Questions Of National Identity Research Articles

Historia de la ciencia ficción latinoamericana I: Desde los orígenes hasta la modernidad [A history of Latin American science fiction: From its origins to modernity] ed. by Teresa López-Pellisa and Silvia G. Kurlat Ares (review).

Reviewed by: Historia de la ciencia ficción latinoamericana I: Desde los orígenes hasta la modernidad [A history of Latin American science fiction: From its origins to modernity] ed. by Teresa López-Pellisa and Silvia G. Kurlat Ares David S. Dalton (bio) Historia de la ciencia ficción latinoamericana I: Desde los orígenes hasta la modernidad [A history of Latin American science fiction: From its origins to modernity] Edited by Teresa López-Pellisa and Silvia G. Kurlat Ares. Madrid/Frankfurt am Main: Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2020. Pp. 507. Historia de la ciencia ficción latinoamericana I reevaluates the role of science fiction (SF) in the Latin American canon. Arguing that SF literature was common in a region that has long used literature to negotiate its relationship to science, technology, and modernity (pp. 10–11), the authors situate SF at the heart of nation-building projects (p. 14). The volume addresses the conspicuous lack of scholarly attention to SF through a transregional approach that interrogates the place of SF in the national letters of an array of Latin American countries. The collection of chapters hits the sweet spot between identifying new material, providing a theoretically rich analysis, and advocating for a more inclusive history of the region's SF. Miguel Ángel Fernández Delgado's chapter juggles these tasks especially well. He cites key foundational studies in Mexican SF (Ross Larson, María Bermúdez, Ramón López Castro, and Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz), but he focuses primarily on identifying SF (and proto-SF) authors who wrote from the colonial period into the present. His rich analysis shows that Mexico's SF has long responded to its cultural referent. Nineteenth-century literature after independence followed a utopian schematic that lurched between optimism and pessimism as writers grappled with questions of national identity. His discussion of Nervo is especially valuable because it establishes this wellknown author as a trailblazer in Mexican SF. Fernández Delgado's discussion of postrevolutionary SF is equally interesting, particularly as he situates authors like Eduardo Urzaiz, José Urquizo, and even José Vasconcelos as SF letrados who used literature to interrogate different aspects of the present. I especially appreciated Fernández Delgado's emphasis on popular literature (and film) from the 1940s into the 1960s. As his chapter masterfully shows, Mexico's SF—especially when one expands the canon—provides an invaluable lens from which to gauge national development. Emily Maguire's chapter also embodies the volume's project as it traces Cuban SF from the nineteenth century to 1938. She begins by challenging those who would separate the concept of SF from "literature" more generally. In the Cuban case, SF (and texts that can be approached as SF) has been a natural genre from which to interrogate notions of national identity and modernity. Her discussion of Francisco Calcagno's En busca del eslabón: Historia de monos is especially important. The novel's decidedly [End Page 1227] racist narrative centers on a group of Cuban and U.S. doctors who travel to the Brazilian Amazon, Africa, and the South Pacific to find the "missing link" between humans and simians. The novel dialogues with Jules Verne and English-language authors of the time period (pp. 216–17), but it also engages the scientific discourses of the day, particularly those of anthropology, Darwinism, and even phrenology. Maguire's discussion of Juan Manuel Planas's alternative history, La corriente del Golfo, highlights how Cuban SF authors have adapted the popular texts of their day to their own context. The novel's imaginative premise—Cuban rebels almost defeat Spain during the war for independence through scientific means (though they ultimately fail and the United States still intervenes)—alludes to the possibility for SF to imagine a preferred timeline from that of the present. In interrogating the role of SF in all Latin American countries, the book even discusses those cases where SF has been almost nonexistent. In his chapter, Hebert Benítez Pazzolano notes that, unlike the rest of the region of the Río de la Plata—which boasts some of the earliest cases of SF in all of Latin America—SF never enjoyed significant diffusion...

From la Favilla to Claudio Magris: Trieste’s European Identity

ABSTRACT This essay discusses Claudio Magris’s concept of Mitteleuropa—which is central to his view of Europe—by situating it within the context of Triestine cultural history. It first presents the reflections on Europe formulated by the early generations of journalists in La Favilla, the newspaper founded in Trieste in 1836. This is followed by a discussion of the cultural and political writings of Scipio Slataper (1888–1915) and Giani Stuparich (1891–1961). Like Magris these journalists and writers assumed the role of public intellectuals and reflected on three pivotal periods in the history of Trieste by focusing on the question of cosmopolitanism (La Favilla), political and national identity (Slataper), and the feasibility of a European project after World War II (Stuparich). Against the prevailing totalizing nationalist vision, these writers explored the possibility of a non-national political identity based on a cultural notion of Europeanism. The different views of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Triestine journalists and writers of the idea of Europe, of Trieste as a border city, and of European identity, are illuminated by Magris’s own theoretical elaborations on borders, on Europe, and on Mitteleuropa, which further highlight their historical and conceptual intricacies.

