Questions Of National Identity Research Articles

“AM I A SERBIAN WRITER?” Mihály Babits and the question of national identity

The fact that Mihály Babits knew himself to be a descendant of Hungarian county nobles, despite the South Slavic sound of his surname, was the defining basis of his identity. He was greatly influenced by his father, a lawyer who died at an early age, from whom he inherited not only his classical erudition but also his liberal social outlook. From the poet’s correspondence, it is known that when he was still a student, he was confronted with the question of his family’s South Slavic origins. After 1920 this became one of the possible tools of attacks on his person, but there were also examples of bona fide “accusations”, to which Babits responded in writing. In my article, in addition to summarizing the known data on the family’s origins and interpreting Babits’ statements on his own national identity, I want to shed light on how this aspect of his self-understanding as a writer also determined his approach to literature.

The Defying Expectations Exhibition at the Brontë Parsonage Museum: A Reflection on Contemporary Curatorial Practices

This article reflects on the curatorial practices in the Brontë Parsonage Museum’s 2022 Defying Expectations costume exhibition, to assess its strengths and weaknesses and to identify opportunities for similar exhibitions to be launched and improved upon in the future. The Defying Expectations exhibition included interactive art installations, recreations and illustrative reconstructions alongside traditional display methods, and this article evaluates the effectiveness of such a blended approach. Written from the perspective of a museum professional, the article considers how the exhibition developed contemporary curatorial practices and its legacy. Drawing on heritage studies and curatorship, the article juxtaposes information gleaned from literary analysis with an assessment of material culture. It assesses the exhibition’s aim of reinterpreting Brontë’s reputation as choosing plain and practical clothing by foregrounding her interest in colourful and multicultural textiles, which raises questions of individual, local and national identity as well as regarding the effects of colonisation.

Уникальность концепции русского пути в ракурсе философского познания

This paper explores the influence of various philosophical movements, such as Orthodox Christianity, Slavophilism, Westernism, and Eurasianism, on the formation of the distinct path of Russian civilization. It examines the contribution of the Russian emigration after the October Revolution to the development of the national idea, as well as the role of leading Russian thinkers like Ivan A. Ilyin, Nikolai A. Berdyaev, among others, in both apologetics for and criticizing the Russian idea. The study convincingly develops the thesis that the Russian path is not merely a quest for national distinctiveness but also a messianic idea, combining idealism and pragmatism in the pursuit of a synthesis of Eastern and Western cultures. Moreover, it evaluates the concept of the Russian path through the lens of historical uniqueness, Russia's cultural calling, and in the context of contemporary issues such as globalization, political life, and cultural identity. The author of the article raises issues of criticism and realism in philosophy, focusing on debates among representatives of various philosophical movements regarding the role of science, religion and social order in the Russian idea. It centers on concepts such as conciliarity, collectivism, and Russia's messianic role, which are juxtaposed with the individualism and rationalism of Western traditions. In conclusion, the discourse surrounding the concept of the Russian path, as explored through various philosophical lenses, unveils a complex interplay between historical context, cultural heritage, and contemporary challenges. The synthesis of Eastern and Western thought, embodied in the Russian idea, reflects not only a quest for national identity but also a broader aspiration for global significance. This study underscores the ongoing relevance of philosophical inquiry in understanding the trajectory of Russian civilization, inviting further exploration into the dynamics of national identity, cultural distinctiveness, and the global mission of the Russian people.

Just not cricket: Baseball, youth and national identity in late nineteenth-century children’s magazines

In the late nineteenth century, baseball became enshrined as America’s national sport. Across American culture, the game became imbued with a series of values and characteristics that seemed redolent of life in the Gilded Age and beyond. This article explores the ways in which this process played out in the pages of popular magazines directed at the children of the nation’s elite. These neglected resources provide us with an extraordinary lens through which to chart both the changing place of the national game within the lives of American children and the changing meaning of baseball within the life of the nation. In poems, stories, illustrations, editorials and even reader’s letters, children were newly acculturated into the sporting life in ways that had profound implications for wider questions of childhood, gender, race, class and national identity.

