Nationalist Politics Research Articles

Gender, Nationalism, and the Regent Queens in Colonial India

Queens in power are “moments of passage” ( Fradenburg 8) and transition. The queen’s rule emanates from an unforeseen circumstance that every dynasty strives to eschew. This explicates the liminality of their political existence. Since queens are upstaged only in times of crisis, they play a significant role in eschewing internal crises and power struggles. Adverting to the idea of saving grace, queens enable the state's transition from chaos to stability in the event of a king’s death. Agency sans official recognition was the mainstay of a queen’s politics. Queens thus acted as a buffer zone that usually worked towards validating the sovereignty of her husband or son. This paper is a comparative study of two regent queens to delineate how nationalist politics reconceptualized the ‘warrior queen,’ to suit their notions of gender and space. In contrast, pro-British queens remained ignored in the national discourses- neither criticized nor acknowledged. The reasons for the divergent reception of anti-British and Pro-British queens in later discourses by looking at the presence and absence of myths and legends about such queens have also been looked into. To clarify this idea, I have looked at Nawab Sikander Begum of Bhopal and Rani Laxmi Bai of Jhansi, who fought on different sides in the 1857 revolution. This paper tries to analyse how the queens who chose a militant response towards the British incursion could be called ‘warrior queens’ and those who chose a diplomatic strategy could be termed as ‘reformer queens’. The latter could be called so, not because warrior queens did not have reformist tendencies, but because the diplomatic strategies finally helped redefine queenship tradition in a way the former could not carry out successfully. This categorization is not absolute and did not come out from the intentions of these queens, but rather from the mode and consequences of their actions. The paper works towards the inference that the difference between the warrior and the reformer queens in this respect is that, while Rani Lakshmi Bai, knowingly or unknowingly, was an agent of her culture and the ensuing nationalist discourse, Sikander made religion and culture, her agents, to rule the principality in her own right.

Navigating (homo)nationalism and heteronormativity; how Turkish-Dutch and Moroccan-Dutch gay/bi men negotiate belonging in Amsterdam

Current-day nationalist ideologies imagine immigrant communities, and particularly Muslims, as traditionalist and backward subjects. They often propagate the importance of sexual and gender equality as a way to ‘other’ non-white minorities (‘homonationalism’). This study seeks to understand how (homo)nationalism affect senses of self and belonging for those who do not fit discursive binaries: non-heterosexual minorities. As such, we seek to contribute to geographical understandings of everyday experiences of sexual and racial politics in Western European cities. We interviewed seventeen Turkish-Dutch and Moroccan-Dutch non-heterosexual cismen in the Amsterdam region, focusing on their spatial perceptions, everyday encounters, and negotiations of subjectivities in urban space. While almost all of these men are subjected by (homo)nationalism, they negotiate their social and spatial trajectories in diverse ways. These findings show how nationalist politics affect everyday lives at the urban scale, while also highlighting how those denied belonging navigate multiple forms of exclusion.

Towards a Green Nationalism with Chinese Characteristics?

ABSTRACT This paper examines the concept of green nationalism in the authoritarian context of China, where the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has adopted the rhetoric of ecological civilization as a means of promoting environmental protection and securing global legitimacy. The authors argue that the CCP's performance legitimacy is closely linked to its ability to address environmental concerns in the context of climate change, and that the development of green nationalism is a rational choice for leaders seeking to maintain this legitimacy. However, the authors also highlight the role of actors such as social entrepreneurs, academics, and environmental NGOs in promoting green nationalism from the bottom-up. Using constructivist political theory, the paper explores how the intersection of different green narratives at various levels can be used to rethink the nation and make claims to legitimacy. Overall, the paper contributes to theory-building by providing a framework for understanding the complex relationship between environmental protection, nationalism, and authoritarian politics in China.

From Cotton and Smoke: Łódź—Industrial City and Discourses of Asynchronous Modernity, 1897–1994

From Cotton and Smoke: Łódź—Industrial City and Discourses of Asynchronous Modernity, 1897–1994

Transnational Activism against Genocide Denial: Protesting Peter Handke’s Nobel Prize in Literature

AbstractThis article addresses the protest against the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature to Peter Handke as an example of transnational memory activism. It analyzes from a transnational mobilization perspective how activists achieved a globally visible protest in Stockholm and what role memory played in the protest mobilization and framing. Genocide survivors and former refugees, human rights activists, journalists, and academics formed a transnational protest coalition. In this way, they drew international attention to their outrage at the honoring of an author who is criticized for denying the Bosnian genocide. The analysis shows that memories of the violent dissolution of Yugoslavia and genocide united the diverse protesters as a “memory community” and shaped their framing. The protesters warned of the potential repercussions of the Nobel Prize to Handke for the internationalization and normalization of genocide denial. They argued that locally, Serb nationalist politicians can find legitimation in it for divisive politics. Moreover, they put the prize in a larger context of globally rising right extremism and islamophobia that find inspiration in the very Serb nationalist ideology and its propagators of the 1990s conflict.

