of Spain, Patricia Grieve has produced a tour de force of erudition. The scope of the book spans the eighth to the twenty-first centuries, covering a rang of cultural production from medieval chronicles to nineteenth-century Romantic art, Civil War propaganda, political cartoons, and authors such as Alfonso X, Ahmad al-Razi, Gonzalo de Berceo, Pedro de Corral, Lope de Vega, Fray Luis de León, Washington Irving, Walter Scott, Ramón Menéndez Pidal and Juan Goytisolo, to name only a few of the numerous references to artists, histories and historians, paintings, plays, poetry, myths and legends that tie the stories of the fall of the Visigothic kingdom to Spain's traditions of neo-Gothic nationalism, anti-Semitism, misogyny and maurophobia. The book is divided into three "acts" —"Fall and Redemption" (711-1492); "Promise and Fulfillment" (1492-1700); "Imagining Spain (The Enlightenment to the Present)"— and six chapters, each with separately titled subsections, plus a prologue, interlude, and epilogue. It is accessible to a general audience, revisiting many of the familiar histories of Spain from 711 to the present, but The Eve of Spain is also professionally prepared with extensive endnotes, a critical bibliography and a helpful index that will aid scholarly readers in new research projects that the book will certainly inspire. In spite of its ambitious breadth and what Grieve describes as a "vast array of texts examined and referenced" (207), the author never loses sight of her main subject matter, the myriad recastings of legends and their intersections with cultural anxieties about the nation's gendered, racial, and religious genealogies, many of which are also linked to the histories of the Castilian monarchy. [End Page 220] Grieve outlines the broad goals of her book in the prologue, where she states that it is a history of Spain studied through the lens of its foundational legends, or myths of origins. While the book does indeed explore various legends —such as the story of the Jewess of Toledo, and other notorious lies that stand at the heart of Spain's darkest national atrocities, such as the legend of the Santo Nino de la Guardia— the foundational myth that receives the most critical attention is the popular story of Rodrigo, the last king of the Visigoths, and La Cava, whose rape lead to the revenge of her father, Julián, and the Muslim conquest. Of particular interest to the author in this legend is the character of La Cava, who is gradually transformed into the eroticized temptress that causes the fall of Spain; in essence, she is a new Iberian Eve. In the same development of the legend, Grieve shows how over time, in chronicles, ballads and modern histories, Rodrigo became a morally ambivalent character, led astray by a seductive woman and his own human —and ultimately pardonable— frailties. Grieve is at her best when studying La Cava and the representation of women in general: women's bodies and their sexuality, race and religion as they are rebranded and implicated in both popular and official narratives of Spain's national identity. Characters like La Cava, Leocadia, and the Jewess of Toledo, or real women like Queen Isabel, are studied as templates upon which are inscribed fears of loss and domination, of racial and religious impurity, of subversive sexual impulses that threaten the Christian kingdom from within. They also represent the embodiment of the nation itself in her dichotomized representations: as fallen Eve or redemptive Eva; as the lost Christian nation or the risen new monarchy; or as empire, dictatorship, or modern democracy. Grieve traces the development of this legend in the first three chapters (ch. 1, "Setting the Stage"; ch. 2, "Granada Is the Bride"; ch. 3, "Blood Will Out"), beginning with the earliest Christian and Muslim versions that tend to highlight the notion of God's punishment on one hand and, on...

Culture, identity and hegemony: Continuity and (the lack of) change in US counterterrorism policy from Bush to Obama

This article explores the social and political construction of US counterterrorism policy since the onset of the war on terrorism. The first part of the article focuses on the period of the Bush administration. It explores the cultural grammar expressed in the language of the war on terror, as well as administration attempts to 'sell' the policy to the American public. In addition, it explores the ways in which the war on terror has been institutionalised in counterterrorism practices and institutions, and how it has been normalised and embedded in American popular culture and linked by the national identity narratives surrounding '9/11' and the negative ideograph of 'terrorism', to American identity. Section two of the article explores the discourse and practice of the war on terrorism in the initial period of the Obama administration. It questions the extent to which counter- terrorism policy can be rewritten, given the degree to which it accords with the deep cultural grammar of American identity and is now a well-established ideograph, the extent to which it has been institutionalised in American political practice and embedded in American culture and the ways in which it is rooted in the political- economic interests of the American polity and empire. Finally, the article briefly reflects on questions of change and identity in the construction of US foreign policy. International Politics (2011) 48, 390-411. doi:10.1057/ip.2011.5

A Nation Divided: Regional Identity, National Narratives, and Senator Zell Miller in the 2004 Presidential Election

This essay analyzes the interconnectivity of regional, political party, and national identities and their association with cultural hegemony. The 2004 Republican National Convention Keynote Address by Democratic Senator Zell Miller coupled with his book A National Party No More (2003) created an event that displays how the Southern regional narrative and its role in the national narrative reinforce a white hegemonic view of Southerners and “the South.” This analysis shows that Zell Miller's keynote address and book provided an opportunity for a renewed and more inclusive version of Southern and national identity. However, Miller, political party spokespeople, and media representatives never capitalized on the opportunity but, instead, further entrenched white hegemony into both regional and national identity narratives during the 2004 presidential campaign.

