Medieval Ireland and the Shannon Hydro-Electric Scheme: reconstructing the past in independent Ireland

This essay considers the position of Irish medieval buildings in the early years of the twentieth century. Focusing on the treatment of the oratory of St. Lua at Killaloe, it examines the ways in which the ruins of the medieval past were used to signify a range of political, religious and cultural ideas and attitudes. The rising water levels following the Shannon Scheme works (begun in 1925) meant that this stone oratory was moved from its original position on Friar’s Island to the grounds of St. Flannan’s Roman Catholic Church in 1929. The resulting paper trail reflects the complex processes of decision-making within a civil service in transition as the new Irish Free State calibrated its position with regard to the past and the treatment of medieval ruins throughout the countryside. The case study of St. Lua’s oratory is considered here in the context of the nineteenth-century tradition of scholarship on medieval buildings, the development of the idea of a national Irish architecture during this period, and the impact of this tradition on subsequent engagement with the buildings of the medieval past.     

Gender in the frame: photography and the performance of the nation narrative in early twentieth-century Ireland

This article considers the role of visualising in the formation of the nation narrative. It foregrounds the significance of gender performance in early twentieth-century Irish cultural nationalism. Prior to the consolidation of a hegemonic narrative of state, spaces existed for the exploration of a range of possible projections of identity. This study focuses on one of those possibilities, namely a series of costume photographs where gender is literally performed. A contextual reading of these photographs is offered in order to situate them within the formation of the nation narrative. The gender of the nation is enacted through performativity, which through its repetition comes to be seen as natural. The photographs under consideration here undermine that process of naturalisation by revealing a more complex and contradictory history of the relationship between gender and nation. The omission of this more complex representation in the Irish narrative, it is argued, reveals how monopoly of narrative is integral to both hegemonic control in the visual field and how we understand the nation.     

Nation‐freezing: images of the nation and the migrant in citizenship packages

ABSTRACT. New nationalism differs from classical nationalism in terms of its content and focus. Whereas classical nationalism distinguishes itself from other nation‐states in defining its national identity, new nationalism distinguishes the ‘native’ national identity from that of its current and prospective citizens of migrant origin. The terms of integration thus become conditions of membership in the national community. Citizenship and integration policies emerge as central arenas where the discourse of new nationalism unfolds. This study looks into the discourses of cultural citizenship by studying the content of the official ‘citizenship packages’ – materials designed to welcome newcomers and assist them in their integration – in three Western European countries: The Netherlands, France and the UK. What images are depicted of the nation‐state and the migrant in citizenship packages, and (how) do these images freeze the nation?     

Visual images in Luigi Galvani's path to animal electricity

The scientific endeavor that led Luigi Galvani to his hypothesis of "animal electricity," i.e., of an electricity present in a condition of disequilibrium between the interior and the exterior of excitable animal fibers, is reviewed here with particular emphasis to the role played by visual images in Galvani's path of discovery. In 1791 Galvani formulated his model of neuromuscular physiology on the base of the image of a muscle and a nerve fiber together as in a "minute animal Leyden jar." This was the last instance of a series of physical models that accompanied Galvani's experimental efforts in the search of a theory capable of accounting for the electric nature of nerve conduction in spite of the many objections formulated in the eighteenth century against a possible role of electricity in animal physiology.     

Gendered images of the German nation: the Romantic painter Friedrich Kersting and the patriotic‐national discourse during the Wars of Liberation

ABSTRACT. The article analyses the oeuvre of Friedrich Kersting (1875–1847), a now largely forgotten Romantic painter, and other gendered images of the German nation that were created among his circle of friends but also in the wider context of the patriotic‐national discourse during the Prussian Wars of Liberation. The paper combines the findings of art historical research with those of history and cultural studies. In so doing, it deconstructs gendered images of the nation in the patriotic‐national discourse during the Wars of Liberation and their political importance during that time. The main focus of the analysis is the interrelationship between visual imagery, discursively formed patriotic‐national concepts in the topical literature, cultural practices and individual experience.     

