National Imagination Research Articles

“New Engineering Education” in China: a national technological imaginary of the Chinese Dream

This paper examines the “imaginaries” taking place in New Engineering Education (NEE). The NEE is the most recent reform of the engineering education sector in China and is used to interrogate the more encompassing backdrop of the country’s national imaginary, the “Chinese Dream.” Further, this paper analyzes three important policy documents that constitute the blueprint of the NEE. Drawing on Charles Taylor’s concept of the “social imaginary” and using critical discourse analysis, a close analysis of the discursive construction of the technological and national elements in the policy texts is carried out. This combinatory theoretical and analytical framework is used to examine how a normative vision and ideology of the development of engineering education is constructed as taking a “new” direction. In undertaking this policy analysis, this paper demonstrates how a rising power is revolutionizing its engineering education as a resource, coupled with the ideological “social (national) imagination” of the Chinese Dream, to extend its power and geopolitical positioning in a competitive and globalized economy.

Fear of Disconnecting: Global Health Imaginations and the Transformations of the Taiwanese State

Abstract Global health scholarship concerning AIDS governance often regards the global either as products of translocal connections or as external forces that initiate local restructurings. As a state without a membership in major global organizations, Taiwan alternatively presents a case for conceiving of global health as grounded, competing imaginations which serve as the foundation both for a symbolic pursuit of Taiwan’s global membership and for the transformations of the Taiwanese state. Building on a global ethnography perspective, this study explores the idea of in-pursuit-of-globality nationalism by examining three AIDS projects in Taiwan that configured global and national imaginations simultaneously. It particularly looks into how sexuality and race became sites of transformative struggles in those projects, arguing that Taiwan’s marginality is not only a product of global geopolitics but also a standpoint on which multiple globalities are imagined and (re)produced. As such, this study contributes to global health scholarship by rejecting a monolithic view of the global and the national and by centering racial and sexual imaginations in processes of globalization.

Modern Bodies and Changing Identities

Modern Bodies and Changing Identities

Affect, practice, and change: Dancing world politics at the Congress of Vienna

How do practices change? To approach this in practice theory (PT) is a widely debated question. This article brings PT in conversation with the study of emotions in International Relations by considering the role of affect in practice changes. For it is affect that permeates the placiotemporal and bodily constellations during practice performances, continuously provoking changes in and through practices. In initiating this conversation, this article adds to current PT literature by arguing that world political transformations not only find their origin in external conditions, identified as such through individual reflection, but also in affective dynamics of the everyday. To elaborate this more theoretical argument, this article evolves against the empirical backdrop of dancing as an everyday international practice at the Congress of Vienna (1814–1815). Affect that permeated dances in Vienna not only substantiated changes in this practice but, with the waltz replacing the minuet as the preferred dance among international political decision-makers, also changes through it occurred. While the minuet embodied collective sentiments of a transboundary European elite, the waltz helped to further national imaginations of world politics.

Elucidating the blurred lines of the national historical imagination. The narrative allure of Sienkiewicz’s With Fire and Sword in 1933–1934 Poland

The novel With Fire and Sword by Henry Sienkiewicz (1846–1916) is an example of the interweaving of fiction, historiography, and national collective imagination. It was written at the end of the period of Polish partition (1882–1888) and deals with events that marked the history and the collective imaginations of Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews: the history of the Khmel’nyts’kyy Uprising (1648–1657). The epic nature of these historical events already carried the seeds of a powerful and emotional narrative that lends itself to mythicization. However, the reading of this book in a later situation, the Second Polish Republic (1921–1939), led the Polish Sanacja government to withdraw it from the compulsory reading in Polish schools in 1932.This aspect of the Jędrzejewicz school reform sparked a lively debate in the Polish press, whereby historians, literature scholars, and journalists discussed the function that this book should have in the patriotic education of young Polish citizens, against the backdrop of tensions between the state and the political opposition on the issue of minorities, namely the Ukrainian minority. This discussion discloses the central place that Sienkiewicz has been given in Polish culture. At the same time, it examines the position that Polish intellectuals attribute to the Ukrainian minority in the Polish state and culture.