Cultural reformations: medieval and Renaissance in literary history

The original essays in Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature mean to provoke rather than reassure, to challenge rather than codify. Instead of summarizing existing knowledge scholars working in the field aim at opening fresh discussion; instead of emphasizing settled consensus they direct their readers to areas of enlivened and unresolved debate. The deepest periodic division in English literary history has been between the medieval and the early modern, not least because the cultural investments in maintaining that division are exceptionally powerful. Narratives of national and religious identity and freedom; of individual liberties; of the history of education and scholarship; of reading or the history of the book; of the very possibility of persuasive historical consciousness itself: each of these narratives (and more) is motivated by positing a powerful break around 1500. None of the claims for a profound historical and cultural break at the turn of the fifteenth into the sixteenth centuries is negligible. The very habit of working within those periodic bounds (either medieval or early modern) tends, however, simultaneously to affirm and to ignore the rupture. It affirms the rupture by staying within standard periodic bounds, but it ignores it by never examining the rupture itself. The moment of profound change is either, for medievalists, just over an unexplored horizon; or, for Early Modernists, a zero point behind which more penetrating examination is unnecessary. That situation is now rapidly changing. Scholars are building bridges that link previously insular areas. Both periods are starting to look different in dialogue with each other. The change underway has yet to find collected voices behind it. Cultural Reformations volume aims to provide those voices. It will give focus, authority, and drive to a new area.

If it ain't on the page, it ain't on the stage: screenwriting, national specificity and the English-Canadian feature film

Like other film-producing nations, Canada's movie landscape was long ago colonized by US interests. While other nations also welcome American movies, the Canadian case is extreme: Canada has the lowest market share in the world of its own movies on its own screens. Living next to the world's most powerful country, Canada occupies geographically, economically, linguistically and culturally a position unique in the world. The historical and ongoing predicament of the lack of success of English-Canadian feature films has been variously attributed to similarities to the United States in language and culture, lower production budgets, and weaknesses in distribution, exhibition, marketing and quality. The role of screenwriting, however, is little understood and rarely broached. In this article, we argue the importance of screenwriting in understanding national cinemas; show that it has institutional, sociological and nation-specific dimensions; and present Canada as an ideal case to begin examining such factors. The first dimension the institutional is defined by auteurism as well as the collaborative nature of production. The second the sociological is greatly affected by exclusionary networks and various levels of discrimination based on such factors as gender, ethnicity/race, age, sexuality and economic class. The nation-specific area pertains to diverse historical, cultural and institutional practices particular or exclusive to the country or region. English-Canada, for instance, experiences a unique and complex cultural policy environment. Moreover, its fractured and regional history is one that has resulted in the production of obsessively performed narratives of national identity, particularly imbricated with Qubec, the United States, Britain and France. Our analysis draws together strands of intersecting disciplines, combining film theory and history with production studies, close textual analyses, political economy and nation theory, calling for a more complete picture of the role of screenwriting in national cinemas.

Zapotec sacred places, enduring and/or ephemeral: Reverence, realignment and commodification at an archaeological-tourist site in Southern Mexico

The abundant and rightfully famous archaeological ruins of Mexico, besides attesting to the grand achievements of pre-Columbian Mesoamerican culture, also serve as foci for the preservation and/or reaffirmation of contemporary indigenous religion and identity. Additionally, those same ancient ruins have been, in many instances, tidied up and reconfigured variously as outdoor classrooms and museums for the dissemination of a narrative of Mexican national identity, as the country's premier tourist attractions, and thus as sites eventually prized far more as engines of economic development than as educational or religious contexts. Where indigenous peoples are often imagined as passive victims in this commodification of their sacred sites, the case study featured in this article, namely, the twentieth century management of the internationally renowned Zapotec site of Mitla, Oaxaca reveals a native community playing a very active role, arguably the lead role, in the exploitation of the economic potential of its famed ruins. Indeed, the Mitleyenos' entrepreneurially astute reconfiguration of their local sacred geography, a realignment that balanced unprecedented economic challenges with on-going devotional commitments, suggests that the designation of various sites and buildings as ‘sacred’, albeit an extremely pressing matter, is also much more contingent and more transient than is generally assumed.

NATIONALIZING HISTORY AND THE CHALLENGE OF DISCORDANT TEMPORALITIES1

ABSTRACTChristopher Hill's National History and the World of Nations reminds us of the conjunctural moment of an emerging world market in the latter half of the nineteenth century and the promise it offered for vitalizing a “world history” yet to be written. More importantly, it supplies the silhouette of a radically different interpretive approach, formed by the force of a centrifugal perspective that—through its concentration on how France, the United States, and Japan were simultaneously motivated to construct representations of self‐identity in national narratives—converged to disclose the possibility of a wider world no longer held hostage to the geopolitical category of the “West.” Hill's account shows that the impulse behind the formation of national history employed different strategies to imagine a singular linear historical narrative of national identity that aimed both to remove the spectacle of coexisting, different, multiple temporalities and to weld large and regionally disparate populations into a single people who, in a new time, would be instructed to recognize themselves in the nation's story. In Hill's reckoning, national history in France, the United States, and Japan appears simply as another name for historical necessity that sought, through processes of naturalization and nationalization, to overcome the unstable and uneven relationship between state and capital but that failed to conceal the deeper reality of determinations demanded by the relations of capital at the local and international levels.

Were It a New-Made World: Hawthorne, Melville and the Unmasking of America

Utilizing Ernest Gellner and Benedict Anderson’s definition of “nationalism,” this article concerns American nationalism and aesthetics and argues that Hawthorne and Melville were among the first American imaginative writers to challenge the myth of American Exceptionalism in terms of their aesthetic operations, insofar as Hawthorne’s sense of ambiguity and Melville’s sense of multiple perspectives challenges the validity of any single monological narrative of national identity. The article further places this argument within the context of modern and contemporary American literature, with particular references to Flannery O’Connor and Cormac McCarthy, whose most recent novel, The Road, was released on film in the Fall of 2009.