The Indonesian “Cosmopolitan Islamic Intellectual” Revisited: A Focus on the Continued Prevalence of “Cosmopatriotism” and the “West”

Abstract This paper argues that the mainstream Indonesian cosmopolitan Islamic intellectual milieu has not been adequately conceptualized in existing literature. By presenting a political history of the evolution of this cosmopolitan cohort and by engaging with contemporary emic Indonesian debates on the nexus between cosmopolitanism, Islam, and the nation state, the paper finds that in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in the archipelago, cosmopolitan Islamic thought has been, and continues to be, significantly driven and shaped by the interplay of international influences dominated by the “West” and Indonesian patriotic politics. More recently, Indonesia’s perceived status as an Islamic periphery and the country’s emerging soft power agenda contribute to furthering a peculiar relationship between cosmopolitanism and patriotism in Indonesian Islamic intellectualism. The paper argues that as a result of the strong impact of patriotism, mainstream Indonesian cosmopolitan Islamic intellectuals are best understood as nationally rooted “cosmopatriots,” representing “cosmopatriotism,” while the “West” remains a central intellectual and cultural reference point.

Actually existing intersectionality: The place-based and embodied politics of animal and human rights activism

Critiques of intersectionality as an additive and simplistic model of understanding identity politics has led to calls for renewed concepts that better grasp the complexity and potential of shared struggle. In this article, we contend that the experiences of activists attempting to practice an intersectional human and animal rights politics are a crucial yet overlooked resource in the development of such conceptual imaginaries and ethical practice. Drawing on an historical case study conducted with activists involved in the 1990s anarchist collective ‘One Struggle’ in Israel/Palestine, we argue that an ethic of shared human and animal rights struggle cannot be separated from place-based and embodied politics. We show that activists cultivating intersectional politics in practice must negotiate affective forces of discomfort, alienation and exhaustion that wear down and constrain the potential for intersectional coalitions and joint struggles. These affects are generated through state disincentives, violence the cultural politics of nationalism and incommensurable differences. In this context, intersectional politics are a precarious achievement, dependent on the capacities of activists to continue to compromise and negotiate affectively charged encounters in everyday settings. To better capture the precarious, contingent and provisional nature of animal and human rights activism, we therefore propose the concept of ‘actually existing intersectionality’, illustrating how intersectionality is retheorised via emplaced, embodied activist practices. In so doing we make visible the work through which intersectional politics coheres through negotiation by actors in particular places and times.

Mapping Hindutva’s coordinates: global formations of nationalist space

ABSTRACT This paper studies the religious and spatial politics of contemporary Hindu nationalism through an examination of the construction of the Ram Temple in Ayodhya, India, and the Swaminarayan Mandir in Neasden, UK. Whereas the Neasden Temple is celebrated as a diasporic accomplishment that testifies to British multiculturalism, the Ayodhya temple has been mired by controversy and marred in violence that has spanned decades. Despite these differences, both temples have acquired their specific symbolic, visual and material salience through a global circulation of ideas, goods, peoples and aesthetics. I trace this circulation to show how these two temples serve to concretize and embody a specific historical narrative of ‘the Hindu nation’ through their shared architectural forms, as well as through the shared processes of their material construction. My argument is that the symbolic, visual and material relationships these temples instantiate across multiple ‘national’ locations can be read as territorializing mythic formations of ‘the Hindu nation’ as a global entity. The transnational crossings that secure the local specificities entailed in the construction of these temples demonstrate how contemporary formations of ‘globality’ are produced by, and in turn become the conditions of possibility for, the transformation of contemporary Hindu nationalism into a global phenomenon.

'Protecting the NHS' - and its limits

There are limits in articulating political struggles around the NHS and the imagined geographies of the nation: struggles based on nostalgia for the post-war welfare state risk co-opting the NHS for an exclusionary, nationalist politics. In tracing the times and spaces of the health service the article asks: when was the NHS? and where is the NHS? The idea of universal healthcare - and changing ideas of nation, state and welfare - are articulated in particular political conjunctures. The whereabouts of the NHS is more than a question of devolution and territorial politics in an increasingly disunited Kingdom; there are also questions of borders, and of workers who are trained and drawn into the NHS from overseas: it is impossible to imagine the NHS without grappling with the ways in which colonialism is integral to the formation of the post-war national welfare state. As both a residual of the national welfare state, and as an emergent site of political and cultural work, the NHS is continuously reworked within dominant politics; while it also offers an emotionally powerful political resource to galvanise popular public support that resists such tendencies. We therefore insist on the need to get to grips with the complex and partial embedding of private interests and market logics within the organisation of healthcare - often framed, rather crudely, in terms of the 'Americanisation' of the NHS. But we also warn of the analytical limits, and political dangers, of framing political struggles around national spatial imaginaries when seeking to 'protect' the NHS in these times of crisis.

