Nationalist Logic Research Articles

Beyond (Ethno)linguistic Determinism: Diverse Approaches to Nationalism in Habsburg-Austrian Schools

Abstract Research on the nexus between education and nationalism in the Habsburg Empire has often focused on the role that language may have played in top-down nationalization processes and the popular dissemination of national thought. According to contemporary nationalist logic, undergoing education in a certain language of instruction also entailed the internalization of nationalist values inherent to its corresponding nationalist movement. The present article argues that the Habsburg educational experience was much more contingent, and draws attention to the diversity of pedagogical approaches towards nationalism and nationality that could be encountered in Austrian schools during the last five decades of Habsburg rule. By using examples from German- and Slovene-language textbooks, it shows that sociopolitical, temporal, as well as institutional factors played an important role in determining the practical values and attitudes towards the nationalism that students encountered during their school years. With systematic empirical studies remaining rare, further research will be necessary to gain a fuller insight into the complexities of the Habsburg education system and its potential effects on popular collective identity formation.

The Power of Citation: Feminist Counter-Appropriation of State Discourses in Post-Reform China

This article presents a comprehensive examination of the new discursive strategy devised and deployed by Chinese pan-feminist communities in response to the pervasive state intrusion, which we call feminist counter-appropriation. These tactics entail adoption and strategic adaptation of the state-sanctioned discourses by feminist netizens to tell their own stories while shielding them from severe punitive measures. Our analysis discerns two types of counter-appropriation practices: deliberate counter-appropriation that involves parodic and satirical redeployment of the party-state’s stigmatizing framing of feminism, and promotional counter-appropriation that uncritically embraces the sanitized version of feminism following the statist and nationalist logic yet creates room for discussion of gender-related and other forms of social inequalities. While acknowledging inherent limitations and susceptibility to manipulation by conservative forces, we argue that these counter-appropriation practices demonstrate the resilience of civil societies in navigating censorship and oppression to subvert the oppressive intentions of party bureaucrats, expose inherent flaws of the official languages, and challenge the entrenched gender inequalities in post-reform China.

Canadian Cultural Nationalism in the Time of Digital Platforms: Reframing Proposed Amendments to the Broadcasting Act

Background: Last amended in 1991, the Broadcasting Act has recently been the object of legislative reform projects with the aim of incorporating online broadcasting into the existing legislative and regulatory framework and expanding the diversity representation mandate of the Canadian broadcasting system.Analysis: The article analyzes proposed amendments to the Broadcasting Act iterated in the third and final version of Bill C-10 (2021) and in the current version of Bill C-11 (2022) and develops a critical analysis of their implications vis-à-vis discursive constructions of Canadian cultural nationalism and the model of cultural citizenship that it fosters.Conclusion and implications: Proposed amendments recuperate the cultural nationalist logic that underscores Canadian cultural policy’s efforts to secure cultural sovereignty. In the legislative reform project, this logic manifests through the continued economization of cultural production in the digital era and the perpetuation of a settler colonial vision of cultural citizenship that remains skewed by ethnolinguistic hierarchies.

Through the Looking Glass:

In spite of Modi’s promise of good days (acche din) in 2014, many Indians still struggle with unemployment, low income, poor health and other difficulties. Though some problems eventually find solutions and middle-class metropolitans increasingly seek help from gurus and psychologists, long-term misfortune and disturbances are still frequently attributed to black magic or possession. Drawing on anthropological fieldwork in Kanpur and Bareilly, this article examines the unintended cosmopolitan effects of such practices, which occasionally unfold in ways that traverse and unsettle official religious boundaries, even in polarized times. Heuristically contrasting Modi to Alice in Wonderland, the article spells out the double bind of many low-income Hindus who seek supernatural assistance in times of crisis: should they follow the logic of inexpensive efficacy, even if necessitating engagement with unfamiliar ritual worlds in heterotopic spaces associated with the religious other? Or should they rather follow the emergent Hindu nationalist logic of Hindu exclusivism, according to which ritual remedies beyond a Hindu ritual repertoire would be inappropriate? The persisting prevalence of the former logic under Modi is illustrated with three cases, two of which are interrelated. Firstly, we meet a female professional seeking help against suspected black magic from a rustic Sufi-Muslim healer. Secondly, we meet a Kali devotee seeking help against spirits that disturbed his career and marriage in a renowned Sufi-Muslim dargah. The final case shows how familial neglect, economic hardship and an interreligious marriage conducted two generations earlier came together in a case of possession. The cosmopolitan effects of such instances, the article argues, lie in their tendency to form an anti-structural, heterotopic counterweight to aggressive Hindu nationalism.
 counterweight to aggressive Hindu nationalism.

