Browsing by Subject "Nationalism"

Art music and folk music are all too often perceived as opposing concepts. The educated, elite practitioners of a notated art seem to have little in common with musically illiterate commoners who weave an oral tradition. However, these two modes have much to say to each other when brought together in dialogue. This dissertation traces the use of Swedish folk themes in nineteenth-century art music—the era of a widespread interest in folk culture that quickly enthralled much of Europe, thanks to Johann Gottfried von Herder’s many disciples such as the Brothers Grimm—and provides a framework through which to understand the musical expression of a culture that has thus far been rendered largely invisible to non-Swedish-speaking scholars.

Though Sweden’s modern sovereignty dates back to 1523, the kingdom’s boundaries shifted dramatically early in the 1800s, as the eastern territory of Finland was lost to Russia in 1809 and the western land of Norway became linked with Sweden via union in 1814. Correspondingly, the question of what it meant to be “Swedish” demanded reevaluation. One response was to transcribe, edit, and publish collections of traditional songs and instrumental tunes as supposed treasure troves of cultural history. These arrangements, which were filtered through musical notation and given newly composed harmonic accompaniments, say more about educated perceptions of folk music and expectations of acceptable performance than they do about actual folk performance practices. Through the medium of print, these “cleaned-up” songs found wide circulation in print and formed the basis for many later compositions. I take a genre-based approach and analyze stages of development of the use of folk melodies in piano-vocal arrangements, male choral settings, theatrical works, piano literature, and chamber and orchestral music.

The political scientist Benedict Anderson writes of “imagined communities,” in which people who never meet nevertheless imagine themselves as part of a single group due to a deep sense of innate comradeship. I argue that, in Sweden, shared knowledge of the most popular traditional songs, and the recognition of the use of these songs in other compositions, helped facilitate the “re-imagination” of the Swedish nation-community during a time when cultural and political allegiances were in flux.

Similar phenomena have been widely observed with respect to other European countries, but Swedish music has not yet been studied in equal depth, likely because there was no figurehead composer of national and international prominence. To date, no systematic investigation of compositions based on Swedish folksong has been carried out. This dissertation draws on extensive research of little-known archival sources, including manuscript and rare published scores, letters, and contemporary newspaper reviews. In addition, it contributes to the field by entering into dialogue with existing Swedish-language scholarship, which has hitherto been inaccessible to most scholars outside Scandinavia. With this dissertation, I join a scholarly community spanning both sides of the Atlantic.

This dissertation research explores the practices and aspirations to national belonging among Evangelical Egyptians, converts to a distinctively Euro-American form of Protestant Christianity through the proselytizing efforts of European and American missionaries between the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. Although Evangelical Egyptians have historically been known as politically quietist, in the wake of the January 25 Revolution, leading Evangelicals began to adjust their practices of public engagement with the revolution, civil society, and political activism. Through participant observation, in-depth person centered interviews, and archival research, this dissertation argues that far from severing Evangelical Egyptian imaginations, desires for, and practices of national belonging, conversion from the historic Coptic Orthodox church and to a more internationally connected form of Christian community, in fact provides Evangelicals with some of their most potent tools for articulating their historical and contemporary place in the nation-state of Egypt. This dissertation aims to bring timely and productive debates on the anthropology of religion to bear on the shape of global evangelicalism in the global south as a key shape of politics and sociality. Indeed, this dissertation argues that it is precisely the ‘will to the global’ as the future imagined community of ‘God’s kingdom’ that paradoxically roots Evangelical Egyptians in a robust nationalistic articulation of their faith.

Art historians have identified a rightward turn in the artistic climate of France in the interwar period, one opposed to an avant-garde accused of being foreign to national culture, and reflective of a broader cultural and political shift towards the right. However, a study detailing the strength and variety of forces opposed to modernism and the avant-gardes in this period has yet to be written.

Drawing on newspapers, art journals, art history books, and sources from private and national archives in France, my dissertation presents four detailed case studies of reactionary, anti-avantgardeist and anti-modernist critics, art educators and art historians during this period, expanding our understanding of the position and influence of these rightwing intellectuals. Analyzing their aims, the artists they supported, their audiences, their social networks, and finally their links to the French state, the dissertation will reconstitute the multiple and multifaceted platforms of conservative cultural activism, revealing the contours of a powerful, persistent, and often successful cultural and political agenda that sought to undermine or reverse the course of modernism.

