National Imagination Research Articles

Adjusted Margin: Xerography, Art, and Activism in the Late Twentieth Century by Kate Eichhorn

Reviewed by: Adjusted Margin: Xerography, Art, and Activism in the Late Twentieth Century by Kate Eichhorn Chelsea Jennings Adjusted Margin: Xerography, Art, and Activism in the Late Twentieth Century. Kate Eichhorn. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016. Pp. xiv + 216. $26.95 (cloth). Utilitarian in appearance, prone to maddening paper jams, and associated with the banality of office work, Xerox machines have not evoked the nostalgia inspired by typewriters, turntables, or 35mm cameras: it is hard to imagine a Xerox machine lending ambiance to a coffee shop or its parts being repurposed for jewelry. The replacement of xerographic copiers with analogous digital machines over the last two decades has made their obsolescence all the less striking. Not only have we failed to miss them, we may have failed to even notice that they are gone. This neglected and maligned technology has found a worthy elegist in Kate Eichhorn. Her Adjusted Margin: Xerography, Art, and Activism in the Late Twentieth Century reconstructs a recent past in which the Xerox machine was edgy, innovative, and central to the counterculture. Although xerography was designed for replication rather than creation and was promoted as a way to make corporate and government bureaucracies more efficient, it turned out to be remarkably well suited to artistic invention and political subversion. Eichhorn argues that such against-the-grain uses of xerography shaped the ways that late-twentieth-century counterpublics were constructed and in turn impacted the arts, grassroots organizing, and the experience of urban space. Announcing at the outset that Adjusted Margin does not restrict itself to a “linear narrative of the copy machine’s evolution,” Eichhorn instead assembles a constellation of artifacts and stories, including moments of relevant autobiography, that “locat[es] the copy machine in time and space and in competing histories of ideas, art, and activism” (7). The resulting account succeeds in filling a substantive gap in media history with an eclecticism that does justice to its subject. Adjusted Margin begins with the official history of Xerox, drawing on Haloid Company advertisements and instructional materials that convey a mid-century optimism about xerography’s ease, speed, affordability, versatility, and fidelity. If this enthusiasm feels overstated to anyone who has physically assaulted a photocopier in frustration (a common occurrence, Eichhorn assures us), it prefigures the sense of possibility embraced shortly thereafter by activists and artists. Among the latter is Sonia Landy Sheridan, whose Generative Systems program at the Art Institute of Chicago placed photocopiers at the center of a novel curriculum that investigated the creative opportunities of new technologies. Sheridan becomes a focal point for considering the broader phenomenon of copy art. A later chapter revisits the artistic dimensions of xerography with a focus on community formation and urban space. The second chapter initiates an emphasis on place by turning to the copy shop’s ambivalent relationship with the law. Although copyright infringement is par for the course in copy shops, [End Page 206] it is generally understood to serve the public good and therefore ignored—hence the symbiotic relationship between universities and the copy shops that cluster at their edges. Categorizing these copy districts as “abject zones,” both necessary to and disavowed by society, Eichhorn offers the high-profile raid of Toronto’s Best Copy by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in the wake of 9/11 as an extreme example of how the copy shop’s marginalization can devolve into xenophobic scapegoating (75). Striking as this incident is, in the absence of other instances of government targeting, it is asked to carry a great deal of argumentative weight in defining how the copy shop is framed in terms of national imaginaries. The chapter is more convincing in its broader claim: if, as Benedict Anderson, Elizabeth Eisenstein, and others have argued, the rise of print culture contributed to the rise of nationalism, xerography exercises a converse power to erode “print culture’s monopolies of knowledge” by threatening the state’s ability to control, or at least monitor, the circulation of discourse (65). Xerography undermines a sense of national unity in other ways too: by privileging local production and distribution of print and by bolstering the vernaculars of specific subcultures. These features made it a powerful...

