Performing the Nation State: Female Representation in Nineteenth-Century American Theatre and the American Cultural Imagination

Author(s):  
Pam Cobrin
2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 15-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ingrid Brühwiler

This article examines public education and the establishment of the nation-state in the first half of the nineteenth century in Switzerland. Textbooks, governmental decisions, and reports are analyzed in order to better understand how citizenship is depicted in school textbooks and whether (federal) political changes affected the image of the “imagined citizen” portrayed in such texts. The “ideal citizen” was, first and foremost, a communal and cantonal member of a twofold society run by the church and the secular government, in which nationality was depicted as a third realm.


The nineteenth century saw a new wave of dictionaries, many of which remain household names. Those dictionaries didn’t just store words; they represented imperial ambitions, nationalist passions, religious fervour, and utopian imaginings. The Whole World in a Book explores a period in which globalization, industrialization, and social mobility were changing language in unimaginable ways. Dictionaries in the nineteenth century became more than dictionaries: they were battlefields between prestige languages and lower-status dialects; national icons celebrating the language and literature of the nation-state; and sites of innovative authorship where middle and lower classes, volunteers, women, colonial subjects, the deaf, and missionaries joined the ranks of educated white men in defining how people communicated and understood the world around them. This volume investigates dictionaries in the nineteenth century covering languages as diverse as Canadian French, English, German, Frisian, Japanese, Libras (Brazilian sign language), Manchu, Persian, Quebecois, Russian, Scots, and Yiddish.


2009 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
SUBHO BASU

AbstractThrough a study of hitherto unexplored geography textbooks written in Bengali between 1845 and 1880, this paper traces the evolution of a geographic information system related to ethnicity, race, and space. This geographic information system impacted the mentality of emerging educated elites in colonial India who studied in the newly established colonial schools and played a critical role in developing and articulating ideas of the territorial nation-state and the rights of citizenship in India. The Bengali Hindu literati believed that the higher location of India in such a constructed hierarchy of civilizations could strengthen their claims to rights of citizenship and self-government. These nineteenth century geography textbooks asserted clearly that high caste Hindus constituted the core ethnicity of colonial Indian society and all others were resident outsiders. This knowledge system, rooted in geography/ethnicity/race/space, and related to the hierarchy of civilizations, informed the Bengali intelligentsia's notion of core ethnicity in the future nation-state in India with Hindu elites at its ethnic core.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Saeed Khudeda Alo

ملخص البحث:يعتبر الأرمن من احد الجماعات العرقية المميزة التي عاشت في الدولة العثمانية، قاموا بتاسيس جمعيات سياسية في القرن التاسع عشر تلك الجمعيات التي سعت الى تأسيس دولة قومية للارمن بمساعدة الغرب كان ذلك من الاساب الرئيسة الى تعرضهم الى الإبادة الجماعية من قبل الدولة العثمانية. وخلال سنوات الحرب العالمية الأولى توجه الاتراك الى اتباع سياسة قومية وذلك نتيجة لتطورات الحرب فكانت النتيجة تهجير الأرمن من مناطقهم وقيام الاتراك بمذابح منظمة ضدهم، لكن هناك مجموعات تمكنت من النجاة من تلك المذابح والتوجه الى العراق وخاصة الى سنجارحيث قام أهلها من الايزيدييين باستقبال الأرمن ومساعدتهم في محنتهم وبناء البيوت ،من الطين، لهم وإيجاد العمل لهم آنذاك لكي يستطيعوا من استمرار حياتهم. لكن موقف الايزيديين هذا مع الأرمن دفع بالاتراك الى القيام بتوجيه حملة عسكرية الى سنجار أدت الى قتل الكثير من الأهالي ونهبت ودمرت قراهم وتركت اثار سلبية على المنطقة. The Yezidis from Sinjar and the Armenians. 1914-1918A study in the Yezidi position with regards to the Armenian Genocide.The Armenians are reputed to be one of the most distinguished ethnic groups which lived during the rule of the Ottoman Empire.During the nineteenth century they established political societies whose raison d' etre was to pursue the founding of a nation-state for Armenia, backed by Western aid and support.Their political endeavours were one of the main reasons for their genocide under the Ottoman Empire. During World War one, the Turks pursued their own national policy, resulting in the displacement of the Armenians from their territories and targeted massacres against them. There were those who succeeded in escaping theTurkish massacres and fled to Iraq, most particularly the area of Sinjar. The Yezidis from Sinjar welcomed the Armenians and aided them in their process of resettlement, building of mud houses and finding employment. The aid extended by the Yezidi community of Sinjar to the Armenian displaced, caused the Turks to launch a military campaign against Sinjar, looting and destroying villages and murdering many that wreaked havoc upon the region.