Accounting for the strategies through which rightwing art world actors battling modernism and the avant-gardes sought to institutionalize their campaigns, this dissertation complicates and revises our understanding of the substantial challenges posed to modern art in the interwar period, demonstrating the power of these interventions while also pointing to the tacit complicity of the French state with these efforts.

Based on fieldwork in Bursa and archival research, this dissertation investigates the historical interplay between professional soccer, nationalism, and globalization in Turkey. The dissertation makes the case that the globalized commercialized competition in professional soccer as well as attempts and failures to regulate the explosive economic and cultural dynamics of professional soccer have made significant contributions to the remaking of Turkish nation-building over the decades throughout the 20th century and until the present day. Starting with a historical analysis of the interwar origins of commercial soccer in post-imperial Istanbul and its fraught relation to militarist nation-building, the dissertation then moves to the formation of a national sport bureaucracy and subsequent development of a national professional league after the 1960s. An ethnography of a city team Bursaspor, which constitutes the second half of the dissertation, demonstrates that what I call the joint-stock politics of city’s soccer team is a cultural performance for the city to tell itself stories about its industrial modernity and the globalizing transformations the city undergoes.

This book addresses the polarization and the erosion of liberal democratic norms and institutions that increasingly define contemporary liberal democratic politics. More specifically, it aims to address the question of how pluralistic liberal democracies ought to secure stability in a manner that both conforms to the normative contours of liberal democracy and facilitates the rectification and identification of injustices.

My broad argument is that liberal democracies can only hold themselves together and become the best possible versions of themselves when their citizens are political friends. First, I advance ‘the basic’ case for why we should appeal to political friendship. I pursue an interpretation of Aristotle’s articulation of the concept to demonstrate that the central concern of political friendship is the cultivation of a political sense of togetherness among citizens who adhere to a plurality of interests and conceptions of justice. I supplement this argument by demonstrating why alternative solutions to the problem are insufficient. Second, I think seriously about how to reinforce political friendship in conditions of modern pluralism. Specifically, I develop an understanding of political friendship that can ensure that citizens who share political sense of togetherness will be able to express their differences and disagreements manageably and equitably. This sort of political friendship draws on multiple notions of political friendship: citizens are political friends by virtue of the cognitive lens or metaphor(s) through which they consider politics and their social relations, of their common civic-national identity, and of the subset of the citizenry with whom they personally practice political friendship – a subset that can plausibly be described as representative of the citizenry as a whole.

Recent studies have revealed that the inequality between different ethnic groups can better explain and predict the onset of ethnic civil conflicts than traditional inequality indicators do. Based on their findings, this article uses the modernist theory on nationalism to further illustrate the mechanism of the horizontal inequality on ethnic civil conflicts. Introducing the modernist nationalism’s dimension, this article finds that with the increase of the degree of modernization, the positive effect of political horizontal inequality on the possibility of ethnonationalist civil conflict onset increases, while horizontal inequality’s effect diminishes in the less modernized countries. This finding matches the expectation of the modernist theory on nationalism, providing a better understanding about ethnonationalist civil conflicts in the context of horizontal inequality.

This dissertation critically examines the ways in which British composers wrote large choral works for festival audiences combining liturgical and sacred texts with poetry to expand multi-text meanings beyond a strictly religious sphere. Processes of anthologizing are considered in the present study as a textual and poetic practice in music by Vaughan Williams, and a later generation of British composers. Analyzing the use of multiple text sources in choral music with orchestral accompaniment, this dissertation addresses the moral, gender, and nationalistic values that composers inscribed in sacred compositions, expanding the traditional understanding of the liturgical and biblical texts. Analytic readings will focus on textual and musical choices used by these composers, and on readings of the texts themselves. This is an analysis of a twentieth-century genre of sacred choral music in Britain emphasizing wider themes in the culture—nationalism, grief, Welsh linguistic history, and feminism—as they interact with religious and liturgical tradition.

