Beijing and Beyond

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Weijie Song
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Historical Consciousness ◽  
Urban Literature ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Collective Memories ◽  
Globalizing World ◽  
Japanese Colonial ◽  
Literary Topography ◽  
Modern Nation State

This chapter situates Beijing in a larger context of modern Chinese urban literature, and charts the trajectories of affective mapping of major cities in the Chinese-speaking world against the great backdrop of the downfall of the (Manchu) Empire, the rise of modern nation-state, the 1949 great divide, and the formation of Cold war and globalizing world. The main issues are modern urban awareness, historical consciousness, individual/collective memories, and nationalist perceptions regarding the old and new capital, Beijing; the semicolonial metropolis and socialist Shanghai and its remnants; the traumatized and aloof Nanjing; the abandoned capital, Xi’an; Taipei under Japanese colonial rule and the subsequent Nationalist Party’s dominance; and Hong Kong from a British Crown Colony to a Special Administrative Region of China. Urban experiences, emotional vicissitudes, and literary topography continue to provide illustrating and illuminating methods of mapping Sinophone cities.

The New Knight: The French Far Right’s View of the Middle Ages

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-49
Author(s):  
Stéphane François
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
National Socialism ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Political Model ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Modern Nation State ◽  
The Middle Ages

The far right has always taken an interest in the Middle Ages. For the French revolutionary far right, which shares an ideological matrix influenced by Julius Evola, fascination with the Middle Ages revolves around the image of the Holy Germanic Roman Empire as a political model for Europe opposed to the modern nation-state. The romantic image of the medieval knight also offers a watered-down way to celebrate and legitimize violence without having to allude to a taboo National Socialism. This obsession with the Middle Ages contrasts with the reality that these revolutionary far-right movements were rather pro-Arab during the Cold War decades. This shift reveals the transformation of their thinking and the new dominance of the Identitarian notion of ethnic withdrawal, with the knight as the symbol of a pure racial warrior defending his society against Muslim invasion.

Living with a Postcolonial Conundrum: Yi Yŏngil and Korean Film Historiography

2019 ◽  
Vol 78 (03) ◽  
pp. 601-620
Author(s):  
Hieyoon Kim
Keyword(s):  
Western Society ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Korean Cinema ◽  
Seminal Work ◽  
Counter Narrative ◽  
Globalizing World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Korean Film ◽  
Complete History ◽  
Modern Nation State

Since its publication, Yi Yŏngil's Complete history of Korean cinema (1969) has remained a seminal work of film historiography. A critical rereading of the work is required, however, to capture the paradoxes of postcolonial historiography that are created by the spatial-temporal orders of modernity in a decolonizing, non-Western society. By examining Yi's creative use of historical documentation, such as oral testimonies of filmmakers, this article considers how he offers a counter-narrative against colonialist historiography that denies Korea's agency to transform itself into a modern nation-state without Japanese annexation. However, despite his decolonizing endeavor, his work cannot fully eradicate the colonial effects that inevitably shape postcolonial subjectivity in the globalizing world. In reassessing the possibilities and predicaments of his work, this article reveals Yi's fundamental conundrum as a postcolonial writer living with the effects of colonialism, ultimately challenging the imagination of the postcolonial experience as an uninterrupted struggle to establish an autonomous nation.

scholarly journals A Consciousness of Streets: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Partition

2016 ◽  
pp. 50
Author(s):  
Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cold War ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Imagined Community ◽  
Political Modernity ◽  
Border Politics ◽  
Benedict Anderson ◽  
Modern Nation State

This largely speculative review historicises the current era of ‘Springs’ through the lens of partition. I offer a critique of political modernity and the modern nation-state through analysis of the turn to border politics in colonial conquests, decolonisation efforts, Cold War politics and other instances of international relations across the long twentieth century. The pervasiveness of such plans across late modernity marks the beginning of the end of the nation as a single, reifiable, imaginable structure. With Ireland as exemplar, I posit national dividedness —a generally underestimated paradigm shaping our time— as spurring a decline in state authority and a new, radical “consciousness of streets.” Together with other defining political structures, it participates in transforming the postmodern map of nation into a conflicted network, an imagined community as metropolitan circuit. I take recourse to theories of partition and nation and work by geographers, historians and postcolonial theorists including Joseph Cleary, Benedict Anderson, Monica Duffy Toft, Étienne Balibar and Michel Foucault.

