National identity during periods of controversy: celebrating Cinco de Mayo in Phoenix,Arizona

Cinco de Mayo, celebrated by Mexican Americans as well as Americans of other ethnicities, provides an opportunity to examine the influence of ethnic festivals on broader US identity. Given the recent controversy over the immigration bill, State Bill 1070, passed in Arizona in 2010, the themes presented in newspaper articles concerning the celebration of the holiday in Phoenix, Arizona (2006–11) and the public response to these articles are examined. This examination reveals the intense contestation associated with the presentation of symbols and themes of national identity during periods of political controversy. It also illustrates that ordinary people have strong, long‐standing opinions about the future of the nation and national identity and will express their opinions when an outlet is provided to them     

Professor Penck's Bluff: Geography,Espionage and Hysteria in World War I

This article considers the image of geography during World War I through a discussion of newspaper controversies about the pre‐war activities of German and British geographers. Early in the war, Sven Hedin and Albrecht Penck, renowned geographers whose achievements had been widely celebrated by the British geographical establishment, were named in the media as enemy spies whose supposedly disinterested scientific inquiries in Britain and the Empire had masked their real intention to pass sensitive information to the German High Command. British geography stood accused of collusion with enemy ‘super spies’. This article examines how Britain's geographical community, represented by the Royal Geographical Society, sought to defend the discipline's patriotic virtue and head off a full‐scale media witch‐hunt. In so doing, the article comments on the media's role in shaping the image of geography and on geography's place in public debates about the sanctity of the national space.     

Distinctions,distinctions: ‘public’ and ‘private’ force?

This article evaluates recent literatures within International Relations on so‐called ‘private force’. It suggests that the conceptual weaknesses of much of this literature can be accounted for, in part, by a misunderstanding of the historical and sociological importance of the way power is organized and legitimated through shifts in the public—private distinction. This distinction is one of the primary mechanisms, if not the primary mechanism, for organizing political, economic and, therefore, military power. For the sake of historical accuracy and conceptual integrity scholars should abandon the terminology of ‘public’ and ‘private’ force. Tracing how public‐private distinctions shift and change as an effect of political power is a joint task for historical sociology and international political theory     

Identity formation through national calendar: holidays and commemorations in Pakistan

This article contributes to academic literature on the project of identity formation in a postcolonial nation‐state. The article argues that a nation‐state emphasising certain aspects of the past for commemorative or celebratory purposes, while suppressing or ignoring the memories of some other event or historical figure, are both parts of the same process. Both these processes, in different ways, seek to give a certain direction to the narrative about the history of the nation and the nation‐state. These aspects of national memory and amnesia have been explained through the prism of national/public holidays while foregrounding the case study of Pakistan. The article argues that although this process of shaping a specific narrative (referred to as commemorative narrative in this article by using Yael Zerubavel's work) is common to every project of identity formation, its peculiarity is more pronounced in a postcolonial state like Pakistan, which has certain cut‐off dates and ruptures but is, simultaneously, eager to emphasise continuities in its trajectory and antiquity in historical tradition. The study of the process of developing a national calendar in case of Pakistan will show that identity formation is a transient process in which various identarian values, political considerations and social processes play an important part. In particular, it requires an attempt on the part of the state to try impose a homogenising historical narrative by envisaging a national calendar, i.e. by announcing a national or public holiday. This helps accord prestige to persons credited as founding fathers or ideologues, ascribe solemnity to days remembering wars and festivity to mark independence or religious occasions. By discussing these themes in detail, this exploratory study of the history of national calendar will lend an alternative lens through which to look into the processes of identity formation in postcolonial nation‐states in general.     

Religion and the cultural public sphere: the case of the Finnish liberal intelligentsia during the turmoil of the early twentieth century

The political public sphere is at one and the same time both public, and private and religion operates in both the public and the private spheres in the modern way of life. This article approaches the dynamics between the cultural and the political public sphere from the point of view of religion; how the cultural intelligentsia developed its worldview fuelled with attitudes towards religion in times of political turmoil. The case study, based on the empirical analysis of cultural periodicals and societies around them, concerns the Finnish liberal intelligentsia in the early twentieth century. The first decade of the 1900s was a particularly important period of formation for the Finnish public sphere; the societal turmoil highlighted the importance of cultural periodicals in defining what was important for the national public sphere. The case of religion is an illustrative example of it, particularly from the point of view of the liberal intelligentsia of the era.     

