Race,culture, and national identity

Wade, Peter. Blackness and Race Mixture: The Dynamics of Racial Identity in Colombia. Baltimore, MD; Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. xv + 415 pp. including appendices, references, and index. $58.00 cloth.

Wetherell, Margaret and Jonathan Potter. Mapping the Language of Racism: Discourse and the Legitimation of Exploitation. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. ix + 246 pp. including appendices, references, and index. $45.00 cloth, $15.00 paper.     

The chimera of national identity

ABSTRACT. In both popular discourse and many academic works, the existence of national identity is largely taken as given. Although researchers disagree on whether national identities are modern or perennial, and how best to gauge the intensity of identification with a particular nation, there is near unanimity on the view that national identities are real and perceptible entities. In contrast to this view I argue not only that there was no national identity before modernity but also that there is little empirical evidence for the existence of national identities in the modern age either. While it is obvious that many individuals show great affinity for their nations and often express sincere devotion to the ‘national cause’, none of these are reliable indicators of the existence of a durable, continuous, stable and monolithic entity called ‘national identity’. To fully understand the character of popular mobilisation in modernity it is paramount to refocus our attention from the slippery and non‐analytical idiom of ‘identity’ towards well‐established sociological concepts such as ‘ideology’ and ‘solidarity’. In particular, the central object of this research becomes the processes through which large‐scale social organisations successfully transform earnest micro‐solidarity into an all‐encompassing nationalist ideology.     

War, suffering and modern German history

This introduction proceeds in five steps. First, it briefly considers the etymology of the term "suffering," as well as the way in which scholars from different disciplines have approached it conceptually and empirically. Second, drawing on the contributions to this issue, it raises general themes emerging from the study of the Thirty Years, Franco-Prussian and First World Wars, with particular attention to gender, the disabled, and Jewish-German veterans. Finally, it considers the most politically contested field of German suffering - the Second World War - and reflects on how that suffering can be narrated and understood without running into the intellectual dead ends of either self-pity or collective guilt.     

The 1911 International Exposition in Rome: architecture, archaeology, and national identity

This paper discusses the 1911 International Exposition in Rome and illustrates how this patriotic celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Italian Sate utilized symbolic landscapes of architecture and archaeology to promote nationalist sentiments of italianità and romanità centered on the young capital of Rome. Through modern art exhibitions at the Valle Giulia, scientific conferences at the Castel Sant’Angelo, archaeological exhibits on the Roman Empire in the Baths of Diocletian, and regional Italian pavilions in the Piazza d’Armi, exposition officials offered a complex representation of Italian national identity that was modern yet ancient, cosmopolitan yet bucolic, European yet regional, and imperial yet developing.     

Place, national identity and post-socialist transformations: an introduction

This paper serves as an introduction to this theme issue on the topic of post-socialist identity politics surrounding nation building, national identity and nationalism. It presents an overview of the key processes of post-socialist identity formation in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the former Soviet Union (FSU) in order to contextualise this collection of papers. This introduction outlines the key processes of identity formation and the treatment of nationalism under conditions of state-socialism, and then identifies the main processes of identity formation which have emerged in discourses surrounding nations and nationalities in post-socialist CEE and the FSU. A short account of each of the papers in the theme issue is then presented to identify the common strands of their analyses of post-socialist nationalisms.     

The historiography of nationalism and national identity in Latin America

ABSTRACT. This article surveys the current state of research on nationalism in Latin America, focusing on the large body of work produced from the 1990s onwards in a wide variety of disciplines (history, the social sciences and cultural studies). Covering work on both the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, it takes as a starting point the impact of Benedict Anderson's work, Imagined Communities, on Latin Americanists. It discusses the ways in which Latin Americanists have applied his ideas, and their critiques of many of his claims about Latin American nationalism. It goes on to outline major recent developments across the field, within the context of an argument that it is important for all scholars of nationalism to incorporate Latin American experiences into their debates on the history and theory of nationalism. The references have been selected to guide readers to key relevant works; regrettably, the article cannot, for reasons of space, offer a fully comprehensive bibliography.     

