Browsing by Subject "Nation"
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Item Open Access Deux Langues, Deux Mondes? —Une étude de la situation littéraire actuelle de l’écrivain maghrébin bilingue(2010-06-28T12:53:17Z) Dal Santo, LeilaSince gaining Independence from France in 1962 and 1956 respectively, Algeria and Morocco have sought to reinstate the prestige of the Arabic language. French, however, has not completely been eliminated from the daily lives of the Maghreb population, and today the language of the colonizer remains closely associated with modernization and technology as well as subjects, such as sexuality, considered “taboo” by many Muslim societies. Conversely, Modern Standard Arabic and Classical Arabic, though rarely spoken in the informal daily setting, represent the universal language of the Arab people, as well as the language of Islam. This study examines the polemic of language choice in Maghreb literature in the 21st Century, demonstrating that the writer’s choice of language is circumscribed by extra-literary considerations (social and political) emanating from nationalist voices within his own country as well from Arab governments and their censorship laws, especially from Egypt, the publishing capital of the Arab world. In short, the suppression of spoken languages such as French and Maghrebi dialects by the post-Independence Arabization policies and subsequent failures in the education system evidenced by high illiteracy rates have prompted bilingual Maghreb authors to publish outside their respective countries. On a larger scale, the absence of an educated Arab public space and the censorship of many liberal texts have forced many Maghreb authors to write in French in an attempt to interact with a larger international community. Therefore, given the contemporary multilingual landscape of the Maghreb, this study questions the possibility and relevance of a “national literature” as defined by 19th century notion of a shared language, territory, and religion.Item Open Access Pictures That Satisfy: Modernist Discourses and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Nation in the Art of Irma Stern (1894-1966)(2009) Walker, LaNitra MicheleThis dissertation examines South African artist Irma Stern’s contributions to modernism in South Africa and to modernism as a global movement. It analyzes how Stern’s interactions with South Africans, combined with her early artistic training in Germany and her cultural connections to the South African Jewish community, helped her to bring critical issues of race, gender, and nation into focus through her work. This study goes beyond the work of previous scholars who have suggested that Stern was uninterested in social or political causes, arguing that Stern was acutely aware of how social and political themes contributed to modernism’s development in Europe. Moreover, this study concludes that Stern employed similar strategies to develop a South African modernism. Although she often spoke pejoratively about nonwhite South Africans, she was cognizant of the fact that the act of painting nonwhites made significant artistic and political statements.
Because Stern is virtually unknown in the United States, this study will do the following: 1) Introduce Stern to an American audience by discussing her work from the beginning of her artistic training in Germany in 1913 to her death in 1966; 2) Reconnect Stern to the larger global debates about modernism in the twentieth century; 3) Analyze Stern’s works that have received little or no attention in previous scholarship; and 4) Discuss the long-term influence that Stern’s work had in shaping the direction of South African art before, during, and after apartheid.
Formal analysis and close readings of Stern's oil paintings, drawings, travel narratives, and watercolors are crucial in understanding how she used her artistic talents to record visual interpretations of South African culture history. As one of only a few internationally respected South African artists of the apartheid era, an examination of Stern's work and career allows for a more complex understanding of how race, gender, and nation contributed to the development of modernism in South African art history.
Item Open Access Realism, Race and Citizenship: Four Moments in the Making of the Black Body, Colombia and Brazil, 1853 - 1907(2010) Rodriguez-Balanta, Beatriz EugeniaRealism, Race and Citizenship: Four Moments in the Making of the Black Body, Colombia and Brazil, 1853 - 1907 investigates the visual and literary mechanisms used to refurbish racial and social hierarchies in Brazil and Colombia in the aftermath of the abolition of slavery. Chorographic paintings, scientific photographs, identification documents, and naturalist literature are taken to together to argue that: on the one hand, the slave is the fleshy object that defines freedom and, in the postcolonial moment, citizenship. In "Realism, Race and Citizenship: Four Moments in the Making of the Black Body, Colombia and Brazil, 1853 - 1907," I propose that in geo-political spaces where the abolition of slavery and the re-branding of work were intensely debated and violently fought over, realist programs of representation facilitated the propagation of modern racializing schemas. Chapters 1 and 2 study the watercolors created for the Comisión Corográfica (the pre-eminent mapping project of nineteenth century Colombia) and scientific photographs produced in Brazil. These chapters uncover the stylistic conventions that make possible the staging of blackness as visible and immutable biological inferiority and as cumulative category that encompasses a variety of physical and social characteristics including but not limited to skin color, occupation, costume, and physical environment. Chapters 3 and 4 argue that the disavowal of slavery structures Brazilian naturalist novels such as O Cortiço (Aluísio Azevedo, 1890) as well as legislative debates about the nation and the citizen. By focusing on the visual and narrative orchestration blackness, my dissertation provides a critical framework for understanding how realist aesthetic conventions configured (and continue to animate) discourses of race and citizenship in Brazil and Colombia.