Go East,Young Cadre: Experiments in Inter‐Provincial Training of Party and State Managers in China

This article situates China's local policy experimentation in the broader context of policy experiments in decentralized political systems, through a case study which represents a local state response to China's transition to a market economy. With growing regional and urban–rural inequalities evident after the initial reform period (1978–1994), local party leaders of inland provinces devised strategies for addressing these inequalities and encouraging public–private sector mobility among party officials. County and township‐level leaders pursued local policy experiments in which they selected and sent officials to find private‐sector work in China's booming coastal cities. Initiated in the 1990s and peaking in the 2000s, these policy experiments and inter‐provincial transfers demonstrate the discretion that local officials possess to conduct programmatic/policy experiments in a unitary political system and show how officials resort to extra‐institutional strategies in order to bridge perceived knowledge gaps. The ultimate demise of these programmes illuminates the challenges to extra‐institutional policy innovations in transitioning states.     

Protocol,politics and popular culture: the independence jubilee in Gabon

National days are powerful moments of commemoration that aim at renewing the citizens' bonds to the nation and the state. In order to be successful, public rituals need to draw large audiences, and their ceremonial design therefore has to be adapted to suit the masses, employing elements of popular culture and everyday forms of nationhood. Despite drawing its significance from the declaration of independence in 1960, however, Gabon's independence jubilee was less concerned with history and commemoration than with celebrating the state and the nation in the present. The ceremonial design of Gabon's jubilee featured intensive preparations, official ceremonies, popular festivities and symbolic politics. In this article, I look at why history and commemoration played such an unimportant role during the celebrations and how Gabon's jubilee organisers included official as well as popular forms of nationhood to assure the population's participation.     

Co‐opting Conservation: Migrant Resource Control and Access to National Park Management in the Philippine Uplands

The history of political and economic inequality in forest villages can shape how and why resource use conflicts arise during the evolution of national parks management. In the Philippine uplands, indigenous peoples and migrant settlers co‐exist, compete over land and forest resources, and shape how managers preserve forests through national parks. This article examines how migrants have claimed lands and changed production and exchange relations among the indigenous Tagbanua to build on and benefit from otherwise coercive park management on Palawan Island, the Philippines. Migrant control over productive resources has influenced who, within each group, could sustain agriculture in the face of the state's dominant conservation narrative — valorizing migrant paddy rice and criminalizing Tagbanua swiddens. Upon settling, migrant farmers used new political and economic strengths to tap into provincial political networks in order to be hired at a national park. As a result, they were able to steer management to support paddy rice at the expense of swidden cultivation. While state conservation policy shapes how national parks impact upon local resource access and use, older political economic inequalities in forest villages build on such policies to influence how management affects the livelihoods of poor households.     

Singing the new Nepal

Nepal's adoption of a new national anthem in 2007 reflected a decision to establish a new social and political order that was republican, federal and inclusive of the country's many minority communities. It came after a ten‐year internal conflict, and was followed by the abolition of the Shah monarchy that had ruled the country since the late eighteenth century. This article describes the historical and political context of the decision to replace the old anthem, the selection of the new anthem, and the debates that arose in the Nepali media and public sphere after its lyrics and the identity of its author were made known. The discussion refers to arguments made by Karen Cerulo about the relationship between the syntactic structure of national anthems and the stage reached in the process of political modernisation of the nation‐state in question, and provides some comparative perspectives on the Nepali case.     

Symbolic recognition,multicultural citizens,and acknowledgement: Negotiating the Christmas Wars

In recent times, December has come to mark a new tradition—an annual public debate over the degree to which Christmas should be publicly recognised and celebrated in a multicultural society. Curiously, political theorists of multiculturalism have had little to say on this controversy. In this article, I argue that there is a genuine issue at stake in the so-called ‘December dilemma’, but that the public debate—which construes the matter in terms of offending non-Christians—fails to identify and address it. Differentiating three distinct areas of contention (public holiday, public square, and state schools), I suggest that the core issue is one of ‘acknowledging a “generalised other”’, and sketch what this might mean for each of these public aspects of Christmas celebration.     