Economic nostalgia: the salience of economic identity for the Brexit campaign

AbstractThe rise of ‘new populism’ is commonly explained by two opposing approaches known as cultural backlash and economic deprivation. Their antagonism perpetuates a dichotomous understanding of economy versus identity. This article contributes to scholarly attempts to overcome this dichotomy by introducing the concept of economic identity. It suggests to bring ‘the economic’ back into culturalist explanations as a discursive motif that can be charged with identity and tradition. I argue that shared assumptions about what economic practices, institutions and conventions appear appropriate for the nation can serve the purpose of national identification. A qualitative discourse analysis of almost 400 Brexit campaign documents shows that those in favour of withdrawal and often considered ‘populist’ did not neglect economic arguments. But instead of relying on brute economic calculus, they referred to Britain’s economic traditions and images of a glorious economic past. By linking economic critique of the EU to issues of British heritage, Leave made Brexit a question of national economic identity—a discursive strategy particularly resonating with those economically deprived.

Borderland, Migration and the Question of National Identity in Nigeria, 1914-1991

Prior to the European conquest of Africa, the area of study was made up of various political entities with different ethnic and religious backgrounds. However, the British colonization and subsequent 1914 amalgamation brought all ethnic nationalities and regions together to form what is now Nigeria. Nevertheless, the nature of political boundaries in Africa separated people with common ethno-religious and political experiences. Thus, most of the people at the borderlands freely migrate to and from Nigeria to neighbouring countries without respect for immigration laws which made it difficult for national identity in the West African sub-region. Therefore, nationalism and independence in Nigeria/Africa have failed to correct such colonial mistakes which made it difficult to address the question of national identity. Above all, the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) which was established by the NIMC Act No. 23 of 2007 to address the issue of immigrants is still battling the question of national identity.

The Carpathian Basin as a ‘Hungarian Neighbourhood’: Imaginative Geographies of Regional Cooperation and National Exceptionalism

ABSTRACT This paper explores how the geographical idea of the Carpathian Basin has been employed in post-1989 Hungarian conceptualizations of regional development across state borders. This involves understanding the tensions that have emerged between different and partly competing notions of the Carpathian Basin as a cooperation space that reflects “Europeanization” and as a geographical context that is central to Hungary’s sense of place (neighborhood) in Europe. These tensions are reflected in concerns expressed by neighboring states that regional cooperation in fact promotes Hungary’s ethnopolitical agendas. Our approach is based on the assumption that links between geography, geographical imaginaries and questions of national identity remain highly salient. We thus take inspiration from traditions of geographical research that emphasize the subjective nature of space–society relations and their representation in geographical imaginaries. The sources used reflect scholarly and political narratives, primarily geographic and regional research, and politically narrated geographical imaginaries. As part of this undertaking, we will highlight change and continuity in the use of the Carpathian Basin idea from the 1920s to the present. More specifically, we will consider the consequences of Hungary-centric neighborhood imaginaries for territorial cooperation as well as the difficulties involved in the institutionalization of the Carpathian Basin as a project region.

Singapore: The Shadow of A Nation Under a Mask - Alfian Sa’at, and the question of national identity

Singapore: The Shadow of A Nation Under a Mask - Alfian Sa’at, and the question of national identity