Le cas Annunziato by Yan Gauchard

Gauchard, Yan. Le cas Annunziato. Paris: Minuit, 2016. ISBN 978-2-7073-2927-1. Pp. 125. 12,50 a. Andy Warhol famously stated that “everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes.”This notoriety turns out to be a bit too long for Fabrizio Annunziato, whose “case” is the subject of this novel. As the result of a practical joke gone awry, he finds himself imprisoned in Florence’s Museo nazionale di San Marco. Specifically in the monastery cell once graced by Fra Angelico. Due to her father’s sudden death, the woman who locked him in forgets to return to free him. Fabrizio will spend nine days in the cell whose only ornaments are two frescos by the thirteenth-century master. There is also a lucarne which rapidly becomes a food conduit, since across from the convent lives the very attractive Raphaëlla who befriends the young man, and keeps him nourished by periodically pitching fruit from her apartment window into his cell. Fabrizio is also not without intellectual stimulation. In his knapsack he has a translation he was working on for a French press. Although he was making slow progress with the task, it turns out that “le travail minutieux de traducteur” is greatly facilitated by “la vie monastique” (57). As a result he has essentially finished his work at the time of his liberation.Yet at first his experience of freedom is rocky. Because the year is 2002, and Italy remains traumatized by the memory of the Red Brigades, a nervousness fueled by the Cavaliere in his role as Prime Minister, Fabrizio is initially imagined to be some sort of “radical red.” Circumstances encourage this suspicion; a deceased half-brother was a militant, and someone had slipped a leftist manifesto into his knapsack. However, these misgivings rapidly disappear as Fabrizio’s adventure captures the national imagination; he is proclaimed a hero.When asked what he would most wish for in Italy, the still weak translator asks to return to his monastery cell. The museum director quickly seizes the prestige possibilities of this request, and turns his establishment into an Italian version of France’s Villa Médicis in Rome, a place where artists can live and work for a fixed period. Fabrizio also profits. He has a fantasy erotic encounter with the young woman who projected his food to him, and a real one with the older woman who had locked him in the cell. Due to his sudden fame, the book he translated will appear with his name in bigger print than the author’s, and the political manifesto will also appear in France in the same format.Yet Fabrizio is uneasy with all this attention, so one day he abandons Fra Angelico’s cell and takes off for parts unknown. Perhaps he is heading back to France, or maybe he is just in search of a quieter, less public monastery. In Le cas Annunziato, Yan Gauchard has produced an engaging divertissement that darkens slightly at the end without, however, losing the lightness of tone so characteristic of this novel. Florida State University, emeritus William Cloonan 206 FRENCH REVIEW 90.3 ...

Rising from of the Ashes: post-war Philippines Architecture

The 1945 battle for liberation witnessed the massive decimation of Manila’s urban built-heritage and the irreplaceable treasures of colonial architecture. Despite the seemingly impossible task to resuscitate war ravaged Manila, it rose again. Out of the ashes, modernism provided the opportunity to craft a new architecture for a newly independent nation. Modernism emerged as the period’s architectural symbol of survival and optimism. In a post-colonial cultural milieu, Filipino architects pursued the iconography of national mythology channeled through the pure surfaces and unadorned geometries of modern architecture. They found in modernism a convenient aesthetic modus to denounce the colonial vestiges embodied in the infrastructure of American neoclassicism in pre-war Manila and sought to create new-built environments that conveyed emancipation from the colonial past and celebrate the vernacular forms processed through modernist geometric simplification. Modernism, therefore, was a logical choice, for it provided a progressive image. The Philippines post-independence architecture endeavored to dispense an image that stimulated a national spirit, inspired patriotism, and invoked faith in the unknown future of the national imagination.

“The Real Geronimo Got Away”: Eluding Expectations in <em>Geronimo: His Own Story; The Autobiography of a Great Patriot Warrior</em>

