From the particularistic to the universalistic: national narratives in Israel’s mainstream press, 1967–97

The aim of this article is to study the development of the Jewish‐Zionist national idea as expressed in the national narrative as it appeared in Israel’s mainstream press during the years 1967–97, against the background of five critical events in the Israeli collective experience as well as in the wake of the Holocaust Memorial Days. This development is studied as a case of the immanent tension between nationalism’s universalistic message and its particularistic application. The Jewish‐Zionist narrative in Israel is found to be ‘shifting’ from its particularistic towards its more universalistic pole. This development is discussed as a transition from a ‘purely national’ to a ‘post‐national’ narrative, and is positioned in its local and global contexts.     

Using an awakening narrative to leave behind a former national‐identity: an investigation of the conversion of national‐identity in Taiwan

National‐identity has become a civil religion and a major source of how people define themselves. Changing one's nationality thus is a salient event/social process in today's society; therefore, people's nationality conversion deserves more academic attention. Treating the convert as a social type and regarding people's self‐reports (or converts' accounts) as topics for analysis, this article examines the Taiwan case to illuminate how people tell their stories of converting nationality. ‘Converts’ usually employed an awakening narrative to leave their former national‐identity behind: For example, the ‘awakening’ plot is readily apparent, a huge contrast between a previous ‘wrong’ self and a current ‘correct’ self is mentioned, and the ‘awakening’ is delineated as an achievement. The symbolic awakening is harnessed as a strategic tool to create discontinuity autobiographically, to justify one's major change, to ensure that one's cognitive security remains intact, and to call for more awakenings. This article further notes that, since narrative itself is a practice, people always have ‘a self in the making’ which determines (and is determined by) how people (re)tell their life stories. Moreover, in Taiwan's case, we see that ‘awakeners’ usually admired early awakeners but blamed late awakeners (which constitutes an interesting triadic group relationship); people may also describe their experience of having multiple awakenings before the ‘grand’ awakening (‘Awakening’). © The author(s) 2015. Nations and Nationalism © ASEN/John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2015     

The Legendary Commander: the construction of an Albanian master‐narrative in post‐war Kosovo*

ABSTRACT. The ongoing, post‐war construction of Albanian martyrs, memory and the nation in Kosovo has produced iconic tropes of militant resistance, unity and national independence. This critical interpretive account, based on years of the authors' ethnographic and political engagement with Albanians in post‐war Kosovo, focuses on the making of a master narrative that is centred on the ‘sublime sacrifice’ of the insurgent KLA leader Adem Jashari, known as the ‘Legendary Commander’. It also aims to trace voices of discord with this master narrative, testing contestations in terms of the rural–urban, political and gender divides in Kosovo‐Albanian society. It concludes that the narrow international view of Albanians as either ‘victims’ or ‘perpetrators’ has contributed to the consolidation of this powerful narrative, its celebration of Albanian agency in militant resistance and the closing of public debate within Albanian society.     

Co‐Producing (a Fearful) Anthropocene

The Anthropocene is not amenable to the senses but, like many modern concepts, must be made visible. We explore the ‘Great Acceleration’ imagery as an immutable mobile to explore how this human‐made geological epoch is constituted through the aggregation of disparate elements of extreme complexity. Our analysis explores how disparate issues such as ‘telephone use’ and ‘coastal zone biogeochemistry’ can be associated and enrolled into the same argument. We write as concerned observers, who are concerned with the way that recognition for phenomena is enrolled into a fear‐based narrative. This risks reproducing the governance structures at the heart of the Great Acceleration and, if so, we ask what this might mean. Using fear is a risky strategy that is as likely to lead to relatively poor behaviours as it is to some ‘awakening’. We make this case as a way of contributing to the Anthropocene debate, challenging those promoting the idea to consider the co‐productive relationship between the knowledge they are proposing and the governance that knowledge entails.     