Изобрести, деконструировать и снова изобрести Супергероя: злоключения национального героя в модерновых культурах национализма (от националистического политического плаката к комиксу массовой культуры)

Автор рассматривает проблемы развития образов героев и супергероев в западной культуре. Целью статьи является анализ основных векторов и траекторий трансформаций героических образов как форм актуализации национальных и частично политических идентичностей. Теоретические подходы, вдохновленные конструктивистским поворотом, определяют методологические принципы, используемые автором в этой статье. Предполагается, что современные образы супергероев в массовой культуре общества потребления возникли как результат процессов постепенной эрозии и кризиса нации-государства и стандартизированных политических идентичностей эпохи модерна. Автор полагает, что массовая культура существенно изменила основные векторы и траектории развития героических образов в идентичностях. Автор анализирует роль национализма в трансформации образов героев. В статье рассматривается роль национального воображения и изобретения традиций в формировании и трансформации героических нарративов в современных политических и этнических идентичностях. Автор выявляет основные этапы в трансформации героических образов, предполагая, что 1) «национализмы» 19 века предложили классические образы национальных героев; 2) во второй половине 20 века классический герой в национальном воображении стал жертвой массовизации; 3) к началу 21 века сосуществовали множественные образы национального героя классической культуры и супергероя массовой культуры; 4) в начале 21 века супергерой воображался и изобретался в процессах деконструкции классических образов национального героя. В целом предполагается, что комикс в частности и культура комикса в целом актуализирует основные формы трансформации образов супергероя.

Keeping the Nation’s Secrets: “Colonial Storytelling” within Australian Families

Recent studies of the genealogy craze focus on how family historians appeal to ancestors to fashion their own identities, but practicing family history can also be a form of national identity-work. In this paper I explore how Larissa Behrendt’s notion of “colonial storytelling” might apply to the hi/stories told within families, as they seek to reproduce or challenge inherited narratives of settler colonialism. To do this, I analyze a sample of self-published family histories of “settlement” held at the National Library of Australia. With close attention to family historians’ books, I consider how genealogical research can revise the collective memories that shape both familial and national imaginaries and offer a model for truth-telling.

Narrating the Ugandan nation in Mary Okurut’s The Invisible Weevil

This article seeks to study how Mary Okurut narrates the Ugandan nation through her novel The Invisible Weevil while at the same time exploring how the author centers upon women in her imagination of the new nation. The arguments in this article are derived from concepts proposed by Benedict Anderson and Homi Bhabha, among other scholars, on nationalism. These are arguments that explore the question of identity formation in nations and what holds these nations together in terms of their cultural standpoints and even at times a desire for a better nation for future generations. Through a close textual analysis that focuses on elements of narratology, the study explores the issue of nationalism in the novel. Of interest to this study is how Okurut as a contemporary writer engages history in the novel to narrate the nation and the challenges it faces as it evolves through different and tumultuous leaderships. The narration is undertaken through the viewpoint of various characters who describe different periods, thus creating a channel through which knowledge from each epoch is transmitted by the actions of women who attempt to define a new nation of Uganda that would be devoid of pestilence from ‘the invisible weevil’.

The sausage that awakened a nation: the Carniolan sausage in the Slovenian national imagination, 1849–1918

ABSTRACT The article is based on the argument that the Carniolan sausage (kranjska klobasa) played an important role in the formation and development of Slovenian national awareness in the period between the Spring of Nations and the end of World War I. The Carniolan sausage was an integral part of a unified field of exchanges which enabled the collective recognition of the members of the nation. The article then discusses its place in ‘banal nationalism’ – the daily nationalism that slips from our attention and daily reminds people of their nationality. As a banal national symbol, highlighting national differences and significance, the Carniolan sausage was a constant reminder of the nation. In the last part, the article analyses its role in ‘nationalism from below’, or everyday nationhood – the reproduction of nationhood by ordinary people in everyday life. The Carniolan sausage demonstrates that nationalism is not merely the result of a political programme or ideology, but primarily a network or collection of people, objects, practices, places, institutions, ideologies, technologies, ideas, symbols etc. which define the subjectivity of the people, and form their actions and imagination.

The ‘ultimate toponym’ and national imaginaries in Georgia and Azerbaijan: Constraining Imaginaries of Borchali among Georgian Azeri-Turks

A central component of any national imaginary is the extent to which it is or can be made marketable and consumable by audiences within and outside of the borders of the territorial state. Physical and symbolic delimitation of the “homeland” – in 2- and 3-D, on the ground and on maps, in speech and in individual thought processes - facilitates a certain degree of intra-group solidarity and out-group wariness. After expanding upon the theoretical utility of the concept of the national imaginary, the author examines the role played by the “ultimate toponym”, that of the bounded and institutionalized nation-state, in reifying dominant national imaginaries in Georgia and Azerbaijan. A further aim of this article is to demonstrate the ways that popular and elite-centric conceptions of Azerbaijani and/or Georgian nation-hood stymie Georgian Azeri-Turks’ abilities to imagine alternate forms of identification and belonging, using the phantom territory of “Borchali” as a key example.