THE PROBLEM OF NATIONAL IDENTITY AND CREATIVE INDIVIDUALITY IN THE PROSE OF VASYL STUS AND CZESłAW MIŁOSZ

In a typological way, the paper considers the problem of preservation/loss of the writer’s individuality, with a focus on the national identity as its essential component, on the example of the self-published texts of Ukrainian and Polish literature, in particular the essay by Czesław Miłosz “Alpha, or Moralist” from the book “The Captive Mind” and literary-critical research work by Vasyl Stus “Phenomenon of the Age (Ascent to Calvary of Glory)”. Both for Vasyl Stus and Czesław Miłosz the native language is a matter of special importance as well as their attachment to the homeland, which is expressed in the awareness of the impossibility to fully realize their talents abroad. In the context of the totalitarian system, which perceived art as a means of asserting ideology, the paper analyzes image features of a famous prose writer Jerzy Andrzejewski and outstanding poet Pavlo Tychyna in the texts of their contemporaries Cz. Miłosz and V. Stus. The main issues are the motive of disguise and pretending to be another, the peculiarities of creative work aiming at pleasing the authorities as a conscious apostasy from one’s own “I”. The role of a state writer leads to the destruction of the writer’s individuality, in particular his national identity (in the “Phenomenon of the Age”), turning the artist into a ‘dead’ person-function. V. Stus and Cz. Miłosz are similar in their desire to understand the writers represented in their texts, to interpret them as victims of the system. Attention is drawn to the difference in the narration of the compared texts: if Cz. Miłosz presents the story about J. Andrzejewski keeping some emotional distance, V. Stus is deeply concerned about the loss of P. Tychyna’s poetic individuality, and with it – national identity, perceiving the tragedy of Ukrainian literature as personal harm. б e question of national identity in the work by Cz. Miłosz is not actually raised, while in V. Stus’s one it is presented quite clearly in its historical continuity as a fundamental problem of the Ukrainian culture.

Trans-gendering the Irish Na(rra)tion: Neil Jordan’s Breakfast on Pluto

Occupying a relegated position as it does in Neil Jordan’s filmography, it is my contention that Breakfast on Pluto is one of his most transgressive films. Not only does it cross the most evident boundaries of heteronormative gender roles by giving a transvestite the central position in the story, but also blends film genres as a way of vindicating hybridisation at all levels, challenging other modern categorisations as those informing Irish national identity. Thirteen years after The Crying Game (1992) was released, Irish filmmaker Neil Jordan returns to the intersectional issues of gender and national identity in his adaptation of Patrick McCabe’s novel Breakfast on Pluto (1998). However, apart from the presence of a transvestite and the shadow of sectarian violence looming throughout the narrative, these films have little else in common: the dull, grey atmosphere of an obscure drama involving kidnap and murder by the IRA in The Crying Game contrasts sharply with the bright colours, ironic drive and parody in Breakfast on Pluto, a story about growing up in Ireland as an orphan transvestite who yearns for romantic true love. Moreover, while Jordan’s first feature film was defined as a romantic drama with thriller hues, Breakfast moves between comedy and drama, the bildungsroman and the melodrama. This generic ambivalence goes hand in hand with Jordan’s transgressing approach to the question of gender and national identity as a strategy to challenge fixed understandings of those labels as natural and given and, for that reason, the violence inflicted on the main character (and, by extension, on any Other body that does not fit those categories).

Gdańsk: Specificity of Its Architecture in the Modern Era. The Question of National and Regional Identity

The architectural heritage and the mode of its analysis and interpretation, especially in the perspective of the national and regional question, can and often does become an issue prone to manipulation. The attempts to define national and regional identity by means of cultural legacy have accompanied research into art and also the creation of modern architecture in the spirit of national Historicism since the 19th century. The place where the phenomena can be observed in a particularly acute way is Gdańsk, a city of extremely complicated identity, multicultural structure, and a rich architectural output, the latter having been on a number of occasions subject to national interpretations or over‑interpretations. The architecture of Gdańsk has for years been the subject of a heated debate of both German and Polish architects, historians of architecture, and conservators. In recent years politicians have also joined in the debate, and so have writers. Discussed have been the general attempts to define factors and means of visual identification, definitions of cultural belonging, and definitions of the historical‑architectural affiliation of the cultural heritage of the city. Another debate issue has been the need to apply all this heritage or its elements to the creation of the urban landscape (both as new districts and filling in the architectural substance in the old ones) as clear signs of regional identification. At the same time, the majority of monuments have become the subject of scholarly abuse and interpretative manipulation, used for the sake of propaganda or merely rhetoric, often with no understanding of architectural issues or the specificity of the history of architecture on this territory.

“Let Us Create a Modern Lithuania!” Confrontations of National Identity with Modernity in the Lithuanian Music Modernisation Discourse of the 1930s

Abstract The project of modernisation, which emerged as the central idea in the course of 20th-century Lithuanian music, predetermined many creative orientations and discoveries by Lithuanian composers of various generations, as well as critical reflection on their works. At the root of Lithuanian projections of musical modernism lies a central concern with questions of national identity, affected by crucial historical changes and political processes. In this paper, I explore issues of relationship between construction of national identity and the modernity, focusing in particular on public discussions concerning national and modern elements in music, which appeared in the musical press of the 1930s and became emblematic of subsequent Lithuanian music history. Among the most active participants of the debates were young composers and musicians who had set up the Society of Progressive Musicians in 1932 and the iscM Lithuanian Section in 1936: Vytautas Bacevičius, Jeronimas Kačinskas, and Vladas Jakubėnas. Their opinions marked a significant turning point in the national music discourse, updating and expanding the understanding and use of the concepts of modern and national music in Lithuania. The interwar polemical observations, insights and statements were effectively elaborated in later reception and served as basis for a reinterpretation and revision of the Lithuanian music modernisation discourse.