(Re-)Writing the Holocaust After Brexit: The Afterlives of British Fiction

ABSTRACT This article examines the representation of a Nazi-occupied Britain in post-2016 reworkings of earlier alternative histories in which Britain lost the war. It does so by placing the 2017 television series SS-GB and C. J. Carey’s 2021 novel Widowland in conversation with their original counterparts: Len Deighton’s 1978 novel of the same name and Robert Harris’ Fatherland of 1992, respectively. Each text therefore has to imagine the consequences of Nazi victory for the Jews of Britain. Appearing in a post-Brexit context in which questions of national sovereignty and identity have been contentiously brought to the fore, these adaptations reveal a tendency towards British heroism in the face of European domination, and reinforce the isolationist messages that had been central to the referendum’s ‘Leave’ campaign. In each case, the British setting reveals the potential for political danger to be found close to home. The encroachment of what had been considered the European malaise of antisemitic murder into the British present is articulated through the act of revision and adaptation. This article shows how the themes of the original works were employed post-2016, and asks why the wartime murder of the Jews is ultimately not their central concern.

In search of common ground: landscape and place-identity in contemporary British folk

ABSTRACT This article identifies ‘place’ as a core theme in contemporary folk, one that affords a means of exploring new forms of post-national identity in Britain. While folk has engaged with questions of national identity, articulating multiculturalist positions, much recent work focuses on individual attachments to landscapes understood as both repositories of highly personal meaning and sites of universal experience. Through a discourse analysis of the popular podcast Folk on Foot (a key space for the development of this emerging discursive strand), I argue that the diminished emphasis on questions of Englishness or Britishness does not indicate a retreat from questions of cultural identity as such. Rather, the programme seeks to sketch out a post-national understanding of belonging in the landscape, one that de-emphasises cultural and ethnic differences within contemporary Britain, and focusses instead on common experiences of attachment to place and landscape that are thought to transcend notions of collective identity as bounded by national borders.

Questions of Cultural, National and Rhetorical Identity in the Poetry of Zhyrau as an Object of Ethnopoetics Translation

Questions of Cultural, National and Rhetorical Identity in the Poetry of Zhyrau as an Object of Ethnopoetics Translation

EU social policy and the subsidiarity principle: The end of an illusion?

Social policy at the EU level remains a notably limited enterprise. The Union appears unable to address social inequalities without treading into politicised areas of national decision-making, since intervention in the social domain touches upon core questions of national identity, sovereignty and democracy. In this article, I explore the fraught relationship between EU social policy and the principle of subsidiarity, which has frequently served to legitimate support for as well as opposition to supranational action in the social domain, even when and where the Union has well-defined competences to legislate. The article engages in a conceptual analysis of the implications of subsidiarity for EU social policy and labour law, illustrated with a case study that examines usages of the principle by different institutional actors in recent debates on EU social directives. While it clearly provides a convenient rhetorical instrument to political actors, I argue, the concept of subsidiarity fails to serve as an organising principle for the multilevel governance of social and labour policy. Scholarly and policy debates on the constitution of a more social Europe are therefore best oriented away from the language of subsidiarity and should focus instead on effective and democratically legitimate ways of delivering the social promises of both the EU and its Member States.

“We” versus “others” in Estonian fiction: the question of national identity in the works of contemporary women writers

ABSTRACT This article uses a postcolonial approach and the concept of Orientalization to uncover hierarchies in Estonian national identity construction. We examine the change in the articulation of the ‘other’ in the context of identity discourses of Estonians and Estonian Russian-speakers using literature by women authors in Estonia. We show how the interest of Estonian writers in the Russian community changed over time and then practically disappeared. We also demonstrate how, reflecting on their new post-imperial status, Estonian Russian-language literature eventually came to see Russians from Russia, rather than Estonians, as the key significant ‘other.’