Item Open Access Survival of a Perverse Nation: Sexuality and Kinship in Post-Soviet Armenia(2016) Shirinian, TamarSurvival of a Perverse Nation traces the ways in which contemporary Armenian anxieties are congealing into the figure of the “homosexual.” As in other post-Soviet republics, homosexuality has increasingly become defined as the crisis of the times, and is understood by many as a destructive force linked to European encroachment. In Armenia, a growing right-wing nationalist movement since 2012 has been targeting LGBT and feminist activists. I suggest that this movement has arisen out of Armenia’s concerns regarding proper social and biological reproduction in the face of high rates of emigration of especially men in search of work. Many in the country blame this emigration on a post-Soviet oligarchy, with close ties to the government. This oligarchy, having quickly and massively privatized and liquidated industry and land during the war over the region of Nagorno-Karabagh (1990-1994) with Azerbaijan, created widespread un(der)employment. A national narrative attributing the nation’s survival of the 1915 Genocide and dispersion of its populations to strong morality preserved by institutions such as the Church and the family has now, in the post-Soviet era, ruptured into one of moral “perversion.” This dissertation is based on 15 months of ethnographic research, during which I participated in the work of two local non-governmental organizations: Public Information and Need for Knowledge, an LGBT rights organization and Women’s Resource Center, a feminist organization. I also conducted interviews with 150 households across Yerevan, the capital city, and did in-depth interviews with other activists, right-wing nationalists and journalists. Through psychoanalytic frameworks, as well as studies of kinship, I show how sovereignty – the longed for dream for Armenians over the last century – is felt to have failed because of the moral corruption of the illegitimate figures that fill Armenian seats of authority. I, thus, examine the ways in which a missing father of the household is discursively linked to the lack of strong leadership by a corrupt government, producing a prevalent feeling of moral disintegration that nationalists displace onto the “homosexual.”
Item Open Access Tele-envisioning a Nation: TV, Postwar Japan and Cold War Media(2021) Cai, YimingThe development of television in postwar Japan synchronized with both Japan’s nation building project after World War II and its geopolitical positionality within the global Cold War. While much of the previous scholarship has been dedicated to postwar Japan and its political and economic entanglement with the Cold War, the dearth of research on how the Cold War culture, or the cultures of the Cold War, shaped the growing nation leaves room for further discussion. Following the “cultural turn” in Cold War studies and taking television as the vantage point, this thesis aims to unpack the correlation between television culture and nation building during the ideological war. The conviction that television should be understood as contextualized within the socio-cultural background leads to the emphases of the thesis not only on the technological features of the apparatus, but also on its social and cultural reception and implications. The thesis firstly traces the development of and discourse on television in postwar Japan to shed light on how television has been inextricably intertwined with the nation since its nascent stage; secondly analyzes the popularization of television as a household appliance and suggests television’s omnipresent role in mediating the relationship between nation and quotidian life; thirdly focuses on television’s live broadcast technology and its utilization during the national events to indicate television’s centrality to the construction of national imaginary. Resorting to both archival resources and secondary materials, to both historical documents and TV commercials, to methodologies in both media studies, visual studies and cultural studies, and to such theorists as Raymond Williams, amongst others, the thesis argues that 1) the development of television in postwar Japan was in sync with Japan’s nation building and economic booming; 2) television presents itself as a spectacle of national prosperity towards its audience, situates the audience in the “national time” and contributes to a national “imagined community.”
Item Open Access The Demands of Integration: Space, Place and Genre in Berlin(2012) SchusterCraig, Johanna EThis dissertation argues that the metaphor of integration, which describes the incorporation of immigrants into the national body, functions as a way to exclude "Muslim" immigrants from German national identity, as these groups are those most often deemed "un-integratable" (unintegrierbar). By looking at cultural products, I explore how the spatial metaphor of integration is both contested and reproduced in a variety of narratives.
One of the recurring themes in integration debates focuses on finding a balance between multiculturalist strategies of population management; the regulation and enforcement of the third article of the German Basic Law, which guarantees gender parity; and the public religious life of conservative Islamic social movements like Salafism, which demand gender segregation as a tenet of faith. Discourses of women's rights as human rights and identity politics are the two most frequent tactical interventions on the integration landscape. My dissertation explores how identity, performance and experience of gendered oppression manifest in the autobiographical novels of Turkish-German women, comic books, journalistic polemics, activist video and the activities of the social work organization Projekt Heroes. Reading a broad array of cultural products allows me to explore the tension between the metaphor of integration and the reluctance of some to reenvision German national identity, with specific attention to how this tension plays out in space and place. Through literary analysis, participant-observation and interviews, I explore how the language of integration shapes the space of the nation and limits what the space of the nation could become. I argue that the tone of integration debates over the past decade has become increasingly shrill, and propose that limited and strategic silence may offer potential as a political strategy for reenvisioning modes of immigration incorporation.
Item Open Access The Spirit Of Survival: Projections of International Solidarity and Security in Contemporary Estonia(2019-04) Loweth, KatharynThis thesis explores the relationship between national cultural spaces and identity in a former Soviet-Bloc state. Through the lens of Estonian history museums and national performances, this paper studies how representations of national identity in the post-Soviet context are a reaction to dominant transnational forces that increasingly challenge the post-Soviet state’s perceptions of respect and power. Applying critical discourse analysis (CDA) theory, I connect museum and song texts to their social and political environment and to overarching global factors. In particular, I analyze Estonian song themes and historical narratives in relation to the Estonian nation, how they fit within the state’s political goals of ‘returning to Europe’, abide by the cultural models of what it means to be ‘European’, and project idealized conditions of a nation-state, such as ethnic homogeneity. Based on my evidence, I argue that the national performance and museum narratives are representing diverging ideals of the nation and state, respectively, in the contemporary era. Although the two representations are not completely incompatible, they position the state on an unstable foundation, which could lead to state sanctioned unrest in the future.