NARRATORS OF THE ARCTIC: IMAGES AND MOVEMENTS IN NORTHLAND NARRATIVES

While the use of public policy to construct a Canadian identity has been established in the literature, what is less well understood is whether national identity, once established, might shape Canadians' feelings about these same public policies. This article examines the extent to which citizens' national identities influence their pride in Canada's social security system, and how this relationship may be changing over time. Using data from the International Social Science Programme's 1995 and 2003 National Identity Modules, the article argues that citizens' national identities help explain the contours of social security attitudes in Canada, and that this relationship persists despite significant policy change in the field. Additionally, the paper suggests that political actors may successfully increase public support for their social security policies by “framing” them in ways that appeal to citizens' definitions of Canada.     

ETHNIC SEGREGATION DURING PUBLIC AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS: A STUDY USING MOBILE PHONE DATA

This paper contains an analysis of ethnic differences in activity locations during public and national holidays. Holidays relate to identity, and the celebration of holidays can be a very important part of acculturation processes and are therefore relevant to ethnic integration policies. We study the out‐of‐home nonemployment activity locations of 12,500 respondents in Estonia, using mobile phone positioning data. The results show that during holidays, ethnic segregation, measured using an index of dissimilarity, is significantly higher than it is on regular days, especially outside the capital city. The type of holiday, such as whether it is a national or international holiday, has a particular effect on people's spatial behaviour. On Estonian public holidays, Estonians are more likely to leave Tallinn than Russian speakers. There are 77 per cent more Estonians and 33 per cent more Russian speakers outside the capital than on non‐holidays. The paper depicts different temporal layers of segregation, which also indicates different integration potential in leisure spaces under various time frames.     

Raising the question: articulating the Dutch identity crisis through public debate

In place of a ‘tolerant no more’ narrative, this article proposes a different conception of nationalism's re‐articulation in the Dutch context. The salience of nationhood in public and political life, particularly concerning issues of immigration, religion and diversity, is not reconstructed as a backlash against a purported multiculturalism. Instead, attention is given to a re‐articulation of the very notion of nationhood. A long‐term historical move away from characterology is assessed and applied in understanding the emergence of a national‐identity discourse. This discourse not merely embellishes talk of Dutchness with new terms, but indicates – so the articles aim to demonstrate – a different conception of nationhood all together. Apart from what the nation is – about which very little disagreement took place – discussions formed about how Dutchness was imagined and to what extent people themselves were able to form a national image. The emergence of national‐identity discourse is empirically reconstructed. Not only is it made clear how a logic of popularity begins to be reiterated across a variety of positionings, but public debate and dissensus acquire a new significance and performativity in the process.     

A New Woman and Her Warlord: Li Dequan,Feng Yuxiang,and the Politics of Intimacy in Twentieth-Century China

This article proposes a new way of viewing Republican-era warlords. Through an examination of the life of Li Dequan, the second wife of warlord Feng Yuxiang, it displaces Feng from his typical military and political context, scrutinizing instead the ways that Feng and Li interwove the private intimacies of love, marriage, and family life into their public and political lives. In the Republic, Feng and Li, like many prominent figures of the time, shared elements of their private lives with journalists and, through them, a broader reading public, posing for photographs with their children on their way to school and inviting reporters to family events. Feng and Li utilized this newfound intimacy between public and political leaders to cultivate public sympathy and support. By the early PRC, Li—following Feng’s sudden 1948 death—was named the first Minister of Health of the People’s Republic of China and her roles as wife and romantic object fell away. Instead, she focused on mothering the nation. By the late twentieth century, emphasis on the Li and Feng romance reappeared in writings about the couple, and while these narratives drew on the Republican-era stories, it was made to seem that Li’s feminism rather than Feng’s modernity had facilitated their true love. Though the warlords have often been seen as destructive, exploring Feng’s and Li’s lives demonstrates that factional militarists and their families contributed to a new political culture grounded in a gendered national narrative that intertwined family and nation.     