“The Real Geronimo Got Away”Eluding Expectations in Geronimo: His Own Story; The Autobiography of a Great Patriot Warrior Anita Huizar-Hernández (bio) If you had to pick a single person to stand for Indianness, you could do worse than Geronimo, the iconic Apache leader who stands in American popular memory for resistant warriors everywhere and the defeated prisoners we imagine they became. —Philip Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places Of course the real man they called Geronimo, they never did catch. The real Geronimo got away. — Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead The name Geronimo conjures up a wide variety of images, from World War II paratroopers to children jumping off the high dive to the code-name for the U.S. military’s covert operation to kill Osama Bin Laden. Well over one hundred years after his surrender to the U.S. military in 1886, Geronimo’s image remains a prominent part of the national imagination as a free-floating signifier for bravery, daring, and danger. Of the many things Geronimo is associated with, however, his own autobiography is not usually one of them. The hypervisibility of Geronimo’s name and face is contrasted with the comparative invisibility of what the man himself had to say in Geronimo: His Own Story; The Autobiography of a Great Patriot Warrior. Why is Geronimo so much more prevalent than Geronimo? Though Geronimo’s autobiography has not been completely ignored, particularly by interested academics, there is something about the text that is at odds with the dominant representations of Geronimo, positive or negative, [End Page 49] that have become so frequent and familiar within U.S. popular culture. In this essay, I argue that Geronimo’s relative obscurity is due to its generic constraints and enigmatic content, both of which frustrate the reader by eluding easy interpretation. This interpretive opacity is all the more exasperating given the pervasive nature of Geronimo’s image, for since its publication in 1906, Geronimo has been defying readers’ expectations. By refusing to tell either extreme of the Geronimo mythology, that is, by rejecting the image of both “the iconic Apache leader who stands in American popular memory for resistant warriors everywhere” and “the defeated prisoners we imagine they became,” Geronimo challenges our ability to make such a straightforward distinction in the first place (Deloria, Indians 136). geronimo, in his own words? One of the reasons Geronimo’s autobiography has received surprisingly little attention is the complexity of its authorial voice. The title Geronimo: His Own Story would seem to make the authorship of this text clear and simple: the reader expects the story of Geronimo as told by the man himself. As is always the case with Geronimo, however, the reality is much more complex than first impressions might suggest. In actuality, Geronimo, like other late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century narratives of the lives of Native American people, is a hybrid text somewhere between a biography and an autobiography.1 R. D. Theisz refers to this canon as “bi-autobiographies” and defines them as texts that present “segments or all of the life of a Native American man or woman, narrated orally or in writing, which is then recorded by a non-Indian editor, generally from among social scientists or literati” (66). Arnold Krupat identifies a third party within this collaboration: a translator (For Those 45–46). The end result, then, is not a straightforward telling of one’s own life but an opaquely polyvocal narrative. Geronimo: His Own Story is no exception, narrated by Geronimo to Oklahoma school superintendent S. M. Barrett through Apache translator Asa Daklugie. The first step in analyzing Geronimo, then, is a careful examination of the specific workings of this culturally, linguistically, and epistemologically complex collaborative process. As Krupat cautions, any analysis of this genre “requires consideration of the language, culture, and history both of Native Americans and of Eur-americans [sic]” (For Those xi). In [End Page 50] order to emphasize this inherent cultural duality, he proposes using the term “original bicultural composite composition” in lieu of autobiography (31). Untangling how this duality operates, as Hertha Dawn Wong warns, is no easy feat. Analyzing these texts requires readers...

WALTER MAGAYA'S PROPHETIC HEALING AND DELIVERANCE (PHD) MINISTRIES AND PENTECOSTALISM IN ZIMBABWE: A PRELIMINARY STUDY WITH PARTICULAR REFERENCE TO ECUMENISM

At the time of writing, Zimbabwe was in the midst of an intriguing expansion of the Pentecostal prophetic sector. There had been a notable increase in the number of predominantly young men exercising the gift of prophecy, healing and deliverance since 2009. After Prophets Emmanuel Makandiwa and Uebert Angel had captured the national imagination, Prophet Walter Magaya entered the scene with gusto. His Prophetic Healing and Deliverance (PHD) Ministries threatened to overshadow his “fellow workers in God’s vineyard”. In this article, we locate Magaya’s PHD Ministries within the broader context of the post-2008 Pentecostal prophetic movement. We describe PHD Ministries, paying attention to the religious, socio-economic and political context in Zimbabwe. We draw attention to the ecumenism that is emerging within the prophetic and healing sectors of Zimbabwean Pentecostalism. Overall, we argue that this is a phenomenon that demands serious scholarly attention. The focus on Walter Magaya’s PHD Ministries is motivated by the fact that it has attracted thousands of people at its weekly Sunday services in Waterfalls, Harare, Zimbabwe. Further, in 2015, Magaya took his brand of Pentecostalism to Botswana and South Africa. This article addresses the theme of ecumenism to question the dominant narrative that places emphasis on tension, rivalry and competition within Zimbabwean Pentecostalism. It analyses how Magaya deploys it to deflect attention from himself and to project a more progressive view of himself.