Beyond ‘Crisis’ in Understanding Gender Transformation

Since the late 1980s, historians have described certain eras as marked by ‘crisis’ in the production of gender norms. At the outset, the concept of ‘gender crisis’ proved useful for understanding changes in normative cultural systems. The rhetorical trope of crisis distinguished key turning points in the construction of gender and helped to shape a coherent narrative centred on moments of breakdown and reconstruction. Unfortunately, however, the concept of ‘gender crisis’ has now outlived its usefulness; it has lost its analytic purchase. This article reviews the notion in modern, American and European historiography, then critiques its usefulness as an analytic concept. ‘Gender crisis’ has been overworked to the point of semantic collapse. It has been so reified as to foreshorten analysis, and it conceptualises masculinity as a fixed set of essentialised norms. Finally, ‘gender crisis’ describes subjectivity and its relation to normative systems in overly binary and mechanistic terms. Using the case study of postwar French masculinity, the author proposes the alternative concept of ‘gender damage’ as a way to understand periods of transformation in gender. The term ‘gender damage’ moves beyond a mechanistic notion of interaction with normative systems in order to incorporate such emotions as frustration, humiliation and confusion in our thinking of human subjectivity. In addition, the term forces us to specify exactly which gender norms are being reconfigured in some way. ‘Damage’ is by nature specific and local because it does not totalise catastrophe in the same way as does ‘crisis’.     

Prostitution,Sex Work and Violence: Discursive and Political Contexts for Five Texts on Paid Sex, 1987–2001

This article deals with the trope of the victimised, female body in feminist debates on the selling of sexual services. The notion of ‘violence’ is central to the construction of a key axis of the debates. The article explores these issues by discussing five recent and historical feminist works on prostitution/sex work, and touches on works which address methodological issues of gathering information on an activity which is, by definition, illicit, stigmatised and socio‐politically marginalised. The essay brings out several tensions in the framing of the present debates, especially regarding the varied contexts of ‘the West’ and the ‘non‐West’, as well as issues of macropolitical change, including economic globalisation. It concludes with the ways in which the texts serve to disaggregate the concepts of ‘sex work’ and ‘violence’.     

Of love and national borders: the Croatian anthem ‘Our Beautiful Homeland’

Croatia became a UN member only in 1992, after the violent break‐up of Yugoslavia. Its anthem is marked by historically founded ambivalences as to the nature and territorial extent of the nation in question. This article offers an interpretation of the current version of the anthem and an analysis of the narrative and imagery of the nineteenth‐century poem from which the anthem originates. Three of the anthem's four stanzas speak about the Croats’ love for their homeland and their people and of the steadfastness and immortality of their love; the remaining stanza extolls the beauty of the homeland. By addressing the homeland's rivers and the sea directly, its singers appropriate this geography and so demarcate the borders of their much‐loved homeland. The anthem thus asserts Croatia's unity (against potential pretenders) and its unbreakable ties with its people. In contrast, the original fourteen‐stanza poem ‘The Croatian Homeland’, written in 1835, is a paean to the Croats’ ties to nature, their simple life and bravery – the romantic virtues of pure national souls. On their path to anthemhood, the four stanzas drawn from this poem have undergone significant modifications and additions, the result being a song that is doubly reassuring: it reassures the singers first of the people's love for themselves as a people, and second that this love is the means by which the ‘natural’ territory of the homeland is maintained.     

AIDS Activism in Pakistan: Diminishing Funds,Evasive State

This article draws on a year of ethnographic fieldwork in the HIV/AIDS sector of Pakistan at the moment of rolling back a World Bank‐financed programme. Classified by UN agencies as at ‘high risk’ of a generalized HIV epidemic, Pakistan has an epidemiology driven by injecting drug use, and a Penal Code and Islamist legislation which criminalize non‐therapeutic drug use and extra‐marital sex. In recent years, a sharp increase in the numbers of registered HIV‐positive people has necessitated a shift from HIV prevention among ‘high risk groups’ to the provision of care to those living with HIV/AIDS. The rolling back of external funding, which was further compounded by the effects of devolution on the Ministry of Health, created challenges for AIDS activism in Pakistan, as reflected in the everyday lives — and deaths — of the patient‐activists and their community‐based organizations. This article recounts the story of one such aspiring AIDS activist caught in multiple dilemmas emanating from these macro‐processes. This story throws light on the limitations of the complex agency of actors in development, and shows how the shifting loci of power from the state to non‐state entities in the global neoliberal order impacts the provision of vital services like HIV prevention and AIDS control.     