Pass Fe WhiteandHomestretch: Joan Miller's Satirical “Reads,” Refusals, and Affirmations

AbstractThis article examines Joan Miller's use of choreographic citation in her solos,Pass Fe White(1970) andHomestretch(1973). The solos “read” the desire to embody idealized, feminine whiteness in a critique of institutions for accessing national belonging—celebrity, education, and marriage—satirically exposing the gendered and racialized exclusions of the figure of the abstract “human” as “proper” citizen. Miller's work performs queer, Black feminist, diasporic desires for a world beyond Black and white nationalist logics, refusing to be “properly” placed in national hierarchies of female objecthood, while affirming the capacity to desire differently by proposing alternative terms for belonging in the world.

Military cosmopolitanism and romantic indigeneity: Crafting claims to statehood in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss and Easterine Kire’s Bitter Wormwood

The world wars definitively changed the relations with the state of the peoples of India’s northeastern frontier. The wars were both fought on their terrain (with the invasion of the Japanese army) and led to the recruitment of people from the region to serve in the British Army. The contemporary Anglophone Indian novel documents the lingering effects of this militarization in the many insurgencies that have fragmented the region in the postcolonial era. Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (2006) depicts the Gorkhaland uprising of the 1980s in the Kalimpong district of West Bengal, which demanded a separate state, while Easterine Kire’s Bitter Wormwood (2011) describes the Naga peoples’ traditional way of life against the backdrop of attempts to declare independence from the Indian state. In this article I argue that these novels capture how these secessionist movements use the experience of the world wars to craft a political identity based on military brotherhood to claim independence from the Indian state. These movements thus undertake a complex reworking of the valences of the figure of the “soldier”, central to so many accounts of national integrity. At the same time, reproducing the nationalist logic of the Indian state, these novels more readily recognize an “indigenous” identity based on a claim to the land as the political basis of nationhood. Hence, these novels about secessionist struggles reveal how certain narratives of nation formation become the only legitimate means for making claims for political rights and independent statehood over the course of the twentieth century.

Η μετάβαση των κοινωνιών στη Νοτιοανατολική Ευρώπη προς τη δημοκρατία και την οικονομία της αγοράς: προβλήματα και προοπτικές

After the collapse of the centrally planned economies in Southeastern Europe, the new governments that came to power tried to create institutions capable of meeting the needs of new era and the imperatives of the neoliberal economy. They had to face the nationalist logic that penetrated the Balkan populations, similar to that of other parts of the world, such as Africa and Asia, or even in Europe such as Catalonia or the Basque struggle. A special study is required to understand the problems that have arisen in the Balkan region, such as population shifts, urban modernization after four decades of “existing socialism” with the particular characteristics of that era. It is also important to analyze the major socioeconomic developments that have taken place in the Balkan countries since 1989.

EU Children in Brexit Britain: Re‐Negotiating Belonging in Nationalist Times

AbstractThis article contributes to debates on identification, home and belonging by focusing on EU children in Brexit times.1 The article combines attention to the emotional and affective side of integration with a focus on the effects of the discursive practices of the state on these processes. The article explores how Italian children and their parents navigate the increasingly neo‐assimilationist pressures in Britain. Specifically, it looks at children's ways of accommodating their parents’ values of mobility, multilingualism and transnationalism with the revived nationalist logic now dominant. The article argues for renewed scrutiny into the role of public discourses on migrants’ experiences, which illuminate the redrawing of the boundaries between inclusion and exclusion at moments of crisis.

"The Whole Content of My Being Shrieks in Contradiction against Itself": Uncanny Selves in Sayed Kashua and Philip Roth

The proliferation of doppelgängers and other doubles in Sayed Kashua's Second Person Singular (2010) and Philip Roth's Operation Shylock: A Confession (1993) suggests that the demands and expectations of national identity threaten the subjectivity of those who try to resist it. In both novels, paranoia and the abject unsettle the boundaries of subjectivity and contribute to the disequilibrium of the mind and the fragmentation of the body. Damaged bodies signify the disintegrating selves of characters who try in vain to overcome the limitations imposed on them by ideological paradigms of identity itself; paranoia is the psychological expression of the seemingly stable "I." Paranoia and abjection—simultaneously the reason for and the consequence of the doublings and splits in these novels—indicate identity's encroachment on subjectivity. As such, these novels, though divergent in some aspects of their confrontation with identity, invoke similar phenomena to mount a scathing critique of nationalist logic.

