Nationalist Politics Research Articles

Present-day Importance of Krleža’s Interpretation of Artistic Motifs on Bosnian Medieval Tombstones

The present text provides an analysis of Krleža’s deliberations on medieval Bosnian art, which are most evidently reflected in his views about the tombstones – the stećci. Back in the 1950s, following Tito’s split with Stalin, Miroslav Krleža organized an exhibition in Paris, France, themed “Medieval Art of Yugoslav Peoples”, placing the tombstones in the center of attention. The reason for this lies in the fact that, in their appearance as monuments, he recognized the heretic efforts of the Bosnian Church, which was persecuted in the Middle Ages by Western Catholicism and Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Similarly, Tito’s Yugoslavia expressed its heretic character by standing up against the Western capitalist bloc – NATO, as well as Stalin’s dogmatism – the Warsaw Pact. The reason for the persecution of the members of the Bosnian Church back in the day was religious, whereas in the 1950s when Yugoslavia was fighting for its independent road towards further building socialism, the split was purely ideological. When the Berlin Wall fell and Yugoslavia was crushed by aggressive nationalist politics, many intellectuals found Krleža’s observations on the importance of the Bosnian medieval tombstones an expression of naïve romanticism, or an ideological construction hiding Tito’s absolute power, and his thirst for power and ethnic balancing. This text attempts to reaffirm Krleža’s deliberations on the tombstones, which, the author of these lines believes have not at all lost their importance, nor do they merely represent “an idealized past”.

The Bay Area Third World Strikes, 1968–1969: Coalitional Activism and Chicanx Campus Politics

ABSTRACT The Bay Area Third World Strikes, 1968–1969: Coalitional Activism and Chicanx Campus Politics. This essay looks at the 1968–1969 Third World Strikes at San Francisco State and UC Berkeley through the lens of coalitional politics and activism. While the paper looks closely at Chicanx campus politics, the goal is to move away from a nationalist or Maoist reading of the two strikes. During these two events, Chicanx activism has to be read in conjunction with African American, Asian American, Native American, and white campus politics. This coalitional politics represented a temporary rupture of U.S. political behavior and manifested a utopic moment when an alternative political possibility was glimpsed. The essay ends exploring the limits of coalitional politics and activism, especially as nationalism and identity politics came to the fore.

The Myth of Sufi Sindh: Reflections on the Orientalist and Nationalist Historiography

The Sindhi nationalist historiography is a classic case of how to read historical, archaeological, and political texts of importance to justify the present-day modernist ideologies premised on excluding marginalized sections of society. This essay interrogates the Sindhi nationalist literati elite’s epistemic neglect of the underprivileged caste’s lifeworld. That disregard reflects in their literary and political writings that arguably rely on the British Orientalist historiography to construct the myth of caste-neutral and egalitarian culture of Sufi Sindh. It traces the historicisation of the claim of Hindu–Muslim interfaith harmony, and its persistence in the post-Partition Sindh. Based on the content analysis of progressive literature and the historiography of progressive politics in Sindh, it is concluded that owing to the casteist social structural barriers the privileged caste elite at the vanguard of progressive nationalist politics was blinded by their own privileged position to justly address the caste question. That inherent blindness to see through the problem of caste is the reason that progressives’ emancipatory projects to redefine the past and myths end in failure.

Embodied nativism in Denmark: rethinking violence and the far right

ABSTRACT Since 2017, the Danish far right party Stram Kurs has staged hundreds of Islamophobic demonstrations in neighbourhoods known for their ethnic minority and Muslim communities. Confrontational counterprotesters are filmed by far right activists who widely diffuse the footage on social media. These scenes of “native” bodies under duress from racialized others serve the far right as evidence of an incompatibility between racialized foreigners and the Danish ethnically defined nation. When far right activists subject their bodies to potential violence they are embodying nativism; dramatizing the threat of ethnic impurity to the nation. Embodied nativism denotes how actors imbue bodies with – and physically perform – values linked to essentialized ethnic categories to advance exclusionary claims. We develop this concept through visual analysis, utilizing images to show how scenes of embodied nativism exploit liberal frameworks of free speech, violence, and nonviolence; framing counterprotesters as racialized aggressors on the national body politic.

United in Patriarchy? A View from across the (Aegean) Pond

United in Patriarchy? A View from across the (Aegean) Pond

Bangladeshi Literature in English:

Bangladeshi literature in English is marked by several interconnected transitions. Beginning with the two hundred-year British rule in India, followed by the birth of the midnight twins, India and Pakistan, and the eventual independence of Bangladesh makes the position of English literature in Bangladesh a curious one. With nationalistic politics on the rise, the strategic interests in language as a cultural and identity marker shifted towards Bangla. The currency gained by the mother tongue is no accident as the birth of the new nation cannot be separated from its struggle for Bangla as a state language while under Pakistani rule. The literary culture in Bangladesh, thus, evolved in parallel with these changes.