Embodying modernity: reading narratives of Indian women's sexual autonomy and violation

References are often made in contemporary Indian discourse, both popular and academic, to the ‘new Indian woman’, a subject position that is seen as coterminous with the emerging identity of the Indian nation as modern – the ‘new India’. This article unpacks key discourses that construct the ‘new woman’ in the public imagination and suggests that the modernity of this imagined figure is founded upon a notion of autonomy that is deeply embodied. While the characteristics of this embodied modernity challenge influential feminist arguments as to the ‘shallow’ modernity of the ‘new Indian woman’, it nonetheless has problematic implications from a feminist perspective. The narrative shaped by these discourses around the question of what it means to be modern not only perpetuates an historically pervasive reductionism in which woman is seen to be defined and determined by the corporeal but also, and more problematically, constructs a boundary around the notion of modern womanhood that excludes women whose bodily autonomy has been compromised, for example through sexual assault. This narrative exclusion is perpetrated in at least three ways: through a discursive rendering of the woman as passive, the objectification of the woman, and a narrative structure that mimics the act of violation. Such erasure of the autonomy of sexually violated women is not inevitable, however, and an analysis of two ‘counter-narratives’ demonstrates how discourses of rape may both reinscribe the autonomy of such women and re-orient the reader to a position of empathy rather than opposition.     

The Macedonian–Albanian political frontier: the re‐articulation of post‐Yugoslav political identities

Abstract. The article examines the re‐articulation of national identity in Macedonia since its independence in 1992. Both ethnic Macedonian and ethnic Albanian political identities have been engaged in a complex process of redefinition. Two ethnic groups had previously been strongly influenced by the Marxist paradigm and its Yugoslav official interpretation. During the 1990s, the elements of the old paradigm were combined with elements of the new – liberal democratic – concepts of nationhood. While some of the concepts developed within the old Yugoslav framework are still in use, the new liberal‐democratic political paradigm finds it difficult to include them into an official discourse on nationhood. At the same time, introduction of the concepts inherent to the liberal‐democratic paradigm has disturbed the fragile balance achieved through the old Yugoslav narrative. In new circumstances, the ethnic Macedonians transformed themselves from the ‘constitutive nation’ to ‘majority’. However, the ethnic Albanians found it more difficult to accept the status of ‘minority’, which was once (in Yugoslav Marxist narrative) considered to be politically incorrect. Thus, they insist on being recognised as a ‘nation’, equal to ethnic Macedonians. In its essence, the conflict in Macedonia is – to a large extent – a conflict between two different concepts of what is Macedonia and who are Macedonians. The questions posed are: is the minority (ethnic Albanians) part of the nation? Could two nations exist peacefully within one state? The article maps out differences between two different discourses on the identity of the new Macedonian state.     

The elusive ‘je’: Language and female subjectivity in Simone de Beauvoir's Les Belles Images

The most striking feature of the narrative of Simone de Beauvoir's novel Les Belles Images (1966) is the constant shift between the third‐person pronoun ‘elle’ (or ‘Laurence') and the first‐person pronoun ‘je’. The pattern produced by this shift in narrative voice within the text has important implications for the construction of female subjectivity in the narrative, primarily in relation to its central character, Laurence. This article examines the nature of Laurence's relationship with language using arguments offered by the feminist psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray pertaining to the relationship of exclusion binding women to language in patriarchal culture. My reading of the novel examines how far Laurence's problematic relationship with language might be read in terms of a quest to articulate her ‘je’ and make her ‘marginal’ voice heard. Further, it engages with, but ultimately problematises, Toril Moi's notion of an ‘authorial’ reading at work in Beauvoir's fictional texts.     