Mosques as Spaces of Everyday Geopolitical Tensions

ABSTRACT Mosques in Europe have long been and are still at the centre of political debates, despite the decades-long presence of migrant Muslim communities in Europe. Scholars within geography and other disciplines have studied mosques extensively with a focus on urban space politics, and examined tensions and conflicts between migrant mosque communities and the broader segments of the local people. In this paper, I focus on DITIB, a Turkish umbrella mosque organization in Germany, and I carry these debates into a transnational terrain, re-theorizing mosques not only as political sites, but also everyday geopolitical spaces where national imaginaries and territorial struggles take place in the daily lives of mosque communities. Through this approach, I draw on the studies of feminist geographers who have provided a renewed perspective to classical geopolitics discussions by revealing how geopolitical relations, struggles, and interactions also operate in everyday spaces, relations, and bodies of ordinary people by reproducing the deep-seated exclusions, discriminations and contestations. This paper contributes to critical geopolitics and geographies of religion literatures as well as to broader discussions on the geopolitics of religion by analysing how a mosque organization is situated at the centre of geopolitical tensions, and how transnational and transregional controversies operate on the walls and properties of mosques and in everyday social/cultural activities of mosque communities.

Book Review: The Cultural Trauma of Decolonization: Colonial Returnees in the National Imagination

Book Review: The Cultural Trauma of Decolonization: Colonial Returnees in the National Imagination

Bridging the communal gap: The politics of “Hindu–Muslim” Salman Bhaijaan

ABSTRACT Of the three Khans that dominate Bombay cinema, Salman Khan enjoys fan popularity amongst Muslims in India. This adoration and identification for Khan is surprising particularly because he has been publicly decried as a Muslim since his implicit support of prime minister Narendra Modi. And yet, his films often get released on the Muslim festival of Eid to tremendous box office success. This article analyzes the intersection of fandom and stardom of Salman Khan to discuss how his stardom is a product of negotiations between the public discussions of his religious identity, interviews that seek to convey his star image as authentic, and the cinematic construction of the star as articulated through his roles. An analysis of media coverage of his films across newspapers that cross nations (India and Pakistan), languages (English, Hindi, and Urdu), and urban-rural divides, I examine the paratextual construction of him as a bhaijaan/brother that then impacts interpretation of his films within local, national, and global imaginaries. I argue that the implicit positioning of Salman Khan across the Hindu-Muslim divide becomes explicit through his roles in Ek tha Tiger (2012), Bajrangi Bhaijaan (2015), and even Sultan (2016). This article proposes that the discourse around what I call his “bhaijaanification” serves as an interruption to the fundamentalist trends within India and Bombay cinema that have become worse as a result of large-scale transnational Islamophobia since 2001, and indicates the extent of stardom’s auteurist function where it influences meanings that go beyond the cinematic and into the political.

Visual Regimes of Mobility Photographic Exhibitions on Refugees during the Financial Crisis in Greece

ABSTRACTThis article explores how photographic images of refugees in modern Greece condition national imagination and construct new ethnopolitical moral fantasies. It also examines how repetitive images of suffering in photographic exhibitions become constitutive of a new regime of mobility in the country during the financial and refugee crisis. I argue that refugees’ images articulate kinship and gender norms, national archetypes, ethnic hierarchies, and ideas of mobility and rootedness. They bind together northern European landscapes and resistant Mediterranean subjects and weave new and old visualities into a single mobility aesthetic that reinvents national memory and initiates new political moralities.

Retro Nuosu: Reclaiming the Past, Present, and Future through Participatory Portraits in Southwest China

ABSTRACTThis article explores visual and ethnic representation among Nuosu Yi youth in contemporary China, where photographic subjects’ desires and agency compete with mainstream visual regimes. I argue that Nuosu Yi university students used self‐fashioning and photography to create a new yet radically retro narrative—one that asserts their political and cultural modernity in the Chinese national imagination. “Art photo” studios have recently inspired youth to express themselves through a markedly retro Nuosu aesthetic. In this project, I replicated an art photo studio and photographed fourteen individuals, revealing their individual desires and agency in the broader context of Chinese ethnic representation.