The text sources in these works draw from multiple languages, time periods, and textual genres. For example, Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Dona nobis pacem (1936) combines Walt Whitman poetry from Leaves of Grass with liturgical and biblical texts to create an anti-war message. Herbert Howells’s Hymnus Paradisi (1950) expands the liturgy of the Requiem Mass to include sacred texts to mourn the death of his son, Grace Williams adds Welsh texts to her Missa Cambrensis (1971) to represent the strength of the Welsh language during a linguistic movement in Wales. Finally, Elizabeth Maconchy proposes feminist perspective in the libretto of her dramatic cantata, Héloïse and Abelard (1979), using liturgical texts and sacred hymns to situate the medieval love story in the setting of the cloister at Notre Dame. In analyzing these works, I reveal a pattern of choral composition responding to the religious interests of the Church of England, while acknowledging the secularizing forces in British culture. Through their music, these composers spoke directly to their audiences, while imbuing traditional sacred forms with identifiably modern cultural attitudes and concerns.

As a multinational state with a population that spoke eleven different languages, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was considered an anachronism during the age of heightened nationalism leading up to the First World War. This situation has made the search for a single Austro-Hungarian identity so difficult that many historians have declared it impossible. Yet the Dual Monarchy possessed one potentially unifying cultural aspect that has long been critically neglected: the extensive repertoire of marches and patriotic music performed by the military bands of the Imperial and Royal Austro-Hungarian Army. This Militärmusik actively blended idioms representing the various nationalist musics from around the empire in an attempt to reflect and even celebrate its multinational makeup. Much in the same way that the Army took in recruits from all over the empire, its diverse Militärkapellmeister - many of whom were nationalists themselves - absorbed the local music of their garrison towns and incorporated it into their patriotic compositions. Though it flew in the face of the rampant ethnonationalism of the time, this Austro-Hungarian Militärmusik was an enormous popular success; Eduard Hanslick and Gustav Mahler were drawn to it, Joseph Roth and Stephan Zweig lionized it, and in 1914, hundreds of thousands of young men from every nation of the empire marched headlong to their ultimate deaths on the Eastern Front with the music of an Austro-Hungarian march in their ears. This dissertation explores how military instrumental music reflected a special kind of multinational Austro-Hungarian state identity between 1867 and 1914. In the first part of my dissertation, I examine the complex political backdrop of the era and discuss the role and demographic makeup of the k.u.k. Armee. I then go on to profile the military musicians themselves, describe the idiomatic instrumentation of the military ensembles, and analyze significant surviving works from this repertoire by Julius Fucik and Carl Michel Ziehrer. The results of this study show how Austro-Hungarian Militärmusik synthesized conceptions of nationalism and cosmopolitanism to create a unique musical identity that, to paraphrase Kaiser Franz Joseph, brought together the best elements of each nation for the benefit of all.

This dissertation examines offers a corrective to the world polity theory of globalization, which posits increasing convergence on a single global cultural frame. In contrast, I suggest that national culture limits the adoption of "world culture" by actors and institutions. Instead of adopting world cultural models wholesale, they are adapted through a process I call translated global diffusion. In order to assess my theory, I follow the creation and development of organizations founded by Australia, Canada, and the United States to foster scientific development within their borders. All three national organizations were initiated around 1915, part of an international wave of state science that prima facie appears to support the world polity thesis.

Through a comparative historical analysis that combines archival material and secondary histories from each case, I demonstrate that concerns tied to national identity mediate the incorporation of models sanctioned as part of a "world cultural canopy" of institutional scripts. More specifically, federal legislatures circumscribe new organizations to fit preexisting ideas of proper government. Secondly, the scientists effectively running state science organizations negotiate often conflicting nationalistic and professional impulses. Finally, the national news media report about science in a selective and nationally filtered way. The result is a kind of particular universality, science layered with national import only fully visible from within the nation-state.