The Representation of Qatari Nation on Television: The Qatari Nation as Traditional in Two Local Channels

<p><em>This paper is a part of MA thesis, “The Representation of Qatari Nation on Television: Tradition, Modernity and Islam in Two Local Channels”. It examines Qatari national imagination in Qatari local television channels, are Qatar National Television and Al-Rayyan Channel. “National imagination” means here an imagined perception of the Qatari nation in which the social and the political factors are integral. The image of Qatari nation is continuously produced in Qatari television channels as a part of national building project. It is presented on television as traditional nation, modern nation and Muslim nation. For the representation of Qatari nation as traditional, there were two television programs chosen for research are Al-Sagar, and Fatah Al-Khair programs. This part contains anthropological and cultural analysis of the traditional television content. There were also numbers of people interviewed to understand the content presented in these television channels. This research aims to contribute to the literature of media, culture and nationalism.</em><em></em></p>

Invented Myths in Contemporary Turkish Political Advertising

This article focuses on the November 2015 elections in Turkey and analyzes the discourses embedded in the political campaign videos produced and circulated by the Justice and Development Party (ruling party since 2002), Republican People’s Party (first political party of the republic), People’s Democratic Party (main vehicle of the Kurdish politics), and Nationalist Movement Party (ethno-nationalist party). Republic of Turkey’s construction in the national imagination over the past 90 years have both rested on and reproduced a range of themes which are themselves based on recently invented nationalist myths such as the common enemy, the multicultural mosaic, order and progress, fight against imperialism, the break from the Ottoman empire, and Turkey as bridge between east-and-west. Hence, we argue that regardless of their severely diverse stance on key issues in the political realm, all the political parties use the hegemony’s myths as tools in their advertisements, therefore reifying these themes in the public imagination.

Transatlantic Women: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Great Britain

Transatlantic Women: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Great Britain

Transatlantic Women: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Great Britain

Transatlantic Women: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Great Britain

Strange Nation: Literary Nationalism and Cultural Conflict in the Age of Poe

Building on his previous investigations of antinationalist themes in the works of Edgar Allan Poe, J. Gerald Kennedy offers a comprehensive study of the ways that Poe and several of his contemporaries practiced unconventional ways of representing America and/or its past. While many antebellum writers insisted that America was a chosen nation, a unified, liberty-loving polity, others “presented contrary images of American life,” exposing “nation-building as a massive, fractious, and grimy endeavor” (x). Some of these critiques, such as the antislavery salvos of William Wells Brown, were the fruit of conscious effort, but other texts expressed traumas and fears hidden within what Kennedy, borrowing a term from Fredric Jameson, calls “the political unconscious,” a reservoir for the irrepressible unease about national life that shaped literary expression. Dedicated to the three decades before 1850, which year F. O. Matthiessen considered the beginning of the “American Renaissance,” Strange Nation is a remarkably comprehensive work wherein Kennedy analyzes several prose texts in multiple genres, including travel writing, the novel, the romance, the tale, and autobiography in various forms; and by treating a diverse lineup of writers such as William Apess, James Fenimore Cooper, Frederick Douglass, Margaret Fuller, John Rollin Ridge, and William Gilmore Simms, to name only six, Kennedy makes a compelling case that gross inconsistencies between national ideals and political realities preoccupied nineteenth-century writers of all regions within the United States and the surrounding territories, and that this tension created a national angst from which works of ideological complexity and emotional power emerged. Arranged topically, Strange Nation contains sections devoted to the following subjects: literary portrayals of Europe and the European roots of many American cultures (Chapter 1), accounts of European travel written by Americans (Chapters 2 and 3), texts about conflicts, military and political, between white settlers and Native Americans (Chapters 4 and 5), literary depictions of the Revolution (Chapter 6), responses to the slavery crisis (Chapter 7), and writing about westward expansion (Chapter 8). In the introduction and Chapter 9, which serve as bookends for Strange Nation, Kennedy establishes the unsettling texts of Poe as models of writing that queers exceptionalist conceptions of national life and reveals “the cultural conflicts emanating from racism, religious bigotry, sexism, slavery, Indian removal, nativism, sectionalism, and many other antebellum controversies” that divided Americans, whose grim experiences countered the “fictions of unity” characteristic of celebratory nationalism (x).A critical tour de force, Strange Nation exhibits the vitality of American writing before the sectional crisis of the 1850s. Particularly effective is Kennedy's technique of juxtaposing works by major authors and writings of their lesser-known contemporaries. For example, Chapter 6 contains analyses of James Fenimore Cooper's The Spy as well as Saratoga, a rarely discussed novel of the Revolution penned by Eliza Cushing. This procedure helps Kennedy demonstrate that subversive themes pervaded much writing produced during the heyday of American literary nationalism. Throughout Strange Nation, Kennedy relies on summary, which seems, at times, excessive, but the summaries are useful for readers unfamiliar with the more obscure texts examined in the book; furthermore, the accumulation of detail achieved through summary bolsters Kennedy's argument. More important, interpretive commentary that is often fresh and thought provoking peppers the book. One memorable example is Kennedy's detailed response to Simms's The Partisan, a novel set in the late eighteenth century and marked by its author's awareness of class strife in Revolutionary society, a discord that Simms linked, as Kennedy argues, to social problems of the Jacksonian era, troubles that exposed deep divisions within a supposedly unified nation. Equally intriguing is Kennedy's well-supported claim that the (in)famous frontier fighter Alexander Macomb, not Richard M. Johnson, was the “model for” General A. B. C. Smith, the broken-down “military hero” of “The Man That Was Used Up,” an 1839 story in which Poe “deconstructs the illusion of sacred destiny that … legitimizes assaults on demonized enemies” (213–14, 217). A number of other Poe texts, from the early tale “The Fall of the House of Usher” to Eureka, the treatise written during the author's last year, also receive new readings, all of which reveal Poe's efforts “to comprehend the strangeness of antebellum national imaginings” (35). Kennedy's book is especially important for Poe scholars eager to explain the author's anomalous position in the American literary canon. As Kennedy indicates, Poe was not a spokesperson for a particular ideological camp; he was a “patriotic skeptic,” a principled but not unprejudiced contrarian warning Americans against the dangers of self-regarding nationalism, which can breed reckless contempt for the moral norms and limits that make communal existence possible (400). Thus the Poe evoked in Strange Nation is not without heroism, a nobility of spirit that still commands respect.

