National Identity

2021 ◽  
pp. 168-182
Author(s):  
Edgaras Klivis
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Social Construction ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Imagined Communities ◽  
Special Focus ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Jean Genet

This chapter aims at presenting the complex correlations between nationalism and modern theater with a special focus on performative construction of national identity. Whether seen as primordial essence or as a social construction national identity is grounded on public rituals and artistic practices (rather than rational ideological systems) which makes theatrical stage, along with print, museums, other media, central to understanding how imagined communities come into being and continue their existence into the global contemporary society. The chapter addresses the question of how the theatrical apparatus of bourgeois theater and staged representations in national theaters function in forming theatrical nationhood as well as concepts (postcolonialism), strategies (theatrical public sphere), artists (Jean Genet), and practices (interweaving performance cultures) that contest the dominant modes of performing national identity.

Exile and Political Activism: The Egyptian-Jewish Communists in Paris, 1950-59

1992 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-94
Author(s):  
Joel Beinin
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Social Construction ◽  
Ethnic Group ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Social Determinants ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
Imagined Communities ◽  
The Social ◽  
Classic Essay

Frederick Barth’s classic essay on the social construction of ethnic boundaries is one of the landmarks in the discrediting of the notion that culture and identity are essences inherent in racially and geographically distinct ethnic groups. In opposition to the exoticist es-sentialism of many anthropologists of his day, Barth argued for the social determination of the boundaries distinguishing one ethnic group from another. The current wave of postmodern textualism, with its emphasis on “imagined communities” (see Anderson) and the “invention of ethnicity” (see Sollors), extends the Barthian anti-essentialist project even further. There is much to be gained by acknowledging the constructed character of all categories of culture, politics, and knowledge, including identity and ethnicity. But many postmodern textualists have gone too far in the direction of regarding culture as a domain to be understood in relative isolation from social determinants, and some varieties of postmodernism have dismissed the relevance of ethnic and national identity altogether. Is there a way to assimilate the insights of poststructuralist social theory while avoiding these antimaterialist and ultimately Eurocentric excesses?

State contestations in constructions of 1Malaysia

2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 46-65
Author(s):  
Mary Varghese ◽  
Kamila Ghazali
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Prime Minister ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
The Public ◽  
Malaysian Population ◽  
Body Of Knowledge ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract This article seeks to contribute to the existing body of knowledge about the relationship between political discourse and national identity. 1Malaysia, introduced in 2009 by Malaysia’s then newly appointed 6th Prime Minister Najib Razak, was greeted with expectation and concern by various segments of the Malaysian population. For some, it signalled a new inclusiveness that was to change the discourse on belonging. For others, it raised concerns about changes to the status quo of ethnic issues. Given the varying responses of society to the concept of 1Malaysia, an examination of different texts through the critical paradigm of CDA provide useful insights into how the public sphere has attempted to construct this notion. Therefore, this paper critically examines the Prime Minister’s early speeches as well as relevant chapters of the socioeconomic agenda, the 10th Malaysia Plan, to identify the referential and predicational strategies employed in characterising 1Malaysia. The findings suggest a notion of unity that appears to address varying issues.

scholarly journals Ethnisierung als Ressource und Praxis

2000 ◽  
Vol 30 (120) ◽  
pp. 399-414 ◽  
Author(s):  
Albert Scherr
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Social Construction ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Collective Identities

Forms of doing ethnicity question an understanding of modern society as a society of free and equal individuals as well as the idea, that membership of social class determines social identities. What kind of a challenge the obversation of processes of ethnicitation represents in regard of the theories of contemporary society should discuss more precisely. In front of this background it is supposed to see ethnicitation as an indeterminate collective name for intern heterogene social practices of social construction of collective identities. It is argued, that even so processes of ethnicitation often indicate conflicts between majorities and minorities and the structural and manifested discrimination of the latter, it can not be sufficiently and exclusively explained in this way.

Martina L. Weisz, Jews and Muslims in Contemporary Spain: Redefining National Boundaries. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2019. 189 pp.

