Patriotic Project Research Articles

Early Translations of English Fiction into Arabic: The Pilgrim's Progress and Robinson Crusoe

This essay examines the translations into Arabic of The Pilgrim's Progress and Robinson Crusoe, two of the first works of modern prose fiction to be translated into Arabic in the nineteenth century. Both are didactic and allegorical narratives that belong to the prehistory of the European realist novel; they were originally written in the late seventeenth to early eighteenth centuries, and by the early nineteenth century had become among the most popular fictional works in Europe, both in their original languages and in translation. They were translated into Arabic at various stages of the nineteenth-century revival (nahḍa). The translations of each work are dealt with separately, but demonstrate certain shared issues and problems of translation in this period. These include the negotiation of different levels of language within Arabic, as suitable local equivalents for the translated work are found; the vital role of individual effort, and the placing of this within a wider educational and patriotic project; the awareness of European and local structures of power; and most importantly of all, perhaps, a shared didactic impulse. The two translations of The Pilgrim's Progress provide evidence of a shift of approach towards translation within the missionary project. The first translation (1834) belongs largely to an Evangelical mode of universal translatability, which tends to ignore distinctions between languages and between levels and registers within a language, in an attempt to proselytize as many people as possible. The second translation was made only ten years later for the American missionaries by the Protestant convert Buṭrus al-Bustānī. It belongs to a more sensitive mode of free translation into a literary idiom influenced by adab norms, and aimed at an educated readership. The two translations also — despite evidence of their appeal to at least fairly wide Christian audiences — seem to have been especially relevant to Syrian Protestant converts, for whom the radically solitary experience of Bunyan's protagonist Christian corresponded to their own experiences of personal conversion. Robinson Crusoe was also translated twice — by missionaries in an abridged version in 1835, and in a full version, outside the missionary framework, in 1861. This second translation was made by Buṭrus al-Bustānī, after his period of close collaboration with the missionaries had ended and he had moved to more ecumenical educational and patriotic projects. His translation demonstrates both continuity with and breaks away from the earlier missionary translations of both The Pilgrim's Progress and Robinson Crusoe. His version of Robinson Crusoe is still presented as a didactic and exemplary narrative, more than a realist novel; an emphasis on the individual struggle and suffering of the protagonist is preserved, as are markers of the work's Christian and Puritan provenance. This personal effort is now, however, placed within a larger, patriotic and educational, framework.