Tomasz Kamusella. Words in Space and Time: Historical Atlas of Language Politics in Modern Central Europe

Tomasz Kamusella. <i>Words in Space and Time: Historical Atlas of Language Politics in Modern Central Europe</i>

Transatlantic Women Travelers, 1688–1843, ed. Misty Krueger

<i>Transatlantic Women Travelers, 1688–1843</i>, ed. Misty Krueger

Overviewing a Century. The Lahore-Ahmadiyya Mosque Archive in Berlin

Abstract In 1923, Ahmadiyya Anjuman Ishaat ve Islam with headquarters in Lahore (hereafter: Lahore-Ahmadiyya) sent the pedagogue Maulvi Sadr-ud-Din to Berlin commissioned to erect a mosque, create a mission and enter in conversation with the Europeans. The European mission was a comprehensive answer to the challenge that the British Empire presented to Muslims. In their hometown, Lahore, Lahore-Ahmadiyya aimed at comparing religions in order to push back British missionaries and disprove Christian claims to superiority. Adapting to the German setting, which in the years to come would swiftly move from democratic to nationalistic politics, the mission in Berlin created many variations on that theme. Today, the mosque registry, holding records of almost 100 years of administration, bears witness to the efforts of the missionaries to explain to various German audiences their view of Islam. An important source for Muslim history in Germany, the archive highlights such different research subjects as Muslim modernity at work, the language of secular Islam, Indian-German approximations, conversion, and mixed marriage. In 2018, it was donated to the National Archive in Berlin, where the approximately 70,000 documents and 5,000 photographs were made available for research. This contribution offers an analysis of the contents.

Book Review: Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty: Land, Sex, and the Colonial Politics of State Nationalism

Book Review: Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty: Land, Sex, and the Colonial Politics of State Nationalism

:World Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern Textual Culture

:<i>World Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern Textual Culture</i>

A dialectical-relational approach to anti-trans sentiments on Hupu

As the first edition of the Olympics including transgender sportswomen, Tokyo 2020 brought trans-rights debates to the forefront of global sports spectatorship during the summer of 2021. In this article, we adopt a dialectical-relational approach to address how anti-trans sentiments unfold in male Chinese sports fans’ social-mediated communication. Based on textual analysis of posts retrieved from Hupu, the research reveals that anti-trans sentiments are largely informed by an essentialist notion of sex, which considers it to be a purely biological construct that is paramount in policymaking, being perpetuated in the process of China’s modernisation. Anti-trans discourses manifest in the sampled postings tend to converge with China’s official nationalist rhetoric, projecting critical voices against liberal-progressive values and Western-style democracy. The research findings shed new light on the dialectical relations between nationalist politics and anti-trans sentiments and, by extension, queerphobic views in China’s sports fandom, pointing towards the heteronormative monopoly of public discourses in sport and beyond.

Celebrating the humane superpower: Chinese nationalism, the Holocaust and transnational heritage politics at Shanghai's Jewish Refugees Museum

ABSTRACT This article examines the portrayal of the Nazi Holocaust in Chinese public culture, focusing on the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum (SJRM). It argues that contemporary Western preoccupations with coloniality/decoloniality are unhelpful in understanding the Communist Party's efforts to project influence abroad, and reinforce legitimacy at home. The SJRM shows how these efforts extend to fierce competition with Japan for UNESCO recognition of war-related heritage, as each country trumpets its role in saving Jews from the Holocaust. Official interest in the Holocaust as heritage remains overwhelmingly instrumental, focused on enhancing the international reputation of Shanghai and China.

Anthropology in a Nationalizing State: Three Case Studies from Interwar Poland

AbstractThree case studies depict different attitudes of anthropologists toward the politics of nationalism promoted by the prewar Polish state. Ethnographer Stanisław Dworakowski, involved in a governmental Committee for the Issues of Petty Nobility in Eastern Poland, elaborated a study on this social stratum. Although based on reliable field research, it can hardly be considered scientific work, as it has many features of political propaganda. Quite opposite is the case of folklorist Joachim Chajes, secretary of the Ethnographical Commission of YIVO. Contemporary Soviet folklore was one of the fields of his research, which Polish anticommunist and antisemitic authorities found suspicious. Accused of communist activity, he was imprisoned. Social anthropologist Józef Obrębski can be situated between those two extremes. His field research among East Slavic peasants in Eastern Poland, concerning their developing national identity, although conducted within a national scientific program and financed by the state, is an example of intellectual independence. By revealing the negative attitude of the peasants toward Polish authorities, Obrębski achieved an outcome, which did not fulfill the official political expectations. These three trajectories show competitive coexistence of the meta-field of power and the scientific field, focused on their respective stakes: power and recognition.

Understanding the Russian invasion of Ukraine through a gendered prism

ABSTRACT This essay offers a timely analysis of how the 2022 Russo-Ukrainian warfare is observed in China through a gendered prism. Accounting for an anti-West axis in China’s current political climate, we articulate how misogyny and nationalism converge in Chinese social media users’ discussions about the military crisis currently unfolding in East Europe. This is revealed by a vulgar interpretation of the Russo-Ukrainian relationship and the sexualisation of Ukrainian/Russian women, which are both widespread in the Chinese-language social media sphere. With the patriarchal specificities of the Party-State polity in mind, the discussion yields a feminist perspective to foreground China’s nationalist politics.