The nation of the people: An analysis of Podemos and Five Star Movement's discourse on the nation

This article empirically explores how populist actors talk about the nation. This is a research area mostly tackled in studies on right-wing populism, with other forms of populist politics usually left out of the analysis. To fill this academic gap, we focus on the Spanish party Podemos and the Italian Five Star Movement (M5S). The former is a paradigmatic example of radical left populism, whereas the latter is commonly considered as a catch-all populist party with no clear ideological connotation. Through a discourse analysis on leaders' speeches and official public declarations, we focus on the role that national identity plays in the strategies of Podemos and M5S and on the type of nation they discursively construct. Whilst Podemos' populist strategy purposely aims at contending to the right ideologically loaded concepts and signifiers to construct an idea of nation fitting the party's leftist values, M5S's strategy mostly aims at appropriating valence issues, such as the “Made in Italy” brand and the concept of “national interest”. Thus, our analysis contributes to clarify the differences between the leftist political culture of Podemos and the “post-ideological” one of M5S, as also reflected by survey data confirming strong differences in “nationalist” attitudes between their respective electorates.     

民族学家与西南民族文献的发现

历史上,由于封建统治者对少数民族的歧视,西南各民族的文献只能在民间传播,官方没有做过系统的调查和整理,许多文献也湮没于历史的长河之中,人们并不太了解西南各族中有多少种文献.     

Educating the nation: shaping student-citizens in Indonesian schools

Children in Indonesia experience the state in ways that are vastly different from any other citizen. This article explores how the bodies of schoolchildren are a key site for nation-building practices in Indonesia through an examination of two state schools in Riau Islands Province. I investigate the ways in which national identity is inculcated in students through various performances intended to shape the student-citizen, including the wearing of school uniforms, morning national callisthenics and the weekly flag ceremony. Drawing on Judith Butler's concept of performativity, I argue that students’ embodied performances of the nation can be understood as performative in the necessity of repetition or ‘citational practices’, which perpetuate the meaning and maintain the power associated. It is through repetition that meanings embedded in the performances of schoolchildren, such as hierarchy, awareness of a higher bureaucratic power and a sense of belonging to the nation, are perpetuated and normalized to the performers.     

Defining the nation: Recent historiography and Irish nationalism

This article considers problems raised in recent historical scholarship concerning the definition of Irish national identity. Catholicism's growing importance in this identity is shown by comparing the eighteenth century United Irishmen, who combined secular and sectarian republicanism, the romantic nationalism of the nineteenth century Young Ireland movement, and the almost exclusively Catholic Irish Republican Army of this century. However, this Catholic, Gaelic, separatist identity excluded Protestant, non‐Gaelic and unionist Irish people. The author concludes by rejecting the notion of ‘an immemorial Irish nation, unfolding holistically through the centuries’, to stress discontinuities over time and the wider geographical setting of the British Isles.     

Fashioning the Italian nation: Risorgimento and its costumeall'italiana

This article retraces the debate that emerged during the nineteenth century about the need to create a modern Italian fashion that could restrain the popular use of foreign clothing, in particular that imported from France and Austria. While we usually refer to the 1950s when we think of Made-in-Italy fashion, it was during the Risorgimento that a public discussion began to take shape on the possibility of creating a national self, vested in Italy's specific character and history. Made of black velvet and accompanied by a hat with a feather, the nineteenth-century costume all'italiana was supposed to incarnate the essence of the modern Italian, although it never turned into a commercial reality. What it did, however, was successfully to communicate a message of national unity based on the notion of national sacrifice and expressed through a visual image of blackness – a message that resonated widely in Italy's nationalist discourse throughout and beyond the nineteenth century.     

Warm nationalism: Mapping and imagining the Jordanian nation

In 2002, fourteen years after their withdrawal from the West Bank, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan revealed its new national program known as “Jordan First.” The Palace initiated this campaign as part of its shifting national discourse which now sought to actively unite Palestinian-Jordanians and East Jordanians living to the east of the Jordan River. This campaign, and particularly its common map-logo symbol, has evolved over the last fourteen years into a rather “banal” national discourse and symbol. However, Jordanian nationalism and the everyday symbols of the Jordan First campaign are not forgotten. Instead, for many Jordanians, the campaign is a reminder of “hot” geopolitics and palpable identity politics. Drawing from Michael Billig's theorizations of banal nationalism, I examine the relationship between banal and hot forms of nationalism in Jordan and argue that scholarly work on banality needs to focus attention on the connections between these categories. As such, I suggest that framing nationalism as something quite “warm” can in many instances more aptly capture the complexity of nationalism. Using a multi-method approach that includes analyses of national maps and map-logos of Jordan and in-depth interviews with Jordanians about their national identities, I highlight the connections of hot and banal nationalism. Through my analysis, I also show that a Jordanian national identity is multi-scalar, merging Arab supranationalism with Jordanian and Palestinian identities; and thus I also extend Billig's work to examine the multiple scales of nationalism.