Strange Nation: Literary Nationalism and Cultural Conflict in the Age of Poe

Building on his previous investigations of antinationalist themes in the works of Edgar Allan Poe, J. Gerald Kennedy offers a comprehensive study of the ways that Poe and several of his contemporaries practiced unconventional ways of representing America and/or its past. While many antebellum writers insisted that America was a chosen nation, a unified, liberty-loving polity, others “presented contrary images of American life,” exposing “nation-building as a massive, fractious, and grimy endeavor” (x). Some of these critiques, such as the antislavery salvos of William Wells Brown, were the fruit of conscious effort, but other texts expressed traumas and fears hidden within what Kennedy, borrowing a term from Fredric Jameson, calls “the political unconscious,” a reservoir for the irrepressible unease about national life that shaped literary expression. Dedicated to the three decades before 1850, which year F. O. Matthiessen considered the beginning of the “American Renaissance,” Strange Nation is a remarkably comprehensive work wherein Kennedy analyzes several prose texts in multiple genres, including travel writing, the novel, the romance, the tale, and autobiography in various forms; and by treating a diverse lineup of writers such as William Apess, James Fenimore Cooper, Frederick Douglass, Margaret Fuller, John Rollin Ridge, and William Gilmore Simms, to name only six, Kennedy makes a compelling case that gross inconsistencies between national ideals and political realities preoccupied nineteenth-century writers of all regions within the United States and the surrounding territories, and that this tension created a national angst from which works of ideological complexity and emotional power emerged. Arranged topically, Strange Nation contains sections devoted to the following subjects: literary portrayals of Europe and the European roots of many American cultures (Chapter 1), accounts of European travel written by Americans (Chapters 2 and 3), texts about conflicts, military and political, between white settlers and Native Americans (Chapters 4 and 5), literary depictions of the Revolution (Chapter 6), responses to the slavery crisis (Chapter 7), and writing about westward expansion (Chapter 8). In the introduction and Chapter 9, which serve as bookends for Strange Nation, Kennedy establishes the unsettling texts of Poe as models of writing that queers exceptionalist conceptions of national life and reveals “the cultural conflicts emanating from racism, religious bigotry, sexism, slavery, Indian removal, nativism, sectionalism, and many other antebellum controversies” that divided Americans, whose grim experiences countered the “fictions of unity” characteristic of celebratory nationalism (x).A critical tour de force, Strange Nation exhibits the vitality of American writing before the sectional crisis of the 1850s. Particularly effective is Kennedy's technique of juxtaposing works by major authors and writings of their lesser-known contemporaries. For example, Chapter 6 contains analyses of James Fenimore Cooper's The Spy as well as Saratoga, a rarely discussed novel of the Revolution penned by Eliza Cushing. This procedure helps Kennedy demonstrate that subversive themes pervaded much writing produced during the heyday of American literary nationalism. Throughout Strange Nation, Kennedy relies on summary, which seems, at times, excessive, but the summaries are useful for readers unfamiliar with the more obscure texts examined in the book; furthermore, the accumulation of detail achieved through summary bolsters Kennedy's argument. More important, interpretive commentary that is often fresh and thought provoking peppers the book. One memorable example is Kennedy's detailed response to Simms's The Partisan, a novel set in the late eighteenth century and marked by its author's awareness of class strife in Revolutionary society, a discord that Simms linked, as Kennedy argues, to social problems of the Jacksonian era, troubles that exposed deep divisions within a supposedly unified nation. Equally intriguing is Kennedy's well-supported claim that the (in)famous frontier fighter Alexander Macomb, not Richard M. Johnson, was the “model for” General A. B. C. Smith, the broken-down “military hero” of “The Man That Was Used Up,” an 1839 story in which Poe “deconstructs the illusion of sacred destiny that … legitimizes assaults on demonized enemies” (213–14, 217). A number of other Poe texts, from the early tale “The Fall of the House of Usher” to Eureka, the treatise written during the author's last year, also receive new readings, all of which reveal Poe's efforts “to comprehend the strangeness of antebellum national imaginings” (35). Kennedy's book is especially important for Poe scholars eager to explain the author's anomalous position in the American literary canon. As Kennedy indicates, Poe was not a spokesperson for a particular ideological camp; he was a “patriotic skeptic,” a principled but not unprejudiced contrarian warning Americans against the dangers of self-regarding nationalism, which can breed reckless contempt for the moral norms and limits that make communal existence possible (400). Thus the Poe evoked in Strange Nation is not without heroism, a nobility of spirit that still commands respect.