Author(s):  
Taner Akçam

This chapter discusses how the demise of the Ottoman state led to a succession of ethnic and religious groups playing out their struggles for independence on its shrinking stage against a backdrop of forced population exchanges, deportations, massacres, and ethnic cleansing. As the last of the great early modern empires, the Ottoman state entered its long nineteenth century trailing the heritage of Byzantium but lacking the means of modernization. Without the requisite political and social structures and public consensus of a nation-state, “the Muslim Third Rome” could no longer bind together the diverse groups that peopled its vast territory. The logic of the nation-state utterly contradicts that of empire. Whereas an empire, by definition, encompasses a number of territories and diverse peoples, a nation-state is circumscribed by two clearly defined boundaries: geographical and social.


Author(s):  
Duncan Bell

This chapter focuses on John Robert Seeley (1834–95), the most prominent imperial thinker in late nineteenth-century Britain. It dissects Seeley's understanding of theology and religion, probes his views on the sacred character of nationality, and shows how he attempted to reconcile particularism and universalism in a so-called “cosmopolitan nationalist” vision. It argues that Seeley's most famous book, The Expansion of England (1883) should be understood as an expression of his basic political-theological commitments. The chapter also makes the case that he conceived of Greater Britain as a global federal nation-state, modeled on the United States. It concludes by discussing the role of India and Ireland in his polychronic, stratified conception of world order.


Author(s):  
Blair Best ◽  
Madeleine G. Cella ◽  
Rati Choudhary ◽  
Kayla C. Coleman ◽  
Robert Davis ◽  
...  

This essay co-authored by Robert Davis and his students in a theater class at New York University describes the interdependence of close and distant reading practices in their creation and analysis of a representative corpus of nineteenth-century drama. With irregular scholarly and theatrical attention given to nineteenth-century American theatre, the archive of plays and productions is frustratingly fragmented with few playbooks and only limited accounts of their staging. This chapter demonstrates how students used corpus linguistic and spatial analysis tools like Voyant, Antconc, and Tagxedo to recover a neglected century of American theater. Students found that the use of digital tools to perform text analysis, mapping, and network visualization sparked new scholarly ideas about nineteenth-century theatre.


Author(s):  
Frank Towers

Whereas the introduction to this volume focused on the question of sovereignty and the nation-state, our conclusion takes stock of another important theme of this volume, writing North American history outside of a national framework. Riding the crest of a wave of studies on transnational and global comparative studies of the nineteenth century, historians working in this field would do well to pause briefly to take stock of its achievements, limitations, and future research questions....


Author(s):  
Colin G. Calloway

This chapter surveys how treaty making involving American Indians developed and changed over time. Early colonial treaties involved a hybrid diplomacy of Native rituals and European protocols, and business was conducted with wampum and oratory as much as with pen and paper. Increasingly, treaties involved land cessions. The United States adopted many of the forms of colonial treaties but employed them primarily as instruments of dispossession and removal. In the nineteenth century, the expanding nation-state made treaties that confined Indian peoples to reservations and that also included measures to “civilize” the tribes. Although Congress ended treaty making in 1871, “agreements” continued to be signed and treaties continued to have the force of law. Treaties were contracts between sovereigns, and tribes have invoked treaties to reassert their rights in modern America.


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