老舍的民族身份与文学创作——以《正红旗下》为中心的考察

按照目前约定俗成的使用情况,汉语中的“民族”一词有着狭义和广义的不同含义,因而老舍与很多作家一样具有双重民族身份:他是一个旗人,同时也是中华民族的一员。老舍的民族身份对其文学创作的影响表现得异常突出:作为一个旗人,他的文学创作在题材、风格、语言等方面具有鲜明的满族文化特质;作为中华民族的一员,他的文学创作表达了外抗强敌、内主团结的时代主题。     

Making time for national identity: theoretical concept and empirical glance on the temporal performance of national identity

Despite global, economic, technological and social transformations, nationality has remained an influential identity category. It still forms the basis for collective self‐determination, political sovereignty and sense of belonging. This article puts forward the concept of ‘Chrono‐Work’ to offer a critical approach to national identity. Employing temporal and performative perspectives, the concept addresses the conditions for establishing and constructing national identity. Drawing on Judith Butler's performance theory, it is suggested that performance of national acts loads national identity with meaning through the construction of a chronological narrative. To complete the theoretical picture, a case study of ‘Chrono‐Work’ among the Jewish settlers on the Golan Heights in Israel is offered. It is shown that national identity is constantly performed through temporal strategies that aim at achieving a chronological order. Therefore, it is suggested that national identity is not given, but rather is the result of continuous ‘Chrono‐Work’.     

Contextual effects on subjective national identity

Does the interaction between context and individual‐level features affect political attitudes? By using the case of Catalonia, a receiver region of international and national immigration since the fifties, this paper intersects a classic acculturation model and a newly reemerging literature in political science on contextual determinants of political behaviour to analyze how context affects subjective national identity. Results reveal that environment matters. The Percentage of Spain‐born population in the municipality is statistically significant to account for variance in the subjective national identity, even after controlling for age, sex, origin, language and left–right orientation and other contextual factors. This conclusion suggests that researchers should not underestimate the direct effect of the environment on feelings of belonging in contexts of rival identities.     

Raising the dead: war,memory and American national identity*

Abstract. The dead, particularly the war dead, play a central role in the development of nationalism, nowhere more so than in America. America's mid‐nineteenth century Civil War produced a recognisable and influential ‘cult of the dead’, comparable in its construction with similar developments in Europe following World War I. Focused on the figure of the fallen soldier, especially the volunteer soldier, this cult found physical expression in the development of national cemeteries devoted not just to the burial of those who fell in the war but to the idea of America as a nation, in the development of monuments to the dead that, again, reinforced the new national symbolism of the war era, and in the beginnings of Memorial Day, an American sacred ceremony with clear parallels with the later Armistice Day ceremonies in Europe. In all these developments, America preceded the European nations by several decades, making America a valuable case study for the role that the cult of the fallen soldier plays in national development more generally.     

The past 20 years of modern Chinese social history

Modern Chinese social history has played an important role in the general revival of Chinese social history. This essay will provide an overview of the major achievements of past 20 years with particular emphasis upon the field of modern social history, the growth of regional social history, and the new research that draws upon field studies. It will also consider the recent debates on “re‐examining political history” and provide an introduction to new works in medical history and environmental/ecological history.     

The nation remembers: national identity and shared memory in television documentaries

Abstract. This article explores the impact of recent trends towards globalisation on the ways in which national identity and ‘shared memory’ find expression in the media. Concentrating on television documentaries produced through international co‐ productions, I show how national consciousness became a key ideological component in the construction of televised narratives. This illustration will be made through the examination of a particular co‐produced television documentary, The Fifty Years War. To make this programme possible, funding from three television networks was secured, with each source given the right to use the produced footage to construct its own version of the final product. The completed series thus exists in three distinct versions, British (BBC2), American (PBS) and Middle Eastern (MBC). Since the final product of this co‐production was split into several national/cultural versions, the content of the different national/cultural projects became translated into different presentations of ‘reality’. In analysing the similarities and differences among the three end‐products, this article offers some reflections regarding the three‐sided interplay between television, shared memory and national identity in an age of globalisation.