Remembering Home in Foreign Lands: Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow

ABSTRACTThis study investigates dynamics among national cultures in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, with special emphasis on the characters’ national memories, ones that are activated by the global crisis of World War II. The displaced characters, situated in the foreign lands of wartime Europe, generate such memories for cultural and ideological purposes. This essay explores the manner in which their memories, implicated with founding myths and elitist genealogy, expose serious contradictions in national histories. Gravity’s Rainbow critically undermines the characters’ desire to return to the pristine national origin and reformulates their genealogy when it powerfully generates the memory of imperialist aggression and modernizing, technological violence. This study also grapples with the questions of primordialism and genealogy in the national myths of the colonial other, especially the type of primordialism called “nativism.” Their myths interrupt imperial national imagination and criticize destructive ideologies exhibited by the Western powers.

“The Mic Is My Piece”: Canadian Rap, the Gendered “Cool Pose,” and Music Industry Racialization and Regulation

Over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, Black Canadian Rap artists, many of whom are the children of Caribbean-born immigrants to Canada, employed the hyper-racialized and hyper-gendered “Cool Pose” as oppositional politics to intervene in a conversation about citizenship, space, and anti-blackness. Drawing from local and trans-local imaginings and practices, Black Canadian rappers created counter-narratives intended to confront their own sense of exclusion from a nation that has consistently imagined itself as White and rendered the Black presence hyper-(in)visible. Despite a nationwide policy of sameness (multiculturalism), Black Canadian musicians have used Rap as a discursive and dialogical space to disrupt the project of Black Canadian erasure from the national imagination. These efforts provided Black youth with the critically important platform to critique the limitations of multiculturalism, write Black Canadian stories into the larger framework of the nation state, and remind audiences of the deeply masculinized and racialized nature of Canadian iconography. And yet, even as they engaged in these oppositional politics, rappers have consistently encountered exclusionary practices at the hands of the state that have made it increasingly difficult to sustain a Black music infrastructure and spotlight Canadian Rap’s political and cultural intervention.

