Belonging to the nation: Negotiating narratives of national identity in Aotearoa New Zealand

One of the most important yet complex contemporary political projects of belonging relate to rapidly diversifying societies. While prior research has tended to focus on how young people work to fit into the nation, this study sought to examine the processes by which ethnic minority young people (re)produced, reimagined and challenged narratives of national belonging. Underpinned by feminist theoretical understandings of citizenship and everyday nation, the study examined how young people (n = 180) attending four superdiverse high schools in Aotearoa New Zealand deliberated and negotiated the parameters of who belonged to the nation. The use of a qualitative participatory strategy – self-directed peer focus groups – opened up opportunities for young people to debate and contest complex ideas about belonging and national identity. Ethnic minority participants expressed widespread dissatisfaction with traditional narrow, monocultural narratives of national identity and drew on illustrations from their own everyday encounters with diverse others to offer more inclusive alternatives. Many employed affective notions of national belonging that centred on ‘feeling’ like, or choosing to be a ‘Kiwi’, rather than being chosen. Their deliberations and dialogue demonstrated agentic ways in which ethnic minority young people were ‘rewriting’ the narratives of national belonging to ensure that they and their peers were located as legitimate citizens of the nation, and in doing so, revealed the formation of their citizenship subjectivities.     

Reconfiguring the French nation: Public debates on the Left and national identity

Since the 1980s, neoliberal globalisation has shaped the fate of local and national cultural productions, from movies to music, from entertainment to food. How did French intellectual and political elites respond to this unprecedented challenge? What were the implications for the politics of nationalism and national identity? Two books respond to these questions, although in very different ways – the first directly and the second indirectly. Vincent Martigny's Dire la France explains how a new way of narrating French national identity emerged in the 1980s within an internationally oriented French Left, attentive of the coming challenges of cultural pluralism. Patrick Boucheron's (ed.) Histoire mondiale de la France advances into a more challenging direction by skilfully unsettling the ‘our ancestors the Gauls’ clichéd narrative. French history is thus redefined by moving away from the Frankish/Gallic myth of descent, thereby reconfiguring national identity along new lines. This article identifies how crucial debates on the cultural nation and cultural identity emerged in the wake of the May 1968 uprising, asking how much they contributed to the current shape and meaning of French national identity. It thus reviews what can be described as a new historiographical turn in French history.     

Domestic troubles,national identity discourse,and China's attitude towards the West, 2003–2012

Prior to its recent, much discussed international ‘assertiveness’, China's attitude to the West had deteriorated, as reflected in official discourse of national identity. Drawing from political science and social psychology literature on identity studies, I argue that the discursive pattern of national identity can shift as a function of an elite strategy to exclude internal others through opposition to foreign others. Internally exclusionary nationalism, often employed by elites during major crises, is instrumental to consolidating control and maintaining order. But when targeting internal opponents alone is politically inconvenient or lacks public resonance, elites will accentuate ethnocentric national identity discourse vis‐a‐vis foreign nations in order to reinforce internal battles and divert popular discontent externally. An interpretive analysis of the official texts of Chinese national identity discourse during the Hu Jintao decade, supplemented by quantitative data, shows a significant correlation between the regime's fear of internal instability and bottom‐up political opposition on the one hand and the timing and intensity of ethnocentric identity discourse regarding the West on the other. The party‐state negatively framed the West in order to shift the blame for domestic troubles onto foreigners and discredit internal resistance.     

Constructing national identity in Canada's capital, 1900–2000: Confederation Square and the National War Memorial

Ottawa's Confederation Square was initially planned to be a civic plaza to balance the nearby federal presence of Parliament Hill. A century of federal planning, with the direct involvement of Prime Minister W.L. Mackenzie King, repositioned it as a national space in the City Beautiful style. Recent renovations have improved its pedestrian amenity and restored much of the original plan by French urban designer Jacques Gréber. The square contains the National War Memorial and the National Arts Centre, yet is a weak public space due to weak edge definition, animation, and spatial enclosure. The war memorial design was selected in a 1925 international competition won by Britain's Vernon March. The Great War monument was not installed until the 1939 Royal visit, and Mackenzie King intended that the re-planning of the capital would be the World War II memorial. However, the symbolic meaning of the Great War monument gradually expanded to become the place of remembrance for all Canadian war sacrifices. The National War Memorial is more successful as a symbolic object than Confederation Square is as a public space, yet both have evolved into important elements of the Canadian capital's national identity.     

Reading between the lines: national identity and attitudes to the media in Scotland*

ABSTRACT. The relationship between national identity and how people perceive and consume media is a central but largely untested assumption of studies of nationalism. Using a previously developed classification of identity among English migrants to Scotland, this paper explores associations between how people use the media and how they make sense of their national identity. Compared with Scottish nationals, who tend to adopt a more taken‐for‐granted and uncontentious view of the media, except when they feel that the media presented to them challenge their sense of identity, English migrants find that the agendas of the media in Scotland differ from those they are used to south of the border. Specifically, how they view the media tends to vary according to whether they view themselves as ‘English’, ‘British’ or as ‘becoming Scottish’.     

