Refugees in South Asia: Political Membership, Nation-Building Projects and Securitisation of Human Flows

2022 ◽  
pp. 27-49
Author(s):  
Shibashis Chatterjee ◽  
Udayan Das
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Building Projects ◽  
Political Membership

Recovering the past in Jodhaa Akbar: Masculinities, Femininities and Cultural Politics in Bombay Cinema

2011 ◽  
Vol 99 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shahnaz Khan
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
Cultural Politics ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
South Asian Diaspora ◽  
Building Projects ◽  
The Past ◽  
Asian Diaspora

As the dominant media institution in South Asia, Bombay cinema's cultural production of narratives, images and spectacle plays a crucial role in the effort to consolidate and project definitions of the nation. Moreover, such images are exported to the South Asian diaspora worldwide as part of the processes associated with the globalized cultural product referred to as Bollywood. This discussion examines the production and reception of the 2008 film Jodhaa Akbar both as process and product of complex historical, cultural and political nation-building projects in which gender plays a central role.

Uncertain Wests: Kelly Reichardt, Settler Sensibilities, and the Challenges of Feminist Filmmaking

2020 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-20
Author(s):  
Susan Kollin
Keyword(s):  
White Women ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
European American ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
The West ◽  
Building Projects

AbstractDirector Kelly Reichardt has been celebrated as an independent filmmaker who takes risks in developing complicated and often fraught storylines, especially for her female characters. In Meek’s Cutoff (2010), she uses the aesthetics of slow cinema to show details frequently overlooked in the Western. In doing so, the film lays bare the violence of the settler-colonial West, highlighting the underside of European-American dreams of progress and prosperity. Addressing settler women’s investments in nation-building projects, the film traces how their commitments to Whiteness helped underwrite expansionist history. Noting the limits as well as the forms of agency White women claimed in the West, Reichardt pushes the boundaries of the women’s Western in ways that foreground Indigenous lives and the possibilities of decolonization.

‘Proceeding Without a Map’: Kathleen Jamie and the Lie of the Land

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Wheatley
Keyword(s):  
Nation Building ◽  
Land Ownership ◽  
Building Projects

This chapter explores questions of poetic territory in Jamie’s poetry, with particular focus on Jizzen, The Tree House and The Overhaul. Wheatley considers Jamie’s political and historical poems, and their refusal to align poetic map-making with nation-building projects. Her poems about Scottish landmarks imaginatively explore local histories, rather than presuming to overturn them. She is aware of the complexities of land-ownership in Scotland and her poems make no claims of ownership of Romantic bowers or forest groves. In a distinct refusal of the bardic self-aggrandizements of Yeats or English Romantic poets, Jamie celebrates provisional sheltering spaces found on cliff-sides or coast-lines. Poetic territory remains provisional, just as political-cultural arrangements of landscape prove transient, in Jamie’s recent poetry.

Maintaining Modernity

2018 ◽  
pp. 169-205
Author(s):  
Michitake Aso
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Industrial Agriculture ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
World War ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Building Projects ◽  
Imperial Power ◽  
Indochina War

Rubber trees helped structure the violent transition from empire to nation-state during nearly thirty years of conflict on the Indochinese peninsula. Chapter 5 focuses on the struggle over plantations that took place in Vietnam and Cambodia between 1945 and 1954. During the First Indochina War, plantation environments served as a key military battleground. In the fighting that took place immediately after the end of World War II, many plantation workers, encouraged by the anticolonial Việt Minh, attacked the rubber trees as symbols of hated colonial-era abuse. Slogans placing the culpability of worker suffering on trees show how plantation workers often treated the trees themselves as enemies. Despite their colonial origins, plantation environments were important material and symbolic landscapes for those seeking to build postcolonial Vietnamese nations. French planters claimed to struggle heroically against nature, Vietnamese workers saw themselves as struggling against both nature and human exploitation, and anticolonial activists articulated struggles against imperial power structures. Industrial agriculture such as rubber was vital to nation-building projects, and by the early 1950s, Vietnamese planners began to envision a time when plantations would form a part of a national economy.