THE BERIMBAU'S SOCIAL GINGA: NOTES TOWARDS A COMPREHENSION OF AGENCY IN CAPOEIRA

Abstract Although the berimbau is widely acknowledged today as part of capoeira - in Brazil and around the world - only a 'minimal' history of this instrument exists concerning its evolution over the twentieth century. The sounds, songs and notes of the berimbau, as well as its circulation among capoeiristas, artists, athletes and intellectuals, played an important role in the historical shift from a 'poisonous' capoeira to the 'non-poisonous' styles. The latter were the same styles that became national with enough of a violent edge to maintain the ambivalence between martial art, game and dance, as exemplified and echoed by the capoeira movement between 1930 and 1960. This article approaches the berimbau as an object embodied with a specific kind of agency, useful to the national imagination, to the control of the body and to the promotion of hierarchies among its practitioners.

The Mapuche in Modern Chile: A Cultural History

The author of this book studies the representation of the Mapuche people from the military occupation of their land (1861–1881) until the present. As the author herself explains, “Alongside an analysis of Mapuche political activism, the following chapters investigate the multiple, contesting ways in which Mapuche and Chilean artists, writers, and intellectuals have grappled with the country's history of internal colonialism” (p. 4). She does so by “deal[ing] with poetry more substantially than any other form of cultural production, but [by] also incorporat[ing] popular music, photography, theater, testimonial writing, ethnographic studies, and literary criticism” (p. 4). Another major concern of the book is state cultural policy toward the Mapuche, which is intimately connected to political or socioeconomic reforms. The author “bring[s] to the forefront some of the key shifts in cultural policy so as to expand our understanding of Chilean state discourses on the ‘indigenous question’” (p. 4). She also “scrutinizes changes to the teaching curriculum at both local and national levels,” as well as government policies relating to museums and national monuments (pp. 4–5). This book, in other words, is an analysis of images and words as discourse, with the aim of resolving the following questions: What did military conquest mean for the Mapuche and Chilean military officers, beyond the obvious economic, political, and territorial consequences? What did compulsory primary education in the early twentieth century mean for the Mapuche? In what ways did they engage with national debates about schooling and with broader state discourses of civilization and modernization? What type of education did they seek? What did discourses of indigenismo (since 1940) mean for Chilean and Mapuche intellectuals?The author's analysis “focuses mainly on the relationship between indigenous Mapuche identities and Chilean national identities,” building upon the historiography of race and nation in Latin America to “explore not only how Mapuche people have challenged dominant national imaginaries in Chile, but also how they have participated in the construction of these imaginaries” (p. 10). The author shows how the discourse of mestizaje (cultural and racial mixing), instead of granting the Mapuche people an increased presence within Chilean society, allows for the ignoring of their existence, putting contemporary Mapuche identity in doubt or denial. Crow also highlights “Chilean intellectuals who have recast official discourses of mestizaje so as to reinforce the presence of indigenous peoples in Chile, and—more significantly—to assume their own indigenous heritage” (p. 11). Furthermore, the book examines the “complex intersections between class and indigenous identity in Chile,” exploring not only the Left's problematic subsumption of the Mapuche within the peasant masses—a theoretical move that effaces indigenous cultural particularity—but also contrary attempts to robustly “link programs of social and racial vindication without diminishing the significance of either” (p. 11).In chapter 4, Crow examines these issues for the 1960s and the early 1970s. There is evidence, for example, that President Salvador Allende and his main advisers understood the specificity of the Mapuche being (the identity of the Mapuche in the ontological sense) as different from the Chilean peasantry, whereas other intellectuals (not the Allende government advisers) ignored this difference, influenced by an evolutionary and developmental paradigm. During this period, according to the author, “Mapuche culture became increasingly visible . . . despite, in conjunction with, or indeed sometimes as a direct result of government initiatives” (p. 17). She concludes that Allende “acknowledged that the Mapuche had a distinct culture and history, and he engaged with some of their demands in this regard, but not all and not always,” an ambiguous conclusion that does not resolve the contradiction between recognition or ignorance (or nonrecognition) of the specificity of the Mapuches' issues (pp. 147–48). But this ambiguity is also the result of the fact that the question of Allende's stance toward the Mapuche has not been fully resolved by scholars.This work reliably follows the documentary evidence and develops a scholarly apparatus for addressing Mapuche cultural history, though, of course, it does not exhaust the literature, especially the most recent (which is constantly growing). Crow's methodology is sound and is presented in clear language. This book is important for its attempt to make a cultural history and for its attempt at objectivity, the author maintaining emotional distance from her subject. The book will be of interest to specialists, students, academics, and activists, Chilean and Mapuche, in the fields of history and various human sciences.