Feminist geography,the ‘everyday’, and local–global relations: hidden spaces of place‐making*

An interest in the taken‐for‐granted, mundane routine activities of women's lives has long been central to the production of knowledge in feminist geography. Here, I revisit the ‘everyday’ in relation to changing lines of inquiry as geographers work to capture the complexity of local–global relations in conceptualising an accelerated pace of the stretching of social relations over space. Through a primary focus on feminist work on care in the home, I explore the various ways in which the meanings and organisation of caregiving activity are intricately connected with the intertwining of globalisation, neoliberalism, social conservatism and a ‘greying’ population in the West. Foregrounding gender in my discussion, I review literature and draw on research examples to illustrate ways in which various types of ‘hidden’ caregiving contribute to contemporary place‐making, and open up our understanding of the ‘local’.     

Science,geography, and nation: the global creation of Thumba

Abstract

The origins of the Indian space program are typically traced back to the founding of a rocket launch base in Thumba in the state of Kerala in India in the 1960s. In creating infrastructure at Thumba, Indian scientific elites used geography as an instrument to create a vast international network of scientific and political actors committed to the science that was possible within India, particularly cosmic ray studies. They were drawing on a long tradition of linking geography to science redolent of the colonial era but were inspired by their newly constituted political imaginary of independent India as a place where science, geography, and nation were perfectly mapped on to each other. NASA’s help was crucial in this regard, enabled as a tool in Cold War high politics, as American technocrats sought to steer India towards the West, while India itself was keenly aware of a more proximate phenomenon, Pakistan’s own burgeoning efforts to do the same. Concerned about domestic opprobrium to large Indian investments in space technology, Indian and American actors shielded the Thumba project from critique by installing it under the umbrella of the international order, in this case the United Nations. This internationalism was complemented by a deep and firm belief in the universalism of modern science as a portable instrument, capable of improving the social order anywhere, regardless of political or social context.     

‘Partially provided’: geography at the University of Toronto, 1844–1935

In universities, as in everyday life, there is a fundamental need for geographical knowledge, even when no formal departments exist to provide instruction. This need was true in the University of Toronto during the decades before Griffith Taylor was appointed in 1935 to the first university Chair in geography in English‐speaking Canada. Using matriculation and annual university course examinations, university calendars and the papers of President Falconer and Professors James Mavor and Harold Innis, I trace the development of geography at the University of Toronto from the mid‐nineteenth century to the arrival of Taylor. Courses taught in selected aspects of physical and human geography in the Departments of Geology, Political Economy and History are particularly significant. Underlying this instruction, and also the desire to establish a geography department, was an acute awareness of the fundamental importance of geography to help understand a large regionally complex homeland, and a wider world.     

Political geography around the world IX: Academic geography in Spain and Franco's regime, 1936–55

Contemporary academic Geography in Spain begins in the 1940s with the educative reform carried out by General Franco's regime. However, Spanish academic Geography did not present any Fascist trend; for instance, German geo-politics did not achieve any relevance. Possible reasons for this political-ideological contradiction may be found in the role played by the staff that manned the new University geography departments, whose scientific behaviour was totally isolated from any Fascist political approach.     

Looking back: the Cotswolds and English national identity, c. 1890–1950

This paper examines how history was appropriated to construct a unique regional identity for the Cotswolds and a national identity for England in the period c. 1890 to 1950. It explores how ideas of the past, tradition, history, longevity and (dis)continuity were woven into representations of the Cotswolds as incontiguous, set apart and remote in time from contemporary England. The analysis examines how the apparently whimsical devise of «locating» the Cotswolds in specific pasts was mobilized to mount serious criticisms of the condition of England and Englishness. This was achieved through the use of the «door ajar» motif which was a particularly powerful means of expressing the perceived disruption of historical continuity in both the Cotswolds and England and is therefore examined at length. These themes are explored through non-fictional rural writing, guides and other written representations.     

Picturing the homeland: geography and national identity in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Iran

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in geography as an ideologically loaded discourse about the world and its inhabitants which has operated both within and beyond educational institutions. Particular attention has been paid to the complex relationships between geography and imperialism, militarism and nationalism. For the most part, these studies have focused on the development of a western geographical imagination in Europe and North America. This article considers the development of geography in Iran during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and charts some of the connections between this new spatial sensibility and an emerging Iranian nationalism. Based on rare and hitherto unexplored nineteenth-century Persian sources, including several newspaper images, this article examines the importance which Iranian statesmen and diplomats in the service of the Qajar dynasty attached to geography and to geographical reasoning in their attempts to protect their authority from external threats. The forms of Iranian geography which developed in this period sustained various myths and legends about Persia's historic importance and reflected both external, western ideas and concepts as well as indigenous, Persian traditions. Forged in a context of acute vulnerability to «Great Power» incursions, Iranian nationalism and Iranian geography both represented an intermingling of external, western and internal, non-western ideas.