Ballet and the Renegotiation of Identity among Jewish Orthodox Women in Israel

This article explores how competing images of Jewish corporeality and gendered identity are emerging in Israel through classical ballet by religious girls and women. It traces the cultural, political, and religious implications of this in the context of masculine Zionist ideals of the valorization of the corporeal. Focusing on a group of pioneering Israeli women it traces how they have reshaped the study of ballet into a liberatory yet modest practice for Orthodox women across a range of Israeli religious communities. The revolutionary efforts that linked the founding of the state of Israel with a new body are viewed through a revised feminist perspective, one within the paradigm of a religious counterrevolution. Just as the laboring body of the secular folk dancer of the Yishuv has stood for socialism, egalitarianism, and muscular Judaism while relegating the religious body to the sidelines, it is possible now to read an image of the return of the religious, via the feminized body of classical ballet, as emblematic of the new Jewish woman of Orthodox communities. I argue that through the study of ballet a politics of piety is operating among Orthodox Jewish women making it a medium through which they are changing assumptions about agency, patriarchal norms, and nationalist politics.

Digital nationalism versus gender politics in post-reform China: Gender-issue debates on Zhihu

This article aims to determine how digital nationalism influences gender politics in the context of gender-issue debates on Chinese social media platforms. To this end, I present an original case study, collecting empirical data from the most popular Chinese community question-answering (CQA) website, Zhihu. By using a mixed-method research design, consisting of content analysis (CA) and critical discourse analysis (CDA), I explored gender-issue debates between Chinese internet users. The analysis reveals how such debates inform divided opinions between women and men internet users, and how misogynistic men invoke a nationalist discourse to distort the debates.

A Community within a Community: Collectivism, Social Cohesion and Building a Healthy Black Childhood

This article features in‐depth interviews and ethnographic vignettes that explore collectivism, social cohesion, and Black educational leadership as a strategy to infuse liberatory practices in the educational process. The article examines how the social foundation of African‐centered ethos of collectivism can shift how marginalized students approach and experience learning and socialization inside mainstream K‐12 educational systems. Additionally, this article introduces a new theoretical concept entitled Ethno‐Cultural Responsiveness. This theory explains how sub‐culture groups socialize new members into their particular ideological and sub‐cultural communities. This research demonstrates how African‐centered leaders shape their schools through an ideological inquiry designed to challenge what they perceive as the cultural negation of African histories and understandings. Moreover, the leaders featured in this article use their public‐facing political project (an African‐centered institution) grounded in the politics of Black Nationalism and Pan Africanism to design and shape their institutional cultures to be responsive to people racialized in western counties as Black.

Less is more: The paradox of minimalism in contemporary Indian fashion

India’s fashion industry experienced spectacular growth in the decades after economic liberalization. The positive outlook brought about by liberalization led to the development of a culture of design built on the backs of textile crafts centred around material excess informed by re-orientalist viewpoints as well as selective references to India’s freedom movement. Most recently, however, a newer generation of designers shunned the visual exuberance that had become the hallmark of Indian couture. Yet even as they refrain from the visual stereotypes made popular by the preceding design fraternity, they continue to foreground Gandhian principles and the sartorial politics of Indian nationalism in their design statements and approach to craftivism. The difference, however, is in the way these are reframed to substantiate the cultural relevance, authenticity and purity of a more minimalist design product. This article closely examines the emergence of such minimalist fashion and highlights the paradoxes that emerge through anti-colonial, pre-colonial and postcolonial references that are evidence of the incomplete nature of the process of decolonization. This article will argue that such ambiguity is a natural outcome of neo-liberal market forces and the realities of creating exclusive luxury fashion while working with crafts in a philanthrocapitalist framework.

From Policy Relevance to Present Relevance: Entanglement, Scholarly Responsibility, and the Ethics of Quantum Social Theory

AbstractDebates about the role of international relations (IR) scholarship in contemporary politics historically privilege “policy relevance” as both a goal and site of debate. The role of scholarship, scholars, and scholarly collectives has become increasingly resonant given the overlapping crises of white supremacy, police violence, and state repression in the United States, the worldwide pandemic, and the antidemocratic nationalist politics throughout Europe and the United States. Critical IR and critical security studies typically resist policy engagement entirely, positioning critical thought and inquiry as political intervention in and of itself. Here, I explore that claim using quantum concepts that foreground the inextricability of entanglement in thinking politics, ethics, and action. Ultimately, I argue that IR should move toward engaging and being responsible to the/a political present. Drawing on the temporality in IR literature, I argue that we are always already entangled with a heterotemporal present. Framing the question of political relevance as a binary of for/against precludes an effective assessment of the politics and normative meaning of scholarly interventions into contemporary politics. By reformulating our understanding of scholarship as produced by and reproducing a political present, something with which we are inevitably entangled whether we choose to be or not, the question of relevance becomes reoriented toward scholarly relationships with a/many presents, and consequently, a/many pasts and futures. Negotiating this dynamic is a more complex question than the narrow formulation of policy and/or political recommendations, and requires a fundamental rethinking of the presumption that scholarship in and of itself is sufficient.