I am Chinese: The Politics of Chinese American Lapel Buttons in Los Angeles during World War II

Abstract This article examines the history of lapel buttons and stickers used by Chinese Americans to identify their ethnicity during World War II. Most of these buttons and stickers were produced by Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Associations (CCBAs) immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor to differentiate their members from Japanese Americans. In examining this history, this article focuses in particular on Los Angeles, the city with the largest Japanese American population on the West Coast. In Los Angeles, U.S.-born Chinese American and Japanese American youth attended many of the same schools and often formed close friendships with one another. As a result, the questions that the buttons and stickers posed for this generation of Chinese American youth were particularly fraught. Drawing on oral history interviews, sociological studies of the Southern California Chinese American community from the period, and archival newspaper reportage, this article approaches these lapel pins and stickers as items of cultural contestation through which a variety of historical actors—from Chinese consular representatives, to immigrant leaders in the CCBAs, to Chinese American youth—negotiated questions of ethnic and national identity after the U.S. entry into World War II. I argue that rather than reflecting the complex ways that most Chinese American youth understood their own identity, the buttons and stickers represented the official viewpoints of the Chinese consulates in the United States and their allies in the nation’s CCBAs.

Gilbert and George's 1980 Pictures and the Spectre of Nationalism in Postcolonial Britain

With their hallucinatory juxtapositions of medieval English iconography, imperial‐era public statuary, and indicators of contemporary urban unrest, Gilbert and George's monumental 1980 Pictures marked what many initial critics perceived as an unsettlingly political turn in the duo's work – even, some alleged, a gesture of identification with Britain's neo‐fascist right. In fact, this essay argues, much of Gilbert and George's preceding work, including their collages of Edwardian‐era picture postcards, and their canonical performances of The Singing Sculpture, was similarly oriented toward questions of national identity and belonging in a manner more philosophical than propagandistic. At a moment marked by an ascendant if internally contested effort by the political right to reconceptualize ‘Britishness’ for a postcolonial age, the artists used their self‐appointed roles as ‘living sculptures’ to emphasize the discontinuities, contradictions, and instabilities inherent to the construct of British identity, stoking an emerging set of anxieties regarding the street‐level legibility of political partisanship in a highly polarized London.

‘Convicted of Patricide?’: Robert Frost’s Nationalism in the Eyes of Contemporary Arab-American Women Writers

Given the culturally expansive nature of the American literary tradition of today, the question of the relevance of Robert Frost’s poetry to the poetry of contemporary Arab-American women writers is an issue worth digging into. Writing almost one hundred years ago does not make Frost’s poetry out of date. Frost’s poetry is as relevant to today’s America as it has been to the America of his days. And this can be ascribed to the multiplicity of perspectives he presents in his poetry as he examines crucial questions lying at the core of America’s “grand narrative of national development.” (Westover 2004: 216) Hence, the ambivalence which characterizes his national poetry. Reading Frost's representation of subjects crucial to the American history in light of the contemporary Arab-American women writers’ can yield a better understanding of the ambivalent standpoint he adopts in most of his national poems. To achieve that, the discussion will analyze, compare and contrast the statements Frost and five contemporary Arab-American women writers (Naomi Shihab Nye, Lisa Suhair Majaj, Suheir Hammad, Mohja Kahf and Nathalie Handal) make on the crucial questions of national identity, citizenry and cross-cultural existence in a number of their selected poems. What place does Frost’s ambivalence find in their poetry? And to what extent is it shared or rejected? These questions, amongst others, will be addressed in the current study with the aim of assessing the impact of Frost’s oeuvre on the poetry of contemporary American poets of Arab descents.