Forms of National and European Identity: A Research Note Reviewing Literature of Cross-National Studies

AbstractIn the past decades, numerous publications have been addressing questions of national and European Identity on the micro level. Only few shed light on the contents that constitute these identities in the minds of Europeans. As different meanings of national and European identity are connected to different consequences such as hostile attitudes toward immigrants or Euroskepticism, reviewing attempts to measure these contents in existing cross-national surveys seems to be promising. This research note summarizes relevant literature on whether and which different forms of national and European identity have been found empirically, which specific contents constitute them, and which determinants and consequences of them are relevant. By comparing articles relying on cross-national survey data since 1995, it will be shown that the field of forms of national and European identity involves different operationalizations and numerous methodological concerns. This leads to considerations for further research in the field.

Austrian national identity in the centre-periphery model

ABSTRACT This article deals with the question of Austrian national identity, seen as a case study set within the theoretical frameworks of the centre-periphery model, and in particular, the theories of cultural emancipation of a periphery from the preponderance of a centre. The article examines , firstly, the unequal partnership between Germany and Austria, whose roots are to be found in the rivalry between the Habsburgs and Hohenzollerns, and, secondly, the way Austria invented its concept of a cultural centre after 1945. Finally, emphasis is put on selected political, cultural, and social phenomena, as well as processes that have happened since the 1960s, which question the traditional image of Austria. The salient element of this deconstruction process is by means of unearthing Austria’s memory of the Nazi past, which facilitates the emergence of a critical culture of remembrance and undermines the artificial post-war construct of Austrian national identity.

National Dreams, Worldly Visions

Abstract This essay explores the intertwined trajectories of a cluster of Argentine magazines, leftist and avant-garde: Proa, Martín Fierro, Insurrexit, and Revista de Oriente which, in their own peculiar ways, rocked and transformed the Buenos Aires cultural scene. It charts the magazines’ fleeting – though momentous – life-spans and existences at a time of revolution, when small collectives of writers and students spread radical and reformist ideas, formal experimentation, and a vernacular revival. While the nagging question of national identity underpinned the magazines’ literary aesthetics, the essay shows that, from the start, those at the editorial helm increasingly steered them towards the wider waters of world literature. Inasmuch as they realised that the conundrum of how to invent a modern Argentine literature could only be resolved dialectically, facing both inwards and outwards, nationally and transnationally, through the relationship between Argentina, Latin America, and the world at large.

The question of national identity and the immigration of Kosovo Muslims to Turkey during the Yugoslav communist regime

ABSTRACT This paper attempts to answer some questions about the Yugoslav communist regime's identity policy in Kosovo: did the authorities encourage Turkification of Albanians or Albanisation of Turks, and how was the issue of Turkish emigration from Yugoslavia to Turkey handled in the 1950s? Answers to these questions may also prove useful in discussing the question of the determinants of the nationality policy of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia under the leadership of Josip Broz Tito. The study is based on the analysis of state documents kept in different archives in Belgrade, Pristina, and Tirana, and the relevant literature in Serbian, Albanian, Turkish, and English. It is my contention that the Turkish minority in Kosovo was in the first post-war years denied the recognition of its national identity and minority rights, and that its status largely depended on the Yugoslav communist leadership's strategy of subordinating Yugoslavia's national interests to the particular interests of the six federal and two autonomous units into which it was divided. I argue that the Yugoslav government implemented different policies regarding emigration to Turkey in Kosovo and Macedonia and that it sought to halt the emigration of Kosovo Albanians, as evidenced by available data.

