Browsing by Subject "national identity"
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Item Open Access El Tango Extranjero(2010-05-06T17:07:31Z) Garibaldi, DianaThe evolution of the Argentine tango is examined, demonstrating the importance of fragmentation and international influences on its creation and endurance as a national symbol for Argentine identity. It looks at the evolution of the tango chronologically, highlighting important moments in its development both domestically and abroad that have furthered its development and importance culturally and in regards to its relationship with national identity. Specifically, five major periods in tango will be explored: its beginnings; its early travels to Europe; its repatriation to Argentina and the subsequent Golden Years; then its renaissance and endurance abroad, which finally led it back to Argentina for a local renaissance. The current renaissance in Argentina demonstrates the lasting importance of the tango to national identity, as well as the durability of various hybrid forms of the tango. It also shows us that tango has particular transnational characteristics, which enables the tango to leave its borders, only to come back with renewed vitality and popularity. The national symbol therefore, benefits from its international travels and exposure, as it furthers its development and helps the tango endure.Item Open Access Multicultural Cold War: Liberal Anti-Totalitarianism and National Identity in the United States and Canada, 1935-1971(2007-05-03T18:53:45Z) Smolynec, GregoryIn Cold War North America, liberal intellectuals constructed the Canadian and American national identities in contrast to totalitarianism. Theorists of totalitarianism described Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as monolithic societies marked by absolutism and intolerance toward societal differences. In response, many intellectuals imagined Canada and the United States as pluralistic nations that valued diversity. The ways in which Canadians and Americans imagined their respective national identities also varied with epistemological trends that were based on the ideas of totalitarianism and its correlate, anti-totalitarianism. These trends emphasized particularity and diversity. Using archival sources, interviews with policy-makers, and analysis of key texts, Multicultural Cold War outlines the history of theories of totalitarianism, related trends in epistemology, the genealogy of the social sciences, and the works of Canadian and American proponents of cultural pluralism and multiculturalism. It centers attention on Canada and the United States where the unreflective ideology of anti-totalitarianism was widespread and the postwar enthusiasm for ethnicity and cultural pluralism became especially pronounced. In the U.S.A. this enthusiasm found expression among public intellectuals who defined cultural pluralism in their scholarship and social criticism. In Canada, discourses of multiculturalism originated in the hearings of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism and the political thought of Pierre Elliot Trudeau. This dissertation shows that enthusiasm for sub-national group particularity, pluralism, and diversity was a transnational North American trend.Item Open Access Red Lovers and Mothers on the Silver Screen: Hollywood’s Feminine Lens on the Soviet Debate from 1933-1945(2014-10-06) Justice, KatherineThe main goal of this thesis is to examine images of Russians in Hollywood film from 1933 to 1945, the years representing U.S. recognition of the U.S.S.R. through their WWII partnership as allies to the conclusion of the war. To narrow the focus of this study, films covered within this argument focus solely on images of Soviet-era Russian women. The woman plays an important role in these films, often standing as a metaphor for the Soviet nation and provides a useful trope to define the United States’ myth of nation, approach to foreign policy, and cultural understanding of the Russian people. I argue that Hollywood film feminized the image of Russia in film and defined her as the “Other” to help both justify the United States’ ideological fears and illustrate our desires for its political behavior on the body and actions of the female. Of primary importance to my argument are films such as Ninotchka, Comrade X, North Star, Song of Russia, and Days of Glory, which feature Russian women in two archetypal roles: as lover or mother. Following the argument that images of Russian women are tropes within these films that persist to this day, I explore how gender coding has helped restructure and reinforce structures of American society and history through a process of Americanizing the image and reinforcing the patriarchal power system of the United States. In this context, the lover and mother are actually not realistic representations of Russian ideology or culture but are evocative symbols that are employed to define “Otherness” of a foreign people in terms of the American status quo, reflect and to define the culture of the U.S. nation, and justify its political motives.Item Open Access Schwarzsein, Weißsein, Deutschsein: Racial Narratives and Counter-discourses in German Film After 1950(2012) Eley, Michelle RenéThis dissertation uses film to explore shifts in conceptions of race, cultural identity, and national belonging in Germany from the 1950s West Germany to contemporary reunified Germany. Through the analysis of several German productions featuring black characters in major narrative or symbolic roles, it identifies narrative and cinematic techniques used to thematize and problematize popular German conceptions of race and racism and to utilize race as a flexible symbolic resource in defining specific identity borders. The dominant discourse around the concept of race and its far-reaching implications has long been impeded by the lack of a critical German vocabulary. This gap in mainstream German language is in large part a consequence of the immutable association between “race” (in German, Rasse) as a term, and the pro-Aryan, anti-Semitic dogma of National Socialist ideology. As Germany struggles to address racism as a specific problem in the process of its ongoing project to rehabilitate national identity in a post-colonial era indelibly marked by the Second World War, the films discussed in this work — Toxi (R.A. Stemmle, 1952), Gottes zweite Garnitur (P. Verhoeven, 1967), Angst essen Seele auf (R.W. Fassbinder, 1974), Die Ehe der Maria Braun (R.W. Fassbinder, 1979), Alles wird gut (Maccarone, 1998) and Tal der Ahnungslosen (Okpako, 2003) — provide evidence of attempts to create counter-discourses within the space of this language gap.
Using approaches based primarily in critical race and film studies, the following work argues that these films' depictions of racism and racial conflict are often both confined by and add significant new dimension to definitions of Blackness and of conceptions of race and racism in the German context. These attempts at redefinition reveal the ongoing difficulties Germany has faced when confronting the social and ideological structures that are the legacy of its colonialist and National Socialist history. More importantly, however, the films help us to retrace and recover Germany's history of resistance to that legacy and expand the imaginative possibilities for creating coalitions capable of affecting social change.