Literary Patriotism in Ecuador’s Juan León Mera and Juan de Velasco

Nineteenth-century nation builders in Ecuador looked to the past for models of national unity and identity. The prolific writer and government servant Juan Le?n Mera served the theocratic state of ultraconservative President Gabriel Garcia Moreno, whose rule extended from 1860 to 1875, and contributed to shaping Ecuador's national imaginary in his literary and journalistic output. Mera found many elements for his vision of Catholic triumphalism in Ecuador in the work of eighteenth-century exiled Jesuit historian Juan de Velasco. This article traces genealogical ties between the two writers, from the Creole historian's elite patriotic history La historia del Reino de Quito en la Am?rica meridional of 1789 to Mera's many novels, stories and essays. As was the case for other post-independence Spanish- American nations, in Ecuador, the experience of nation building in the nineteenth century was tumultuous. After the independence wars, the colonial-era Audiencia de Quito joined Gran Colombia as the Distrito del Sur (1822?30), but broke away as Bolivar's dream of a unified South American state crumbled. In Ecuador's case, after 1830, conflicts among regions and competing oligarchic interests led to continued instability, as traditional landholding elites in the highlands ? themselves divided between northern and southern zones ? and export-oriented landholders in the coastal region struggled to establish both a nation-state and a sense of nationhood in the ethnically stratified territory. Between 1860 and 1875, as Ecuador was drawn more closely into the global export economy, the nation was ruled by Gabriel Garcia Moreno, who supported his modernising program with a repressive regime closely allied with the Catholic Church.1 Writer and government official Juan Le?n Mera made significant contributions to Ecuador's nation-making project, both by backing Garcia Moreno's 'theocratic state' and by shaping Ecuador's sense of national identity through his literary output.2 Just as Garcia Moreno looked to colonial models of social control ? for example, by renewing the Church's role in 'civilising' the people and by reintroducing colonial-era labour arrangements ? to shore up his national project. Mera turned to a late-colonial historian of Quito, Juan de Velasco, as a source of elements of national identity. Both writers, living in periods of rapid change, attempt to define the essence of the Quite?o or Ecuadorian people by looking to the past to fashion invented traditions for the present.3 Velase o's Historia del Reino de Quito en la Am?rica meridional (1789)4 and Mera's works show that both promise and contradictions lie at the heart of their patriotic projects. Velasco's eighteenth-century Creole patriotic history played a vital part in Ecuador's national imaginary during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The text was rescued from near oblivion, repatriated from Europe, and published in early republican Ecuador in the 1840s. Post-colonial nationalists found his tale of alternative indigenous agency and Quite?o identity too enticing to resist; in addition, the text provides the prehistory for nationalist rivalry between Ecuador and Peru. Mera's work is deeply indebted to Velasco's history of the Quito region, because of its heroic tale of an indigenous royalty that outshone the Incas; its description of the region's territory, resources and population; and its model for establishing and perfecting Catholic civilisation in America. Mera saw continuity between various periods and actors of his nation's history, as did Velasco with the colonial Kingdom of Quito, and both have been instrumental in institutionalising the unbroken narrative of Ecuadorianness (or 'Quite?oness') that elites wished to tell. Mera's concerns with national and territorial unity, national origins and cultural history resonate with the earlier attempt by Velasco, written during the Jesuit's exile in Italy after 1767. To take one example, if Mera's 1879 novel, Cumand? …

Narrating Venice in nineteenth-century Italy: the notions of municipal and national in Samuele Romanin's patriotic project, the Storia documentata di Venezia (1853–64)

In his Storia documentata di Venezia, Samuele Romanin aimed at refounding Venetian history through the lens of contemporary Italian bourgeois principles. What he enthusiastically highlighted was the model of patria building and the cultivation of patriotism he observed in republican times: he thought they should have been a powerful base for the construction of new Italy. On one hand, he presented Venice as a fully Italian state – even if he essentially narrated a story rich in counterexamples. On the other hand, the Republic was a unique case: but this uniqueness could be explained in turn by pointing to the fact that Venice was the most Italian of the peninsular states, and it ended up being considered as a synecdoche for Italy. Despite his nineteenth-century methodologies, Romanin largely inherited the traditions of Venetian republican historiography; overall, what he constructed was a modern eulogy of the Serenissima, making its mythology compatible and meaningful in the Risorgimento context.

Borrowed Halos: Canadian Teachers as Voluntary Aid Detachment Nurses during the Great War

Teaching and nursing were frequent career choices for unmarried, middle-class women in the Great War era, but only nurses were eligible for active service in Canadian military hospitals overseas. Teachers were expected to remain at home, volunteering for patriotic projects like other women. This role proved too passive for some, who relinquished their careers to become, temporarily, Voluntary Aid Detachment nurses (VADs); many served in British military hospitals overseas. The history of this unique group offers new insights into societal expectations for Canadian women’s professional work in the early twentieth century. The transformation of teachers into nurses during the crisis of war was legitimized by the substitution of gender and class attributes for specialized training, allowing women teachers the otherwise unattainable opportunity for active service abroad. Their experience raises important issues regarding the meaning of “professional identity” in traditional women’s occupations, and professional development later in the century.