Constructing the ‘Neighborhood Sphere’: Gender and Community organizing [1]

This article examines organizing styles and issues in neighborhood activism to illustrate how activists seek to constitute a neighborhood community. It identifies the ways in which community organizing is gendered in both style and content, often separating 'women's' and 'men's' issues along an artificial public-private divide. This research illustrates, however, how neighborhood activists can use and challenge gendered forms of activism to integrate both public and private into an ideal of a neighborhood community. Using a case study of the Thomas-Dale Block Clubs in St Paul, Minnesota, the article examines how residents use gender-essentializing discourses of safety and parenting to insert household and family issues into a broader community arena. Further, it identifies how these discourses overlay cultural tensions in a diverse neighborhood. The activism in the block club organization studied here reflects a wide variety of community organizing strategies and concerns, focusing on defining and creating a neighborhood public sphere, to which, as the organization argued, every resident ought to be responsible and accountable.     

Gender and Environmental Justice in Louisiana: Blurring the boundaries of public and private spheres

Many scholars have examined the implications and effects of a putative dichotomy between public-as-masculine and private-as-feminine spheres on community activism, and suggest that women's community activism blurs this ideological divide in numerous ways. This article draws on a case study of a siting conflict in St. James Parish, Louisiana, to examine how, in the process of blurring boundaries between gendered spheres of interest and activity, predominantly women environmental justice activists contended with differently gendered contexts. Concepts of performance and performativity shed light on how gendered hierarchies of public and private sphere activism both constrained and enabled the protest group's political practice.     

For the Wealth of the Realm: the transformation of the public sphere in Swedish politics,c. 1434–1650

This article addresses the transformation of the representative public in late medieval and early modern Sweden. While recognizing the importance of Habermas' theory of the public sphere, the focus is on the progressive character of the royal administration and on how the interaction within the administrative setting eventually came to serve as a basis for political opinion. The interplay between local bargaining over taxes and political action at the national level is of critical importance. The state formation process served to empower new groups such as peasants and burghers, who eventually learned how to wield rational arguments in defence of their interests. This is demonstrated here by focusing on the interaction between local officeholders and the tax-paying peasantry.     

The Problem that Had a Name: French High‐Rise Developments and the Fantasy of a Suburban Homemaker Pathology, 1954–73

Within Western Europe, France had the largest and longest postwar commitment to private social‐market housing inside dense residential suburbs called grands ensembles d'habitation (GEs). Social‐Catholic activists and planners viewed the GEs as facilitating women's maternal mission within egalitarian communities, but others across the political spectrum saw them as pathological spaces, especially for women who supposedly contracted a psychological disease dubbed ‘sarcellite’, after France's flagship GE of Sarcelles. This article analyses how a phantasmatic gendered discourse of housing disaster, first circulated by the media, strategically influenced gendered actors’ residential desires and legitimised policy shifts toward single‐family housing. The discourse of sarcellite reveals how housing realities and imaginaries shaped gendered claims to housing as an evolving aspect of social citizenship. The article considers both suburban women's demands for subsidised childcare and other services and the nuances and contradictions of the evolving discourse of sarcellite.     

The 2010 independence jubilees: the politics and aesthetics of national commemoration in Africa

In 2010, as many as seventeen African states celebrated their independence jubilees. The debates surrounding the organisation of these celebrations, and the imagery and performances they employed, reflect the fault lines with which African nation‐building has to contend, such as competing political orientations as well as religious, regional and ethnic diversity. The celebrations represented constitutive and cathartic moments of nation‐building, aiming to enhance citizens' emotional attachments to the country and inviting to remember, re‐enact and re‐redefine national history. They became a forum of debate about what should constitute the norms and values that make‐up national identity and, in the interstices of official ceremonies, provided space for the articulation of new demands for public recognition. A study of the independence celebrations thus allows us to explore contested processes of nation‐building and images of nationhood and to study the role of ritual and performance in the (re)production of nations.