Nationalism and populist politics: the migrant-citizen conundrum in Assam

ABSTRACT The article explores the far-reaching repercussions of British colonialism in producing hierarchical identities around religion, identity, and ethnicity in the northeastern state of Assam in India. The trajectory of people’s mobility across the border, due to political and economic reasons, has led to contention around legality, demography, and electoral outcomes. The article elucidates how nationalism, populism and the politics of insecurity have been played out whereby perceived collective threats are framed and acted upon. Traversing from past to present and apprehending the lurking dystopia, the article explains how the populist politics of othering residents in the borderland state of Assam has initiated various statist initiatives to differentiate natives from migrants, and citizens from residents. It grapples with the shifting meaning of a ‘native’ that qualifies or disqualifies populations from their citizenship, and examines how populist governance uses a migrant figure to seek legitimacy of its exclusionary citizenship policies and practices. It explores the dialogic functioning of a Hindu nationalist governance at the centre and an ethno-nationalist governance in Assam in a right-wing populist milieu. In the context in which migration is framed as a threat to the people, the article engages with the politics of insecurity, anxiety, and grievance.

The Dialectics of Nationalism: Jaromír Weinberger's Schwanda the Bagpiper and Anti-Semitism in Interwar Europe

AbstractThis article examines the conception and subsequent reception of Jaromír Weinberger's 1927 opera Schwanda the Bagpiper in the context of various expressions of nationalism, anti-Semitism and Jewish identity politics throughout the interwar period. It takes into consideration the many historical, political and musical junctures before and during the opera's trajectory. While remaining rooted in nineteenth-century Czech nationalism, Weinberger sought to blend a plurality of cultural expressions, thus responding to the transitory state of nationalism during the interwar period. This is evident in the dialectics of the work – including its music, its libretto by Miloš Kareš and the first production. In this way, Schwanda and its divergent reception represents young Czechoslovakia's liminalities in relation to nationalism and the complexities of the new multi-ethnic state, especially with regard to its minorities. The article thus offers insights into the phenomenon of nationalism, which at the time of the opera's conception was inescapably co-constructed with anti-Semitism, and demonstrates Schwanda's importance as part of larger histories of European music and opera.

:The Archaeology of Roman Macedonia: Urban and Rural Environments

:<i>The Archaeology of Roman Macedonia: Urban and Rural Environments</i>

‘Churchill abandoned the fighting Scots’: The Mythology and Reality of the Surrender of the 51st Highland Division at St Valery-en-Caux, 12 June 1940

The 51st (Highland) Division surrendered to the Germans on 12 June 1940. The force lost at St Valery was made up not only of Scots, but also English, Welsh, French and French Colonial troops. But in recent decades the division’s loss has been recast as a story of solely Scottish loss, deployed in narratives of grievance and victimhood. We contrast the mythology with the historical reality, in the context of the distribution of ‘fake history’ in the service of nationalist politics ( English 2021 ). This paper considers three aspects of the events of 1940: 1. The creation, development and use of the mythology. 2. The nature of the 51st Highland Division – how ‘Highland’, how ‘Scottish’ was the force lost at St Valery? 3. The actual events of May-June 1940. We do this by drawing together existing and new scholarship, including more from French perspectives than is common, to summarise knowledge in an accessible form for a wider audience.

Gender and the Nationalist Imagination of Women in Sri Lanka

The paper focuses on how hierarchical gender relations that form the basis of the patriarchal Sri Lankan society allows women a very limited role within nationalist politics. It explores both Sinhalese and Tamil nationalism, exposes their inherently patriarchal nature and their respective nationalist imagination of women. It further sheds light on the myriad ways that Sinhalese and Tamil women submit to or subvert this nationalist expectation of them through their actions.

“Send a Soldier to Parliament”: Ex-servicemen, Masculinity, and the Legacies of the Great War in Liberal Electoral and Parliamentary Politics

AbstractThe spectacular collapse of the Liberal Party in Britain has often been regarded as the result of a crisis in Liberal values, supposedly provoked by the unprecedented militarization of British society during the Great War. However, this interpretation typically fails to recognize the extent to which the most important and visible legacies of that process of militarization were accommodated within the Liberal Party itself. Between 1918 and 1929, more than a hundred ex-servicemen were elected to Parliament as Liberal MPs, and scores more stood as Liberal candidates. This article examines how these men negotiated, presented, and performed their military identities within the framework of postwar electoral politics; analyzes how they operated in Parliament; and traces the longer-term trajectories of their political careers. It challenges the assumption that Liberals were temperamentally or ideologically incapable of engaging with the war's legacies, demonstrating the ability of Liberal candidates to exploit the iconography and rhetorical tropes of military service when appealing to an electorate that had been profoundly shaped by the experience of war and military mobilization. Liberals sought to contest Conservative Party attempts to monopolize the politics of patriotism after 1918 by constructing gendered electoral appeals that acknowledged the unstable meanings of the Great War and the ambiguous status of the men who had fought in it. However, the inability of Liberal politicians to unite around a shared understanding of what the war had meant ultimately prevented them from exploiting the memory of the conflict as effectively as their Conservative and Labour rivals.