To be a member of the leading gentry: the Suffolk voluntary subscriptions of 1782

Abstract This article examines the Suffolk voluntary subscription campaign conducted to raise funds for the building of naval ships in 1782. By carefully analysing the list of subscribers, as well as by looking into the initial process of the campaign, it demonstrates the importance of the county's leading gentry group. Special attention is paid to Sir Charles Davers of Rushbrooke, one of the principal proposers of the patriotic project, who contributed the comparatively large sum of £300.

Before Postnationalism: Supernationalism, Modernisme , and Catalonia

Before Postnationalism: Supernationalism, Modernisme, and Catalonia Brad Epps is Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. He has published over fifty articles on modern literature, film, art, and architecture from Spain, Latin America, Catalonia , and France and is the author of Significant Violence: Oppression and Resistance in the Narratives of Juan Goytisolo (Oxford UP). He is currently preparing two books: Daring to Write, on gay and lesbian issues in Latin America, Spain, and Latino cultures in the United States, and Barcelona and Beyond, on modern Catalan culture. He is also co-editing two volumes, one with Luis Fernández Cifuentes, Spain Beyond Spain: Modernity, Literary History, and National Identity, and another with Keja Valens, Passing Lines: Immigration and (Homo)sexuality. To wish class or nation away, to seek to live sheer irreducible difference now in the manner of some contemporary poststrucuralist theory, is to play straight into the hands of the oppressor. —Terry Eagleton Introduction: An Alluring Proposition Postnationalism may well be a lure, and a late capitalist one at that. It serves, within an increasingly anxious intellectual market, as a sign that sells. And what it sells, ever so symbolically, is nothing less than the promise of a new world, free from the narcissism of small differences and the fanaticism of big identities, beyond the pettiness of borders and the grandeur of patriotic projects. Postnationalism shimmers seductively as a way out of so many nagging problems, so much sacrifice and violence, so much divisive love and ironclad hatred. Ample as its bounds may be, it is arguably related less to internationalism, in the Marxian sense, than to multinationalism, where globalization is of capital importance indeed. Even if the concept is taken less dramatically as indicating a crisis in strong understandings of national identity, even if it is taken as more descriptive than prescriptive, it nonetheless suggests a world order in which nationalism is out of sync with new material technologies, modes of information, and markets. However superannuated it may seem to some, nationalism, in all its contenArizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 7, 2003 134 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies tious guises, remains rigorously current for many more. As Immanuel Wallerstein asserts, "[tjhere is no question that, at the present time, nationalism in general [...] is a remarkably strong world cultural force," stronger now, he continues, "than any other mode of social expression or collective mentality," with the possible exception of religion, to which it is so often bound (314). Even Eric Hobsbawm, who writes of the decline of nationalism as an historical force, notes that "there is no foreseeable limit to the further advance of national separatism" (163). There is also, of course, no foreseeable limit to national consolidation and expansion, most spectacularly that of the United States of America in its various wars against terrorism . And yet, obviously, there is some question as to the strength, sweep, and future of nationalism, a question posed by the very existence of something called "postnationalism." As term and concept, "postinternationalism" also exists, as well as "postcapitalism," and perhaps, though I have yet to see it, "postmultinationalism ." Whatever the case, the proliferation of the "post" is as dizzying as it is undeniable . Postinternationalism, as formulated by James Rosenau and his followers, takes as its motivating force the insufficiency of the sovereign state of Westphalian Europe to account for the dynamics of contemporary global politics. Postnationalism appears to be similarly motivated, though the accent tends to fall on the dangers of nationalism (its violence, racism, sexism, and so on) rather than on the limitations of the established analytical protocols of international relations theorists. The ethicopolitical , even moral, tenor of postnationalism is such that the contrast with nationalism is not only charged but also overstated. Far from being mutually exclusive , nationalism and postnationalism are in many respects complementary—one highly successful Western construction entailing another, so far less successful and more anxiously Western construction. The repercussions of such constructions for what is not the West, or not quite the West, are serious, but so too are the repercussions for the West itself—its frayed yet persistent European core. For nationalism is by no means inoperative in contemporary Europe; nor, despite...