Hedayat’s rebellious child: multicultural rewriting of The Blind Owl in Porochista Khakpour’s Sons and Other Flammable Objects

ABSTRACT Divided along several ethnic, linguistic and religious lines, Iran is a multicultural country and the question of its national identity has been a matter of dispute since the beginning of the last century. Part of this dispute has been going on in literary works by national and diasporic authors. In this paper, Porochista Khakpour’s Sons and Other Flammable Objects has been read in terms of its contribution to the questions of nationalism and national identity famously addressed in Sadegh Hedayat’s The Blind Owl. It seems that Khakpour has modelled her debut novel on Hedayat’s magnum opus as an effective way to join the debate. Focusing on Khakpour’s narrative, this study demonstrates how the novel presents a multicultural narrative of national identity in response to what is sometimes considered as Hedayat’s ethnocentric nationalism in The Blind Owl.

Front and Back Covers, Volume 37, Number 4. August 2021

Front and back cover caption, volume 37 issue 4Front coverTOXIC FLOWS: E‐WASTE RECYCLINGA worker starts a fire to burn off the insulation from electrical cables to extract copper at an informal e‐waste recycling site in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Open fire is one of the methods used here to mine metals from defunct electronics devices and their components.Electronic waste is one of the fastest‐growing types of waste worldwide. However, many countries lack the formalized infrastructures necessary to collect and handle e‐waste safely. The informal sector has stepped up to fill the gap. E‐waste attracts urban dwellers seeking to extract value from these discarded materials while releasing toxic compounds detrimental to health and the environment.In this special issue on toxic flows, Samwel Moses Ntapanta follows Dar es Salaam's informal e‐waste recyclers to find out how they understand the toxic nature of their work and what measures they take to minimize exposure. The number of informal e‐waste recycling workshops in Dar es Salaam has skyrocketed in recent years. High demand for metals, like copper, offers a stable livelihood for e‐waste recycling workers.Scavenging spare parts from the electronic afterlives is primarily driven by a vibrant Tanzanian local market, giving an impetus to repurpose certain materials. During these activities (mining, repurposing, restoring and reusing), workers are exposed to many toxic chemical compounds. With little or no knowledge about these, workers in informal e‐waste recycling face unknown risks of exposure as they make a dangerous living in urban environments.Back coverTOXIC FLOWS: GLYPHOSATELaunch of the #StopGlyphosate campaign supported by the European Citizens' Initiative (ECI) and 37 European organizations in front of the European Parliament, 8 February 2017.Across the globe, grass‐roots movements against glyphosate, the world's most used herbicide, have encouraged regulators to re‐examine its safety assessments. In Europe, a drawn‐out process is widely expected to conclude that glyphosate is harmful to health and should be banned across all 28 member states. If so, this would likely lead to similar decisions in other markets, representing a blow to the agrochemical industry.More than any other pesticide, efforts to ban glyphosate have become tied up with questions of national sovereignty. From Vietnam and Thailand to Colombia and Mexico, the US government has threatened ‘trade disruption’ should a ban go ahead. The message is clear: chemical regulation is an international, not a domestic, matter.Nevertheless, glyphosate has become a standard for emerging populism. In post‐war Sri Lanka, banning glyphosate became a mission of Buddhist nationalist movements seeking to purify the national body. In the UK, Brexit supporters argued an independent UK would have the freedom to stop glyphosate (another ‘Vote Leave’ promise quickly broken).As politics the world over has re‐engaged with questions of national identity and autonomy, halting the free flow of glyphosate has become a goal for those on the left and right of the political spectrum.

Captioning the occupation: The role of textual elements in the process of building national narratives in historical museums

Background: After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, in the ideology vacuum it left behind, the question of national identity became one of great importance. Adopting the Benedict Anderson constructivist idea that nations are imagined – or socially constructed communities that have to be continuously reproduced in order to exist, we aim to analyse whether and in what ways historical and archaeological museums can serve as tools in the process of building or reshaping national identity in the post-Soviet landscape in order to achieve the state ambitions of the nation. Museums are a powerful tool for policymakers; they not only present neutral objects but also usually enter into dialogue with visitors and create a certain vision of history. The stories told in museums can incorporate selected episodes into a national narrative. Aim, Method, and Discussion: The author aims to verify whether there is a disconnection between two or three parallel texts, between the texts and the visual image, and finally between the texts in question and the master narrative, as imposed by the policymakers. The materials for the analysis are captions, labels, audio guides, and texts from the websites, from the Museum of Soviet Occupation, Tbilisi, Georgia; the Museum of Occupation and Fights for Freedom in Vilnius, Lithuania; and the National Museum of the Holodomor-Genocide in Kiev, Ukraine. The research demonstrated that the analysed texts in the museums in question are a key element of building the museums’ narratives. In addition, the choice of language version is a significant factor that strengthens the museum’s discourse. Captions and labels are an integral part of the narrative styles. Conclusion: The caption is a key element in relation to what a spectator thinks they are seeing: if the contextualising text is changed, the meaning of the artefacts and of the exhibits changes to a large degree.