Women, Poetry and the Voice of a Nation by Anne Varty

Reviewed by: Women, Poetry and the Voice of a Nation by Anne Varty Magdalena Kay WOMEN, POETRY AND THE VOICE OF A NATION, by Anne Varty. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021. 248 pp. $110 hardback; $105 ebook. Women, Poetry and the Voice of a Nation by Anne Varty is a ground-breaking book that engages with the work of four laureate poets of the United Kingdom and Ireland: Gillian Clarke, Carol Ann Duffy, Liz Lochhead, and Paula Meehan. The book’s discussion focuses largely on the poets’ prose comments and manifesto-style pronouncements, looking at the ways they have made themselves visible in public space. Varty explores how these authors gained access to a poetry establishment dominated by men, how they critique prevailing representations of the home nation, and how they have gone from liminal positions to central ones. It also contains moments of close reading of individual poems in chapters devoted to each poet, as well as a chapter on their negotiations with William Wordsworth, Robert Burns, and William Butler Yeats. Although feeling the need to seek permission to use one’s voice is, of course, not unique to female poets— even after winning the Nobel Prize, Seamus Heaney speaks of feeling the need to ask permission to undertake his acclaimed translation of Beowulf (1999)—this book centers on a gendered sense of exclusion. Varty does a wonderful job of presenting the foundational energies animating female poets in the twentieth century. The desire to make space for women’s voices is perhaps a given, but the ways in which poets take energy from their re-conceptualizations of the poetic voice is a phenomenon well worth reading about. The notion of “vitality arising from resistance, subversion and opposition” is intriguing (p. 6). Indeed, the book is not unified around any orthodoxy. For example, the question of national identity has the potential to be vexing for women writers who may feel, like the Irish poet Eavan Boland, that their voices are “outside history.”1 Other authors may argue that this issue does not hinge on a dialectic of inclusion and exclusion but rather upon recognition of various modalities for expressing collective identity, which may not hew to heroic or even public models for expressing national belonging. While this book focuses on the United Kingdom and Ireland, it is alive to the fact that influence is transnational. Sylvia Plath is positioned as an enabling voice that allows British women to feel that someone is listening, while the influence of Gary Snyder upon Meehan is sensitively recounted (p. 7). Varty is also aware that some of the poets represented here have a complex relation to the United Kingdom as a multi-national entity (indeed, it is hard to think of Boland or Meehan seeing themselves as poets of the United Kingdom). The book’s interest in laureate positions focalizes these concerns but also runs the risk of attaching overmuch importance to a role that some writers view as near-anachronism. Potential readers, though, may be drawn to this book precisely for its attention to public recognition. [End Page 176] Varty views these poets in terms of their participation in the “creative culture” of their home places, simultaneously recognizing that such culture is not often unitary (p. 94). For a poet such as Lochhead, whose “alignment of Scotland with woman” is widely recognized and serves her purpose of self-assertion, this approach makes sense (p. 104). For Duffy, the approach foregrounds one aspect of her legacy yet runs the risk of scanting her own refusal to engage in identity politics—regarding the identity-driven conversation surrounding the New Generation Poets, Duffy laconically comments, “the whole thing ‘misses the point’” (p. 125). In her chapter on Duffy, Varty recognizes that “the ‘edge’ has been presented entirely in terms of content and identity politics,” yet for practicing poets, their verse-craft may well be the real point, and the poet’s consciousness may not readily ally itself with available labels (p. 126). Perhaps not all the poets Varty studies would agree with the book’s focus on community—a reading of its individual analyses tempts us with the question of whether and when they have ever...

Building pasta's empire: Barilla in Italian East Africa

AbstractThis article investigates the role that Italian food companies like Barilla pasta played in creating narratives of East African empire at the apex of the Fascist ventennio. It aims to use the commercial remnants of Fascist empire to provide a more thorough accounting of how colonialism shaped the modern cultural history of Italian pasta. To do so, I analyze the paper ephemera, that is, the pasta advertisements and packaging, that connected occupied East Africa to Italy, demonstrating how regime projects to promote grain evolved into corporate projects in private industry. I argue that these two stories form a single cohesive narrative, one that can unite much of the excellent work that has been done on Fascist agriculture in empire with the transnational history of Italian food companies. East African empire, as depicted by Italian pasta shapes and advertisements, was consumable. At stake in this inquiry lies the shifting question of Italian national identity, framed by food products in global contexts.