The Latino Nineteenth Century ed. by Rodrigo Lazo, Jesse Alemán

Reviewed by: The Latino Nineteenth Century ed. by Rodrigo Lazo, Jesse Alemán Elena V. Valdez LAZO, RODRIGO, and JESSE ALEMÁN, eds. The Latino Nineteenth Century. New York: New York University Press, 2016. 384pp. $89.00 cloth; $30.00 paperback. The fifteen essays in The Latino Nineteenth Century illuminate for literary scholars a complex and often overlooked legacy of Latinidad that has largely remained absent from critical discussions in mainstream nineteenth-century American literary studies and Latina/o studies, although scholars involved in the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project have been writing about nineteenth-century Latina/o literature for, in some cases, more than two decades. Editors Rodrigo Lazo and Jesse Alemán have brought together some of the most active scholars in these fields to produce The Latino Nineteenth Century, an innovative volume that offers a variety of methods and terms for literary critics and historians to better grapple with the “Latina/o dimension” of American literary history and its implications for our contemporary moment. Most if not all the essays in the volume make the case that the key to expanding our knowledge about the American nineteenth century in general and the Latino nineteenth century in particular is to rethink the linguistic and formal boundaries of the American literary archive. Central to most if not all of the essays in The Latino Nineteenth Century is the premise that the inclusion of Spanish-language texts in the archive of American literature is no longer a question but a necessity. Lazo underscores this point by stating [End Page 567] in the introduction that besides having to deal with a “dispersed” and “incomplete” collection of materials, scholars examining the literary history of Latinas/os must also deal with its linguistic diversity, which “raises questions about the notion of an archive (singular) versus archives that are not always and not easily accessible” (9, 10). Although the advantages of consulting a multilingual archive are somewhat obvious for many scholars of Latina/o studies, Chicana/o studies, ethnic studies, and other related disciplines—especially for scholars involved in the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project—the volume’s insistence on “reading Spanish-language texts” demonstrates for a broader academic audience some of the tensions, contradictions, and networks such a multilingual American literary archive reveals, as well as the questions it generates (Alemán viii). To what extent, for example, does Spanish-language print culture change the way we view historical figures we thought we knew well? How do we reconcile the nineteenth-century Latina/o archive’s formal and linguistic differences with existing categories and paradigms that fail to account for the conditions that produced them? Contributors to the volume take up the issue of the archive in different ways, some more directly than others. Raúl Coronado writes that Latina/o history should not limit itself to an “object of knowledge (‘American literature’)” that was determined by the “logic of the nation” (50). One strategy for avoiding the impeding effects of nationalist logic on the writing of Latina/o literary history, he argues, is by consulting “alternative, minoritized—as it were—documents that yield different narratives of belonging” and approaching it as a “history of textuality” (51, 54). For him, this means being as aware of Latin American literary history as we are of the literary history of the United States, consulting Spanish-language texts, and focusing on local articulations of Latinidad (54). Carmen E. Lamas makes a similar argument about the importance of knowing the Latin American literary archive in her essay, which shows through a case study of Cuban intellectual Raimundo Cabrera’s writing how the Latin American literary archive helps scholars recover the heterogeneity of Latina/o identity. The terms “Latino/Latina” are directly related to the issue of the archive in The Latino Nineteenth Century, of course, for they encompass a range of experiences and identities. Although some audiences may be skeptical about the applicability of “Latino/a” in a nineteenth-century context and its utility as an organizing term, Lazo explains that it enjoyed widespread usage throughout the Americas, where people used it to “reference themselves” but sometimes in a way that...

Mary Peabody Mann’s Juanita and Martin R. Delany’s Blake: Cuba, Urban Slavery, and the Construction of Nation

This essay compares the depiction of Havanese slavery in two nineteenth-century US novels, Mary Peabody Mann’s Juanita and Martin R. Delany’s Blake. I contextualize these depictions of Havana in terms of contemporaneous discourses regarding the incompatibility of urbanity and slavery. Juanita’s representation of a chaotic Havana, I contend, underpins Mann’s nationalist argument that the absence of problems endemic to Cuban slaveholding entails the superiority of US liberal democracy. Various moments in the text, though, compromise this nationalist logic by revealing similarities between US Southern and Cuban slaveholding. In Blake, Delany seizes on this tension, suggesting that the meaningful division is not that between nations but rather a transnational conflict between US and Caribbean white elites and the black slaves they exploit. For Delany’s protagonist Blake, Havana offers opportunity, as its large, heterogeneous black population makes possible successful slave revolt. In conclusion, this contrast in attitudes towards urban slavery focalizes meaningful differences between Mann's white paternalist and Delany's black nationalist approaches to abolition.