The Pandemic as a Rupture that Follows Rules: Comparing Governance Responses in India, USA, Sweden and Norway

How a country responds to a rupture such as the COVID-19 pandemic can be revelatory of its governance. Governance entails not only the exercise but also the constitution of authority. The pandemic response thus presents a real-world disruption to verify or problematize some truisms about national governance and produce novel comparisons and insights. We present a comparative analysis across four established democratic nation-states. First, we identify concerns of relevance for national pandemic responses and map them to state characteristics. Next, we conduct thematic analyses of recent ruptures in India, the United States, Sweden and Norway, to form a baseline of truisms about governance responses to frontier moments such as this pandemic, and hypothesize their relative propensities across the concerns. We then compile comparative data on emergent pandemic responses during the first 90 days of respective, temporally proximate outbreaks. This combination enables us to link response characteristics to national propensities across the relevant concerns. We identify similarities and differences between what the pandemic responses reveal and the truisms of scholarship about the four countries state characteristics. We argue that ruptures in democratic governance contexts embody temporally discontiguous and country-specific patterns. They are conjunctures of particular possibilities for bounded reconfiguration. Such reconfiguration can intensify or shift the course of what the state is becoming. We argue that in our cases it accelerates shifts to authoritarianism (India and the United States), raises stark questions of national identity (Norway and Sweden) and underscores tensions between the reemergence of welfare states and the global project of neoliberalism. By revealing what sort of rules show resurgence across ruptures, our comparative analysis deepens a timely understanding of punctuated politics of reconfiguration of authority.

Identity Crisis in Arab Diasporic Novel: A Case Study of Lebanese American Novel

Very little has been written on cultural identity and national identity in contemporary Lebanese novel in the diaspora. This study explores how border identity is presented in Rabih Alameddine's Koolaids (1998), I, the Divine (2001), and The Angel of History (2016), three novels about the failure of the Lebanese immigrants to establish their cultural identity in the diaspora. It also gives a bird's-eye view of the myriad problems encountered by the immigrants while trying to build their cultural identity. Rabih Alameddine, a Lebanese American writer whose early literary pursuits focus on melting in the new homeland, represents the impossibility of redefinition and introduces the immigrants' remarkable preoccupation with the quest for national identity and nationhood. He mixes melancholic and ridiculous moments to represent the quest for cultural identity in order to subvert the neo-orientalist discourse which is based on the East/West dichotomy. Moreover, the use of multiple settings and narrators in each novel is also a common theme that explains the physical and psychological effects of the Lebanese civil war and the Lebanese ethnic categories in the diaspora.

Question of national identity as a part of the cultural security of Italy

The research subject discussed in the article is the main conditions of the cultural nationality of The Italian Republic. In the first part of the text, the notions of spiritual and material cultural heritage and the concept of national identity are described and explained. Next, the problem of Italian national identity is discussed. The Italian Republic is a young state with a strong regional identity and still weak national identity. Italy is inhabited by many ethnic groups, often characterized by diverse cultures and customs. The situation is complicated by the Italian Peninsula’s history, which contributed to the conflict of interest between the north and south. The author analyzes history, language, and religion, searching for common elements determining Italian nationality. Italian society, as mentioned above, has still been searching for its national identity. Unification of the nation is a process that is in progress. It is still a challenge for both the authorities and the citizens. Finally, the elements of Italian material cultural heritage are characterized, and the domains of cultural heritage and the institutions responsible for their security are described.

Representing England in Rome: Sermons from the Early Modern English College to Popes and Cardinals

ABSTRACT This article explores how preaching at the English College in Rome, c.1580–1603, can illuminate questions of national identity, Anglo-Italian exchanges, inter-confessional conflict and the symbiotic relationship of religious and national identities for English Catholics. It investigates in detail texts from a hitherto little-studied manuscript at the English College, Rome, whose large collection of homiletic and other rhetorical texts offers an unequalled insight into preaching at the College and adds valuably to our knowledge of preaching in Counter-Reformation Rome. The article looks at how English College preachers dealt with subjects such as persecution and martyrdom, England's ‘apostasy’, England's history and relations with Rome, and their place in the international Church. It reveals how the College and its members positioned themselves in both their English and their Roman contexts.