Chinese Migration to Britain and the Impact of the Cultural identity on the British East Asian Theatr

Cultural identification has a long history that dates back to colonial times. As globalization increased the frequency of cross-national encounters during the 1950s, researchers became more concerned with the question of cultural identity. Globalization had a significant influence on third-world culture in the late 1990s, therefore most researchers paid increasing attention to the question of national culture and national identity. The topic of cultural identity first arose in Britain in the nineteenth century. As a colonist, Britain improved its native culture, while weakening its foreign culture. The emphasis on British national pride in education for all countries distinguishes between internal and exterior cultures. According to Liu (2021), the issue of accepting mainstream culture while rejecting alien culture has entered the ambit of British cultural identity inquiry due to the increase of Chinese immigration to Britain. The history of the Chinese in Britain, the waves of immigration, their identity transitions over time, and numerous related subjects, including the economic and social position of the Chinese in Britain, have affected the new Chinese identity as being exposed in the British East Asian Theatre (BEAs). The aim of this study is to link the development of the British East Asian Theatre with the impact of the changes that happened to the cultural identity of the Chinese migrants in Britain throughout history since the 1880s. The researchers conclude that the various generations of Chinese migration to Britain from the early nineteenth century to the present have gone through many cultural changes. These changes affected their Chinese identity and resulted in a cultural conflict in terms of acculturation and loss of heritage. This is what the British East Asian playwrights try to expose in their theater.

Interpreting Ethnic Movements in Pakistan (Communication)

My difficulties with this paper relate primarily to the methodology. Professor Christophe Jaffrelot has chosen to omit the section on Kashmir that figured in the version first presented at the Fourteenth Annual General Meeting, of the Pakistan Society of Development Economists. The omission reinforces the exception I have to the approach. In my comments therefore, I will include some inter-related, and overlapping dimensions of the subject addressed, the exclusion of which, to my mind, hampers an holistic analysis. I will draw attention to the ‘role of Islam’ in Indian Muslim politics before partition, and the question of national identity since the creation of Pakistan. I will also highlight some of the features of the phenomenon of ethnicity itself that help explain the dynamics of the nature, content, and process of identity formation, and hence, an understanding of the mechanics of the identity that became pertinent during the Pakistan Movement. Similarly, I will comment on the ethnic expressions (that have been defined and re-defined) within the national context since the creation of Pakistan.

National identity, transnational ideology, and cultural policy in Iran

ABSTRACT The question of Iranian national identity under the Islamic Republic has been the subject of much academic debate in the past two decades but little empirical research has been conducted to assess the government’s cultural policy on national identity. This article seeks to scrutinize The Islamic Republic of Iran’s cultural policy vis-à-vis the Iranian national identity. We use a content analysis approach to explore the Iranian government’s cultural policy toward Iranian national identity. To do so, we analyze the documents of the highest body of cultural policy-making, Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution (SCCR), at two levels to explore their relationship with Iranian identity. The results of our content analysis at level 1 unveil that the Iranian national identity, as a whole, has a marginal role in the SCCR’s documents. Content analysis at level 2 (i.e. semiotic analysis) explains why such a peripheral status exists and delineates that cultural policy based on the SCCR’s transnational ideology represents a situation whose most paramount features are (a) substituting a part of Iranian identity for the whole of it, (b) defining a transnational sphere as the main subject in adopting cultural policy, and (c) describing Iran as a part of the Islamic Ummah and its forerunner in the universal defiance against the West.

The Production of the Book of Mormon in Light of a Tibetan Buddhist Parallel

The Production of the Book of Mormon in Light of a Tibetan Buddhist Parallel

Brutalised, Broken and Betrayed: The Falklands Veteran in 1980s British Film

Abstract This article examines how the British Falklands veteran was depicted in three late 1980s films: Resurrected (1989), Tumbledown(1988) and For Queen and Country (1989). Like many contemporaneous depictions of American Vietnam veterans, all three productions explore the difficult homecoming of the “returning soldier”, paying close attention to questions of health, well-being, national identity, class and race. To this extent, all three films “use” the figure of the veteran for pointed social and political commentary, with the mores and values of 1980s Britain the subject of engaged critique: from unemployment and the collapse of class solidarity, to the pettiness of government bureaucracy, to the racism of the State and its agents. In doing so, 1980s era depictions of the Falklands veteran established a powerful template which continues to shape and inform perceptions of the “stigmatized veteran” in contemporary British culture.