Truth or Reconciliation? The Guest and the Massacre That Never Ends

The Guest (Sonnim), Hwang Sok-yong's 2001 novel, offers a sustained meditation on conditions of possibility for inter-Korean reconciliation. Featuring memories of what happened in Sinchon, a North Korean town where an estimated thirty-five thousand civilians were killed during the early months of the Korean War, the novel explores the relationship between official and unofficial narratives of the Korean War, and between different versions of official histories that have sustained the nationalist logics of Korean division. The novel also moves beyond representation to a performance of reconciliation by turning the narrative into a ritual space in a reinvigorated implementation of Korean funerary tradition. In the process, The Guest both couples and decouples truth and reconciliation. While seeking validity for its version of the Sinchon massacre by offering up its fictional narrative as a truthful revision of official histories, The Guest incessantly undermines the empirical ground for its version of history. What opens up as a result is the gap between cognition and affect, law and lawfulness; reconciliation emerges not as the natural consequence of establishing truth but as an agonizing attempt to close the gap between truth and justice. Where truth may actually hinder the cause of reconciliation, what is the price of arriving at truth without reconciliation, and of implementing reconciliation without truth? Situating The Guest in the context of Hwang Sok-yong's own commentary, this essay examines the relevance of these questions for contemporary Korea.

Intellectual iconoclasm as modernizing foreign policy: the cases of Mahathir bin Mohamad and Lee Kuan Yew

This article attempts to engage in a preliminary twinned study of the foreign policy styles of Mahathir bin Mohamad and Lee Kuan Yew within the framework of ‘modernizing Southeast Asian foreign policies’. Modernization is a process of immense multidimensional displacement in economy, society, political system, attitudes towards politicians, identities, work, and consumption. As such the onus falls upon their leaders to either mitigate change or productively awaken their followers to embrace a new mode of thought. Both Lee and Mahathir have however chosen to engage in the foreign policy of intellectual iconoclasm featuring the narrative of ‘productive shock’, manufactured nationalist logics, elitist policy-making and elaborate self-propaganda.

Race and Ethnicity in Post-network American Television

This article examines post-network American television’s fraught relationship with race and ethnicity by exploring two recent media ventures focused on South Asian Americans: MTV-Desi and NBC’s Outsourced. Approaching these media ventures as productive failures, we examine how industry workers narrate these failures to trace how the contemporary television industry in the United States imagines racial and ethnic identities. Bringing together interviews with media industry professionals, observations at a media industry convention, and thematic analyses of trade press and news coverage, we argue that both media ventures are symptomatic of nationalist logics that inform the operations of television industry professionals even as they seek to target audiences increasingly embedded in transnational media circuits. Industry professionals’ misreading of South Asian Americans’ position in the racial economies of the United States and changes in patterns of media circulation reveal the challenges confronting the media industry when it comes to issues of race and ethnicity.

Nuuk underground: musical change and cosmopolitan nationalism in Greenland

AbstractIn Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, there have been a significant number of musical events in recent years that have been called ‘underground’. These have formed an underground scene that offered a cosmopolitan alternative to established ‘greenlandificated’ popular music. This paper accounts for the building of this underground scene by Nuuk youth, and asks why these young people valued musical change informed by a cosmopolitan outlook, while at the same time holding firmly to the conviction that their activities were a part of the dominant Greenlandic nation-building project. Social agents, which played key roles in building the Nuuk underground scene, described their activities as attempts to come to terms with a history in which Greenland has been perceived as a subaltern nation. This enquiry explains the nationalist logic behind a concern with performing similarity with Western nations in the Nuuk underground scene, as opposed to the more widespread romantic nationalist logic concerned with expressing a distinguishable national character. This further leads to an expansion of a position of cosmopolitan nationalism.