Untangling Invasive Narratives: Boundaries, Belonging, and Narrative Agency

ABSTRACT This article explores the ways that stories about boundaries and belonging are bound up with cultural narrative frames that set the stage for the interpretation of new, or often recreated, accounts. I use the term “invasive narrative,” to refer to the force with which these narratives can invade and shape interpretations of unfolding situations. These disputes are entangled with broader narratives that provoke ambivalence toward open borders, migration, as well as cultural and biological fluidity. Narratives can be “invasive” in another sense when they dwell on the apparent unnatural, intrusive, and unwelcome elements of a species’ presence – a label that can also be used to target native species that have reemerged after a long absence. To explore these concepts, I examine the blurring, substitutions, and differentiations between wild species and human migrant/foreigner/other categories with regard to public debates on conservation, migration, and identity in Poland. These accounts are significant because they promote fear and radically exclusionary concepts of belonging and are linked to acts of violence. Here I examine conflicts between fishermen and conservationists, including the inflammatory comments of an extreme nationalist politician and the illegal killings of protected Baltic grey seals.

Making Swadeshi Managers: The Antecedents of Professional Management Education in India, 1860s–1950s

The history of Indian management education is overwhelmingly focused on the period from the 1950s and 1960s onward. This article traces the hitherto underexplored history of how, from the 1860s until the 1950s, Indians thought about and implemented education and training for managers. In particular, it demonstrates how Indian nationalist politicians articulated the nation-building utility of managers and managerial training, and how business education became yoked to nationalists’ broader visions of India’s economic regeneration. Beginning in the early twentieth century, Indian nationalists championed commercial education, advocating its evolution out of its vocational roots into something more scientific and specialized for producing skilled indigenous managers. The precise evolution of Indian commercial education exercised long-term influences on postcolonial management programs. First, Indians established a tradition of surveying the latest pedagogical methods and institutional models from around the world and adapting them to Indian conditions. Second, Indian advocates of commercial education carved out an important role for the state, working on commercial education endeavors with British officials in the colonial era and, later on, placing management education within the ambit of centralized state planning. Management had a fundamentally political valence in India. For this reason, commercial and management education programs in India, unlike in the West, largely avoided questions about their legitimacy.

The Remains of the Day: Re-tracing Archival Art through Dayanita Singh and Ali Kazim

The history of modern South Asian art has been fast-moving, but art that is about modern South Asian history is still in its infancy. While the art of the post-Independence era continues to wrest with the legacies of colonisation, fractured nationhood, majoritarian politics, and weakening secular legacies, there is a strain of this art preoccupied with the historical gaze. In relation to works of art by Dayanita Singh and Ali Kazim, the aesthetics of representing archives and archiving can be examined in order to explore the politics of nationalism and historical change, as well as the global neoliberal economies of institutional archiving practices. The tendency to look back constantly over the region's past raises questions about whom these artistic interventions address and the archival logics at work within this distinctive field of contemporary art.

Love in the times of Hindutva (Part 2) : The sexual politics of religious nationalism in India

Love in the times of Hindutva (Part 2) : The sexual politics of religious nationalism in India

Gathering the Nation in the Village: Intellectuals and the Cultural Politics of Nationality in the Late Soviet Period

AbstractThis article analyzes the activities of three Soviet intellectuals–the Ukrainian artist Ivan Honchar, the Russian writer Vladimir Soloukhin, and the Gagauz poet Dmitri Kara Çoban–who launched independent projects to collect and preserve artifacts of pre‐Soviet peasant culture in the 1960s. Reacting against representations of their national culture in state museums that they considered inauthentic and incomplete, these three collectors were part of a broader movement of intellectuals in the post‐Stalin period who sought to return to the village as the original source of “authentic” national culture. State responses to these intellectual initiatives were determined not by clearly articulated policies made in Moscow, but through the “cultural politics of nationality”–the interaction of intellectuals, republican leaders and central authorities. Demonstrating the enduring impact of these three independent collecting projects on Soviet and post‐Soviet thought about the nation, this article argues that changing conceptions of the nation in the post‐Stalin period are best understood as the result of a nationalities process involving intellectuals, republican leaders and central authorities, rather than an explicitly defined nationalities policy.