Territoriality, Sovereignty, and the State

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-45
Author(s):  
Shibashis Chatterjee
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
The State ◽  
Working Out

The chapter explains the chosen conceptual categories, clarifies the tropes of their deployment, and stitches together the two dual narratives of India’s domestic and external imaginations. The author goes on to show that India’s transforming models of nation building have evolved within the framework of sovereign territoriality. He also makes the argument that while the domestic/international divide is inappropriate to make sense of India’s negotiations in South Asia, it is equally facile to see the region as an extension of India’s domestic contests. This chapter shows how India has framed its project and negotiated with others in its neighbourhood. However, the fact that the lines of peoplehood and territorial nationalism never coincided in South Asia meant that there will always be tension in working out national projects predicated upon sovereignty. These states embarked on different projects of difference that were crucial to the making of modern South Asia.

Americans in An Giang: Nation Building and the Particularities of Place in the Mekong Delta, 1966––1973

2009 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 139-172 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Biggs
Keyword(s):  
Vietnam War ◽  
Mekong Delta ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Building Projects ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
History Of ◽  
Building Activities ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
American Nation

In recent years, American diplomatic and military historians have begun to reexamine Cold War-era nation-building efforts in Vietnam and elsewhere. This essay explores the contested and contingent meanings of some US-sponsored nation-building programs established in the Republic of Vietnam during the 1960s. By focusing on nation-building activities in the Mekong Delta province of An Giang during the peak years of the Vietnam War, this essay suggests how historians may begin to assess these indirect effects of the war within a more nuanced, local Vietnamese historical framework. Such a history necessarily focuses on particular places and on the specific social and environmental conditions that shaped the course and outcome of nation-building projects undertaken there. Despite the universalist aspirations inherent in nation building, its effects varied widely from one place to another. In assessing the course and fate of these nation-building initiatives, this essay draws from the varied archival documents produced and collected by American provincial advisors during their stays in An Giang. A close reading of these reports reveals why the history of American nation-building programs in the Republic of Vietnam cannot be explained solely by reference to ideologies of modernization and counterinsurgency.

scholarly journals Old homes and new homelands: imagining the nation and remembering expulsion in the wake of the Mali Federation's collapse

Africa ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 88 (3) ◽  
pp. 469-491 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie Rodet ◽  
Brandon County
Keyword(s):  
Nation Building ◽  
Central Place ◽  
Internal Boundary ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Building Projects ◽  
Railway Workers ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Political Communities ◽  
International Border ◽  
Insight Into

AbstractThis article examines concepts of ‘home’ and ‘abroad’ for migrants and citizens in the twilight of empire. It focuses on the ‘cheminots refoulés’, railway workers with origins in the former French Sudan (today's Republic of Mali) who were expelled from Senegal shortly after both territories declared independence, and other ‘Sudanese’ settled in Senegal, sometimes for several generations. Using newly available archives in France, Mali and Senegal, and interviews with formercheminotsand ‘Sudanese migrants’ on both sides of the border, this article seeks to historicize memories of autochthony and allochthony that have been constructed and contested in postcolonial nation-building projects. The Mali Federation carried the lingering memory of federalist political projects, but it proved untenable only months after the Federation's June 1960 independence from France. When member states declared independence from each other, the internal boundary between Senegal and the Sudanese Republic became an international border between Senegal and the Republic of Mali. In the wake of the collapse, politicians in Bamako and Dakar clamoured to redefine the ‘nation’ and its ‘nationals’ through selective remembering. Thousands ofcheminotsand ‘Sudanese migrants’ who had moved to Senegal from Sudan years (or decades) earlier were suddenly labelled ‘foreigners’ and ‘expatriates’ and faced two governments eager to see them ‘return’ to a hastily proclaimed nation state. This ‘repatriation’ allowed Republic of Mali officials to ‘perform the nation’ by (re)integrating and (re)membering the migrants in a nascent ‘homeland’. But, having circulated between Senegal and Sudan/Mali for decades, ‘Sudanese migrants’ in both states retained and invoked memories of older political communities, upsetting new national priorities. The loss of the Mali Federation raises questions about local, national and international citizenship and movement in mid-century West Africa. Examining the histories invoked to imagine postcolonial political communities, this article offers an insight into the role that memory has played in constructing and contesting the nation's central place in migration histories within Africa and beyond.

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