A mexicanidade encontra o americanismo: A circulação de imaginários nacionais e os regimes de gênero entre o Western e a Comedia Ranchera

Este ensaio discute os fluxos cinematográficos transregionais entre Hollywood e a indústria cinematográfica mexicana, usando o exemplo de dois grandes gêneros: o western estadunidense e sua contrapartida mexicana, a comedia ranchera. Como um estudo científico de “glocalização” (ver RO- BERTSON), este ensaio traça algumas das complexas interconexões entre esses dois gêneros e o “capital midiático” (CURTIN) investido, que será espe- cificado de acordo com “lógicas de acumulação”, “forças socioculturais vari- áveis” e “trajetórias de migração criativa” particulares, incluindo não somente as equipes de filmagem, como diz Curtin, mas, particularmente, padrões de gênero. Portanto, aqui se examina a circulação de estrelas e outras pessoas da equipe de filmagem, sinergias crossmedia entre as indústrias de cinema e de música, bem como intervenções políticas de governos e inter-relações econômicas entre as respectivas indústrias culturais (trans)nacionais. Dá-se uma atenção específica às negociações de identidades de gênero e culturais vis-à-vis os processos misturados de globalização e localização.

Encountering the stranger: Ontological security and the Boston Marathon bombing

Since 9/11, the rise of Islamist extremism has taken hold of the national imagination as the greatest threat facing the USA. The 2013 Boston Marathon bombing seemed to add a new chapter to the War on Terror with the ‘introduction’ of homegrown terrorists who wantonly kill innocent Americans, just as the 19 hijackers did. They are evil. Yet, the narrative of the Tsarnaevs that emerged shortly after the attack crafted a far more ambiguous relationship to these threatening bodies. What allows for such ambiguity, given the Tsarnaevs’ murderous acts? In this article, I look at how identity demarcation was used directly after the bombing as a form of securitization, paying particular attention to the role of the stranger. Contributing to both identity and ontological security theory, I argue that analyzing the discursive (re)presentation of the liminal and its mediation between inclusion and exclusion best captures the multifaceted nature of security, which includes both ontological and material well-being. I show that the particular manner in which the stranger shows up in the portrayal of the Boston attack helps steer American identity practice(s) down specific paths of meaning-making that are not as clear-cut as ‘righteous Self’ versus ‘evil Other.’

Exhibiting Confrontations: Negotiating Dutch Design between National and Global Imaginations

Exhibiting Confrontations: Negotiating Dutch Design between National and Global Imaginations

Dialogues of Memory, Heritage and Transformation: Re-membering Contested Identities and Spaces in Postcolonial South African and Zimbabwean White Writings

SummaryThe protean and contested symbols of Zimbabwean literature remain the land and invented heroes, including a hagiographic iconisation of shrines, best seen in the Zimbabwe ruins, the Zimbabwe Bird and the national heroes’ acre. In South African white writings, the symbolic topos has been dominated by prison walls, the hangman’s noose, Robben Island and, in the post-apartheid era, Saartjie Baartman and the imagined rainbow generated through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The horrors of apartheid are ideographically embodied in Coetzee’s tongueless protagonist, Foe. In both locales, white writings – fictive renditions and auto/biographical – have invited critically legitimated constructs of coherence. This article contends that answers to our present postcolonial crises inhere in the multiplicity of voices, not monological narratives. Diversity, and therefore polyphony, is valued for its ability to suggest multiple ways of seeing and belonging to national imaginaries; its ability to suggest answers to the postcolonial problematic related to memory, heritage and transformation. This article explores how the meanings of cultural objects often display shifting appropriations that garner either symbolic or ephemeral qualities, demonstrating the ability of those in power at different historical junctures to determine and confer minted meanings. In turn, this anxiety and re-membering of space and symbol has a bearing on ownership claims, and gives rise to a choreographed heritage discourse.

Place, Identity and National Imagination in Postwar Taiwan, by Bi-yu Chang. New York: Routledge, 2015. xviii+260 pp. US$145.00 (cloth).

Previous articleNext article No AccessReviewsPlace, Identity and National Imagination in Postwar Taiwan, by Bi-yu Chang. New York: Routledge, 2015. xviii+260 pp. US$145.00 (cloth).David SchakDavid SchakGriffith University, Brisbane Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The China Journal Volume 76July 2016 Published on behalf of the Australian Centre on China in the World at the Australian National University Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/686620 Views: 76Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.