Although the previous literature has extensively debated the role of nationalism in civil conflicts, few studies have addressed how different types of nationalism might affect the occurrence of civil conflicts. In this study, I distinguish two types of nationalism—inclusive and exclusive—and examine their impact on the likelihood of civil war. I argue that both inclusive and exclusive nationalism can have pacifying effects that are produced by distinct mechanisms in each case. In particular, inclusive nationalism will reinforce national identity and national unity, leading to a reduced likelihood of civil conflicts. Meanwhile, exclusive nationalism creates a window in which the likelihood of interstate wars increases by distracting attention away from domestic grievances, which, in turn, decreases the likelihood of civil war. In this study, I use a nationalism-­‐‑inducing sporting event—the Summer Olympic Games—as the impetus for creating surges in nationalism, and I test the effects of the Games on the likelihood of civil war in a given country. An analysis of an original dataset on Summer Olympic Games and civil war from 1946 to 2015 confirms my theory that nationalism induced by the Summer Olympic Games reduces the likelihood of civil conflicts.

This dissertation offers a comprehensive model of contemporary nation-state sovereignty. To do so, it examines the mutually constitutive relationship between sovereignty and present-day globalization as well as the role of law and capital in creating, maintaining, and driving that relationship.

The scholarly treatment of nation-state sovereignty has been inadequate for several reasons. Older theories of sovereignty could not have foreseen the unprecedented technological advances that underlie our current system and therefore do not sufficiently explain it. More recent theories of sovereignty, in turn, tend to be too narrowly focused, such that a given model of sovereignty often only applies to that particular condition. Furthermore, the academic literatures on sovereignty and nationalism, while occasionally referencing each other, have failed to recognize that the two phenomena are parts of the same whole and therefore must be more fully integrated.

This dissertation argues that a comprehensive model of contemporary nation-state sovereignty must include two symbiotic elements. The first, referred to here as emotional sovereignty, involves subjective relationships with the state. As such, the substance of this element is unique for each group. The second element is a functional/instrumental element. It addresses ways that the sovereignty serves as an interface-mechanism with other sovereignties, like compatible nozzles attaching and linking variously-sized hoses. It likewise explains how sovereignty functions as a value-maximization mechanism. In short, a sovereignty must control its relationships with others in order to accumulate as much capital as possible in order to protect and perpetuate aspects of the domestic culture that are deemed most valuable. This functional/instrumental element, while used in distinct ways by different groups, is largely identical in form among all states.

From these multiple angles it becomes evident that nation-state sovereignty is not one single power but instead a set of powers, such that each power entails a strategic option that can be negotiated, delegated, mortgaged or surrendered. Nation-state sovereignty is therefore rendered meaningful only in connection with other nation-state sovereignties; in the contemporary situation, this means globalization. Sovereignty is, after all, an ad hoc solution to a particular set of historically and contextually emerging dilemmas; as the dilemmas have continued to change, so have the solutions. And so although people, goods, and ideas have always flowed across borders, whether geographic or cultural, the speed, nature, and extent of all such movement in the contemporary age is unprecedented. Today, all sovereignties - across the globe - are connected in diverse and manifold ways. This dissertation therefore provides a model of globalization that goes beyond the simple movement of people, goods, capital, and ideas to explain the conceptual transformations that have made today's globalization possible; the processes that drive it; and the role of the nation-state, and in particular nation-state sovereignty, as a necessary component of globalization itself.

The dissertation integrates these theories of sovereignty and globalization to show how the connections created by systems of nation-state law serve as the framework for many of the core processes of globalization, while flows of capital within and enabled by that framework fuel those processes. It shows that there are at least three important aspects of this relationship between sovereignty, globalization, law and capital: First, because of the connections of law, capital, and labor, every state is implicated in the production of every good, a phenomenon here referred to as co-production. Together with the co-consumption of those goods, co-production is the driving force behind globalization; as such, one can likewise say that nation-states co-produce globalization itself through the legal regulation of the movement of capital and individuals. Second, nation-states remain the central structural machinery of globalization. Third, globalization is not uniform. To be sure, the effects of globalization have transformed every culture on the planet and capitalism has been the vehicle for doing so. But just as not all cultures are the same, all capitalisms are not the same either. No model of sovereignty and globalization is therefore complete without a mechanism for accounting for differences in culture and capitalism.

The research that is the foundation for this dissertation was undertaken primarily in the South Pacific region, focusing on Cook Islanders in the Cook Islands, New Zealand, and Australia. Methods included participant observation, legal and documentary research, as well as informal and semi-structured interviews.