Constructing the Port: External Perceptions and Interventions in the Making of Place in Port Adelaide,South Australia

Port Adelaide, South Australia has been stigmatised as ‘Port Misery’ for over one hundred and fifty years. The origins of this stigmatised discourse can be traced prior to actual colonisation, having their genesis in wide political debates. This reflects the complex and contested nature of landscape, revealing that ‘Port Misery’ constitutes a powerful meta‐narrative that has been projected onto Port Adelaide by powerful and often external actors. This stigmatising discourse may lie dormant for prolonged periods of time, only to be remobilised to serve specific political, social and economic objectives. Recently, the ‘Port Misery’ discourse has been remobilised to justify the redevelopment of Port Adelaide from an industrial to a post‐industrial landscape.     

Old wine in new bottles: civic nation‐building and ethnic nationalism in schooling in Piedmont,ca. 1700–1861

ABSTRACT. Gellner (1983 : 35) equates nationalism with ‘the organisation of human groups into large, centrally educated, culturally homogeneous units’. As the theorist of nationalism argues, and as recent and not so recent historical research shows, the modernisation of schooling is a defining moment in this process. The objective of this article is twofold: first, to show that during the Risorgimento schooling in Piedmont became nationalist; and second, to explain why that was the case. In doing so, it is argued that: (a) the modernisation of schooling reflected the rise of laissez faire liberalism, industrialisation and the enfranchisement of the middle class; and (b) the leadership of the Risorgimento revived pre‐modern ethnic symbols of patriotism to legitimate inequality and state formation under conditions of individualism.     

British Muslims,multiculturalism and UK foreign policy: ‘integration’ and ‘cohesion’ in and beyond the state

After the 7 July and 21 July 2005 attacks on London the government‐sponsored effort to ‘prevent extremism together’ has repeatedly acknowledged the central role of anger at UK foreign policy in the radicalization of some British Muslims. This acknowledgement has been incorporated into a ‘comprehensive framework for action’ centring upon the need for increased ‘integration’ and an effort, critically, to re‐work British multiculturalism as a means to combat terrorism. Examining the history of multiculturalism in Britain and the tradition of living and acting ‘together’ that it suggests, however, raises a set of questions about the society into which integration is supposed to occur, what integration might involve and its real efficacy for combating terrorists. In addressing these issues, this article suggests that the debate over contemporary multiculturalism should be situated within a much wider social and political crisis over the meaning of ‘community’ in the UK, to which questions of global order and foreign policy are central. Comparing the ‘ethical’ basis of Al‐Qaeda's attacks with Tony Blair's invocation of ‘values’ as the foundation for military intervention reveals that both seek to realize models of community through violence and a shared process of ‘radicalization’ which in both cases precedes 9/11 and which might be traced back to the Gulf War of 1991. The article concludes that debate over the future of multiculturalism in the UK is being conducted alongside and is implicated within a second, violent global conflict over community: one which is central to, but essentially unarticulated within the domestic context.     

Monitoring and Medicalising Male Sexuality in Semi‐Colonial Egypt

This article examines the ways Egyptians monitored male sexuality in Ottoman and semi‐colonial Egypt. An exploration of the legislative proposals and press debates about marriage, prostitution and venereal disease reveals that the state attempted to medicalise the sexuality of Egyptian men to create ‘healthy’, disciplined men who would later marry and form fit families to serve as the foundation for a strong postcolonial nation. In their attempts to medicalise male sexuality, reformers delineated the normative heterosexuality of the ‘healthy’ male colonial subject for the emerging nation. This article explores the sexual practices of male colonial subjects to demonstrate how Egyptian notions of sexual diseases were gendered.     

Sub‐state nationalism and the welfare state: Québec and Canadian federalism

ABSTRACT. This article examines the relationship between sub‐state nationalism and the welfare state through the case of Québec in Canada. It argues that social policy presents mobilisation and identity‐building potential for sub‐state nationalism, and that nationalist movements affect the structure of welfare states. Nationalism and the welfare state revolve around the notion of solidarity. Because they often involve transfers of money between citizens, social programmes raise the issue of the specific community whose members should exhibit social and economic solidarity. From this perspective, nationalist movements are likely to seek the congruence between the ‘national community’ (as conceptualised by their leaders) and the ‘social community’ (the community where redistributive mechanisms should operate). Moreover, the political discourse of social policy lends itself well to national identity‐building because it is typically underpinned by collective values and principles. Finally, pressures stemming from sub‐state nationalism tend to reshape the policy agenda at both the state and the sub‐state level while favouring the asymmetrical decentralisation of the welfare state.     