Aesthetic Significance Of Holidays

Holidays have the power to reflect the nation's views, imagination, vision and national values about the scientist and man through artistic images. In addition, holidays form and strengthen feelings such as national pride and national pride, which are composed of such principles as nationhood, popularity, heroism, beauty, grandeur, as well as aesthetic pleasure, aesthetic interest, aesthetic taste and formation of aesthetic ideals – forming a composition of aesthetic perception that distinguishes people from other life events.
 In this article, the stages of development of holidays and their artistic and aesthetic features will be studied and studied on a scientific and theoretical basis. Also, the philosophical-aesthetic analysis of the concept of the holiday, the history of its development and scientific-methodological aspects are studied.

The refiguring of Ancient Rome in Fascist Italy's national imagination

AbstractThe relationship between the Italian fascist regime and Roman archaeology was based on an extreme simplification of antiquity, reduced to a set of aesthetic motifs used to exploit their symbolic power. This article aims to examine how the culture of the ruling classes of liberal Italy came to identify its past in ancient Rome and then to highlight the decontextualisation and semantic transformation of certain symbols taken from ancient Roman iconography under the fascist regime which used them for political and nationalistic purposes. Through the analysis of the process of isolation and transformation to which the ruins of ancient Rome have been subjected, the article highlights how the same dynamics were adopted for iconographic elements of antiquity, leading to the creation of modern symbols invested with supposedly ancient values.

Resisting nationalism in Rompepistas (2009): Pan-national punk attitude in the working class fiction of Kiko Amat

In his third novel, Rompepistas (2009), Catalan writer Kiko Amat creates a semi-autobiographical first-person narrative that observes national crisis as inextricable from geographic and economic issues of migration and constructions/locations of class as markers of identity in Spanish and Catalan national imaginaries. In a context of internal tensions and official discourses of consensus to organize the city in terms of what ‘should’ be visible, a teen narrator describes an emotional punk attitude during the summer of 1987 in post-dictatorial Barcelona in terms of embodying a cultural misdemeanor in Catalan nationalist context. Amat’s affective literary response to the role of ‘foreign’ music in his early life imbues the novel with a soundtrack of a pre-internet, pan-national sense of solidarity among working-class teenagers as the disenfranchised ‘other,’ producing a counter-consensus within official national discourses and unfettered neoliberal urban development plans.

Migrar, morir y seguir perteneciendo

This article is a result of a strategically situated ethnography on the celebration of the Day of the Dead, carried out between 2008 and 2014 at the Cemetery of Flores and in the south-western neighborhoods of Buenos Aires (Argentina). The data gathered through ethnographic observation and a bibliographic and press review show a Latin American regional dynamic in which we observe from the mid-twentieth century a decline of the celebration of the Day of the Dead in the large cities of those countries that have constructed their national-state identity as “non-Indian”. At the same time, in those countries that have included “Indian” identities in their national imaginaries, the celebration is increasing. The research carried out positions Buenos Aires in both spheres: while the celebration of this festivity has declined among the native population, it has grown among Aymara, Kolla and Quechua migrants from the central Andes. I identify how these migrants generate processes of communalization and relational dynamics in the resignification of the celebration to the deceased and the burial of their own people in Buenos Aires. I suggest that in these processes, the subjects build territorialities and produce new senses of attachment towards the new spaces they inhabit.

Queering the Nation: Hegemonic Masculinity, Negative Sovereignty and the Great War in Sebastian Barry’sA Long Long Way

This article examines how Sebastian Barry’s 2005 novelA Long Long Wayexplores the impact of the First World War in the construction of a sovereignty that is, against the grain of a teleological understanding of history, not incorporated in the official chronicle of the Irish independence from the British Empire. Through the lens of what I call ‘negative sovereignty’, which describes a form of agency that amounts to something less than nothing and is located in the obverse of the official historical record, I argue that the novel thematises the disruption caused by the war as a crisis in the hegemonic masculinity at the core of the national imagination. This article, thus, reads the novel’s protagonist, Willie Dunne, as a ‘queering’ subjectivity that embodies this kind of sovereignty, provoking a suspension in the patriarchal foundation of nation-building as symbolised by the severance of his relationship with his father.