This paper seeks to explain the phenomena of popular foreign vloggers in domestic Chinese media by using existing theories in propaganda, nationalism, and social identity theory. Selecting six videos from domestic Chinese social media Bilibili, I generate original data of 1,125 comments from these six videos. I find that holding everything else equal, videos with foreign vloggers who speak fluent Chinese will elicit more positive comments from the audience than foreign vloggers who do not. Moreover, the word “China”, “U.S.” and “foreign” appeared more frequently in videos by Chinese-speaking vloggers, and comments praising foreign vloggers’ Chinese skills constitute half of all the positive comments in one video. This study contributes to people’s understanding of nationalism and propaganda. It is also the first time, to the author’s knowledge, that social identity theory has been applied to the Chinese context in the discipline of political science. This study has implications for future studies and studies outside of China as well.

This thesis examines popular Indian and South Korean film and television media which depicts the nation in the context of postcolonial division. Specifically, it looks closely at portrayals of anti-colonial struggle and partition, cross-border encounters, and revisionist nationalist narratives. This analysis illustrates the potential of such media to simultaneously gesture towards reconciliation between populations that have emerged as enemies despite their origins as one nation, and fail to exceed the limits of post-colonial, post-partition ideas of the nation-state and its formation of citizenship. The possibilities of these portrayals lie in their ability to both predict and produce public sentiment, as they provide an outlet for national discourse negotiating exclusion and belonging.

In keeping with the recent paradigm shift, this dissertation approaches the indigenization of Christianity in China from a different perspective. Rather than conceiving indigenization as the devolution of missionary power to indigenous leaders, the study focuses on the emergence of Chinese Protestant intellectuals and their ability to engage the public space—how they have historically engaged their religious tradition to address the broader public during crises. It does so by examining the lives and works of several Chinese Christian intellectuals as they negotiated with the most transformative events in twentieth-century Chinese history: modernizing reforms in the 1910s and 1920s, prolonged resistance against the Japanese invasion in the 1930s and 1940s, and ideological domestication after 1950. With transnational and indigenous resources, these people created a captivating vision of national salvation for their country.

The first three chapters of this work reconstruct the intellectual development among mainstream Chinese Protestants in Republican China by tracing the rise and unraveling of the liberal consensus that integrated three spheres of emphasis in Christianity to lead China in progress. Such endeavor offered an inspiring message of national salvation by individual moral improvement, social implementation of reformist ministries, and transcendence of national boundaries for world solidarity. However, starting in the 1930s, a group of Christian intellectuals’ continued exploration led to increasing ideological affinity to socialism and organizational closeness to the Chinese Communist Party. Meanwhile, another group turned to conservative theology and began to advocate for a national as well as spiritual deliverance that could not be reduced to morality and social service.

The last three chapters document these Christian intellectuals’ response to an unprecedented challenge: a centralized and ideologically charged state. During the Civil War, the Christian socialists saw the Communist triumph as an eschatological victory of “light” over “darkness,” while the conservative group struggled to create Christianity’s continuing relevance in China. Despite their adaptability and courage in the early 1950s, the totalitarian regime soon engulfed public space, and these intellectuals found themselves marginalized through either bureaucratization or exile, thwarting their nation-saving longings. Failing to achieve the public intellectual mission haunted them in their last years. It also prompted many to return to the Christian faith as they tried to reorient themselves to China’s unfinished quest for modernization, which seemed yet to reveal its hidden directions.

Overall, English monographs on Chinese Protestant intellectuals are few. This dissertation aims to narrate a story of the intellectual odyssey of Chinese Protestantism in the twentieth century, from the birth of Republican China in 1911 through the height of ideological fanaticism in the Cultural Revolution. Using case studies, the dissertation shows that the evolving perspectives of these Christian intellectuals have never escaped the gravitational pull of the grand narrative of national salvation, for which they infused highly transnational influences into active public engagement. Eventually, despite seemingly within the seekers’ grasp, the vision of deliverance proved fleeting as it became co-opted by the power of the state, yet without failing to throw subsequent followers into new cycles of hope and violence propelled by the ever-present pressures for change.