Global Citizenship Made-in-Asturias: Xuan Bello’s Paniceiros

SIMPLISTIC portraits of global citizenship paint the world as a single hypermodern non-place, a world of erased borders, flattened differences, and ceaseless market flows. In this brave new territory, transnational and nongovernmental powers whittle away at the sovereignty of old-fashioned nation states. Technology overcomes the old dictums of space and time. The global citizen, armed with Google translator and a smart phone, flows like the goods she purchases and the capital she employs to do so, across borders and in and out of markets--hyper, cyber, and occasionally flesh-and-blood, but ever emerging. In this new global reality, place would seem to hardly matter. While this may hold true for some, contemporary human subjectivity in general still experiences material constraints. Regional cultures, for example, walk a sometimes violent line between the demands of proverbial local matter and global spirit. The cultures of the most historic of Spain's autonomous communities provide outstanding examples. Each boasts globally savvy artists whose works manifest the tension between global and local and a sometimes desperate need to sustain, rescue, or even resuscitate local cultures long-belittled or even proscribed. One of the most successful twenty-first century attempts to pull off this global/local balance in Spain comes, interestingly, not from either the more separatist or the more cosmopolitan of its autonomies, but from the very rural and the very seemingly Spanish (in its legendary status as the birthplace of the Christian Reconquista that gave rise to modern Spain) region of Asturias. Xuan Bello's Paniceiros (2005) is simultaneously a model of regional and cosmopolitan writing. Deeply situated in a lovingly depicted rural idyll, Paniceiros nonetheless creates what we may call, borrowing from theorists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, an experience of smooth space and place appropriate to the demands and opportunities of globally savvy readers. Filled with old historical photographs, local folktales, lyric poetry, alphabetically ordered definitions of local key words, and personal and family memories, Paniceiros at first glance is the kind of nationalistic paean easily dismissed as inappropriate to fomenting effective global citizenship. In an introductory prologue, Bello describes the collection in the melancholic terms of viaje imposible a mi pasado, a study of mundo que se muere (9, 10). Like any self-respecting nationalist, Bello links his romantic longing for the forgotten homeland with a nostalgia for a magical mother tongue: Aquella gramatica y aquel vocabulario, leidos una y otra vez, fueron algo asi como un conjuro que me abrio las puertas del alma (10). He reflects on the personal loss felt when his family moved from the rural idyll of Paniceiros to the local capital of Oviedo where he and his sister found themselves atrapados por las reglas de la ciudad (11). The collection's first poem sustains this seemingly nationalist logic of loss. Entitled, like the name of the collection and the lost idyll, Paniceiros, the poem describes a once glorious realm on the verge of collapse: Conozco un pais donde el mundo se llama Zarreu Grandiella Picu la Mouta Paniceiros Un mundo que perdio sus caminos ... Un mundo que era alto luminoso esbelto Naciente y fuente y vocacion de rio ... Un pais donde la casa cae Cae el horreo el puente el molino la iglesia el hombre tambien cae ... Donde tan solo nos queda la memoria corrompida de la infancia Nuestra soledad Este abandono nuestro. (39) The five hundred-plus pages that follow appear to confirm the deep nationalistic nostalgia the poem and prologue suggest. Lovingly composed and compiled, Paniceiros is an aesthetic delight, a hymn as it were to lost places and lost times seemingly far in its intentions from answering the needs of global citizens. Closer analysis of the poem and accompanying stories and photos tell a more complex tale. …

Rice Sticking Together: Cultural Nationalist Logic and the Cinematic Representations of Gay Asian-Caucasian Relationships and Desire

Rice Sticking Together: Cultural Nationalist Logic and the Cinematic Representations of Gay Asian-Caucasian Relationships and Desire

Paradoxes of ethnic politics: The case of Franco‐Maghrebis in France

Abstract Ethnic politics is a paradoxical phenomenon in France. While predominant French ideologies and institutional arrangements reinforce a ‘no ethnic politics’ model, there have been substantive challenges to this traditional model, including changes in state practices, and the political emergence of Franco‐Maghrebis and the immigrant association movement. Using the affaire des foulards [headscarves affair] of 1989 as a case‐study, the article seeks to clarify the ethnic politics paradox in France. I argue that the emergence and configuration of ethnic politics in France are being shaped by a series of constraints. These constraints are reflected in the ways in which the headscarves affair was created, defined, and managed. I suggest that the constraints are rooted not only in French ideologies and institutional arrangements, but also in the ‘nationalist logic’ of contemporary French immigration politics, the integrationist strategies of Franco‐Maghrebi groups, and the immigre perspective of the state...