Commemorating Raffles: The creation of an imperial icon in colonial Singapore

2019 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 579-598
Author(s):  
Timothy P. Barnard
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Core Element ◽  
Imperial History ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Trade Port ◽  
Modern Nation State

While Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles led the expedition that founded colonial Singapore in 1819 and conceptualised many of the early institutions that developed the trade port, it was the depiction and commemoration of his time in the region that made him an icon of imperial mythology. This was part of a process in which admiration of his name and exploits were exalted, ultimately representing a core element in the Victorian mentality, the need to create heroes to glorify the British Empire. This article will survey and analyse how the commemoration of Raffles in the first 75 years of colonial rule, through the commissioning of statues and the attachment of his name to establishments and institutions, solidified and justified a British presence in the region and larger imperial history, which continues to echo in the modern nation-state of Singapore and its history.

From 'Sovereignty as Responsibility' to the 'Responsibility to Protect'

2010 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 353-370 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francis Deng
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Responsibility To Protect ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Conflict Prevention ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Modern Nation State

AbstractThis essay examines the origins and evolution of the concepts of 'sovereignty as responsibility' and the 'responsibility to protect'. In particular, it considers the role and duty of states and how ideas of sovereignty have evolved since the modern nation-state was conceived by the European Treaty of Westphalia of 1648. It then examines the responsibility of states towards their own citizens and traces the development of the R2P norm in Africa as it has related to conflict prevention, management, and resolution since the end of the Cold War. The essay further considers the responsibilities of national democratic governments in Africa and beyond. Recent developments that have widened the scope and helped the acceptance and application of the concept of 'sovereignty as responsibility' are discussed, and the essay concludes with an examination of the accountability and enforcement challenges faced by R2P.

Minorities in the Contemporary Egyptian Novel

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Youssef
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
First Century ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Robust Analysis ◽  
Specific Approach ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Context Specific ◽  
Historical Moment

This book examines questions of identity, nationalism, and marginalization in the contemporary Egyptian novel from a postcolonial lens. Under colonial rule, the Egyptian novel invoked a sovereign nation-state by basking in its perceived unity. After independence, the novel professed disenchantment with state practices and unequal class and gender relations, without disrupting the nation’s imagined racial and ethno-religious homogeneity. This book identifies a trend in the twenty-first-century Egyptian novel that shatters this singular view, with the rise of a new consciousness that presents Egypt as fundamentally heterogeneous. Through a robust analysis of “new-consciousness” novels by authors like Idris ᶜAli, Bahaᵓ Tahir, Miral al-Tahawi, and Yusuf Zaydan, the author argues that this new consciousness does not only respond to predominant discourses of difference and practices of differentiation along the axes of race, ethno-religion, class, and gender by bringing the experiences of Nubian, Amazigh, Bedouin, Coptic, Jewish, and women minorities to the fore of Egypt’s literary imaginary, but also heralds the cacophony of voices that collectively cried for social justice from Tahrir Square in Egypt’s 2011-uprising. This study responds to the changing iconographic, semiotic, and formal features of the Egyptian novel. It fulfills the critical task of identifying an emergent novelistic genre and develops historically reflexive methodologies that interpret new-consciousness novels and their mediatory role in formalizing and articulating their historical moment. By adopting this context-specific approach to studying novelistic evolution, this book locates some of the strands that have been missing from the complex whole of Egypt’s culture and literary history.

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