2021 ◽  
pp. 300-302
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
The Political ◽  
Special Focus ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
Comparative Framework ◽  
Collective Self ◽  
National Boundaries ◽  
Cultural Negotiations ◽  
Contemporary Spain ◽  
The Way

This chapter studies Martina L. Weisz's Jews and Muslims in Contemporary Spain: Redefining National Boundaries (2019). This book aims to analyze “the place granted to Jews and Muslims in the construction of contemporary Spanish national identity, with a special focus on the transition from an exclusive, homogeneous sense of collective self toward a more pluralistic, open and tolerant one, in a European context.” This narrative of progress, however, is challenged by the excellent information provided in the book itself, which shows how these processes have been filled with contradictions and deep ambivalence, both historically and in the present, and how exclusionary nationalism has not been left behind. One of the book's richest contributions is its Jewish/Muslim comparative framework, which, as the author argues, is not usually undertaken. Ultimately, this book contains an abundance of useful information and insights for all those interested in Spain's relationship with its Muslim and Jewish minorities, the political and cultural negotiations of multiculturalism in Spain, and the way these relationships are affected by international events and diplomatic concerns.

“Suddenly Everyone Started to Love Our Anthem, Our Flag”: Identity Construction, Crisis, and Change in (Almost) Sovereign Kosovo

2019 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 721-736
Author(s):  
Alissa Boguslaw
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Social Construction ◽  
Identity Construction ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Alternative Theory ◽  
Semiotic Analysis ◽  
Political Independence ◽  
National Symbols ◽  
The World

AbstractHow, amidst a crisis of sovereignty and identity, did once-rejected national symbols become meaningful to Kosovo’s Albanians? Having declared independence in 2008, a 2014 study found that less than one-third of Kosovo’s citizens identified with their newly adopted state symbols. As meanings are always shifting, depending on the contexts in which their forms appear and the actors involved, theories of social construction have focused on the representational aspects of meaning-making: the ways in which the forms stabilize (or destabilize) the constructs they depict. Instead of focusing on the representational—the determinable, measurable, and rational aspects, this article investigates the discursive mechanisms that mobilize meanings and configure contexts, extending Robin Wagner-Pacifici’s alternative theory of events. Through discourse and semiotic analysis, it tracks Kosovo’s new flag and anthem through the construction, crisis, and transformation of three social realities: political independence, national identity, and the world of international competitive judo, illuminating how changing meanings change, shifting contexts shift, and how to interpret actors’ fleeting emotions. In the Kosovo case, the construction is the crisis, as well as the change.

Constructing Freedom: Institutional Pathways to Changing the Gender Division of Labor

2014 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-99 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth K. Markovits ◽  
Susan Bickford
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Division Of Labor ◽  
The Public ◽  
Gender Division Of Labor ◽  
Women's Participation ◽  
The Social ◽  
Paid Labor ◽  
Democratic Freedom ◽  
The Public Sphere

In recent years, there has been renewed public discussion regarding the relationship between women’s equality and their traditional responsibility for carework. In this essay, we analyze the structures of choice and constraint that continue to produce the gender division of family labor and thus women's unequal participation in the public sphere. We conceptualize this as a problem of democratic freedom, one that requires building institutional pathways to sustain women's participation. Drawing on Nancy Hirschmann's arguments about processes of social construction and their relation to freedom, we argue that gender inequality in the public sphere means that women are unfree, in the sense that they are not participating as peers in the material and discursive processes of social construction that then help to shape their own desires and decisions. We use that framework to analyze the current landscape in which different subgroups of women make decisions about paid labor and care work. Our goal is to bring into view the way the social construction of desire interacts with the material context to underwrite inequality between women and men and across different groups of women. Gender equality and the project of democracy require participatory parity between women and men in the public sphere. We therefore turn in our last section to an effort to imagine how public policies could construct pathways that can help interrupt and undo the gender division of labor, and thus better support democratic freedom.

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