The Natural Contract: From Lévi‐Strauss to the Ecuadorian Constitutional Court

In 2008, the Ecuadorian Constituent Assembly became the first juridical body in the world to legalize what Michel Serres might have called a ‘natural contract.’ With the assistance of the U.S.‐based Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, representatives at the Assembly in July of 2008 re‐wrote their 1998 constitution to include a landmark series of articles delineating the rights of nature — a notion long familiar to Indigenous communities in the Andean region, actively propagated by anthropologists like Claude Lévi‐Strauss at the French National Assembly as early as the 1970s, and often mocked by mainstream Western jurists for its conceptual confusion about the sorts of entities that can properly be said to have rights. Drawing on the experiences of activists currently engaged in the first national‐level lawsuit to make use of these rights as well as a range of both activists and non‐activists involved in alternative implementations of them, the article explores the possibilities, limitations, and paradoxes of this extension of rights‐based discourse. At a time when the natural world is increasingly being talked about at the United Nations and elsewhere not as a ‘rights‐holder,’ but as an ‘ecosystem services provider,’ I suggest that while the discourse of ‘rights' signals promising shifts in how Andean governments are conceptualizing agency and responsibility in ways that productively break with the trend toward marketization, it also runs the risk of providing the administration with symbolic cover for its intensifying commitment to what Eduardo Gudynas has called, a ‘new extractivism.'     

Henry II,liturgical patronage and the birth of the ‘Romano‐German Pontifical’

Variously acclaimed as coepiscopus, saint and Mönchskönig, Henry II of Germany has always had a reputation as a quasi‐religious figure. This article goes a step further, appending to his résumé the creation of the wildly successful liturgical tradition known as the ‘Romano‐German Pontifical’. Formerly dated to the tenth century, its major ordines are here argued to have been cultivated in royal circles in the years 1002–9, before being compiled for the first time as a gift for the new Bamberg Cathedral. The tradition is shown to reflect the king’s concerns, scholarly, political and confessional, as well as projecting an idealistic, Bamberg‐esque notion of Romano‐German unity.     

Gender,Sexuality and the Formation of Racial Identities in the Eighteenth‐Century Anglo‐Caribbean World

In recent years, scholars have directed considerable attention to the influence of gender relations and sexual practices on developing racial formations in early British America, the colonial Caribbean and the wider British empire. Understanding that unauthorised intimacies in the imperial world threatened notions of Britishness at home has greatly enhanced our knowledge of the complexity and instability of the process of collective identity formation. Building on pioneering research in early American and British imperial history, this article charts the connection between gendered concepts of ‘whiteness’ in Anglo‐Caribbean contexts and in metropolitan discourses surrounding British national identity, as articulated in eighteenth‐century colonial legislation and official correspondence, popular texts and personal narratives of everyday life. It explores the extent to which the socio‐sexual practices of British West Indian whites imperilled the emerging conflation between whiteness and Britishness.     

The Irish question and the concept ‘identity’ in the 1980s1

ABSTRACT. This article critically investigates the social construction of ‘identity talk’ in relation to the Irish Question in the 1980s. Our contention is that the utilisation of ‘identity’ imagined people as bounded groups in a particular way – as the two traditions or communities in Northern Ireland – and that this way of imagining people was deployed against ‘will’‐based conceptions of politics. The first part of the article places the emergence of ‘identity’ as a concept in its historical context and suggests four phases in the use of ‘identity’. The second part focuses on ‘identity’ as a concept and locates its emergence within the meta‐conflict regarding Northern Ireland. The article concludes by reflecting on Brubaker and Cooper's (2000) analysis of ‘identity’ as a category of analysis in light of our case study of ‘identity’ as a category of practice regarding the Irish Question.