The fiction of nationalism: Newroz TV representations of Kurdish nationalism

2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-179
Author(s):  
Ahmad Mohammadpur ◽  
Norbert Otto Ross ◽  
Nariman Mohammadi
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
Media Representations ◽  
Imagined Communities ◽  
Seminal Work ◽  
Political Groups ◽  
Specific Identity

Benedict Anderson’s seminal work on imagined communities has opened a multitude of explorations in how mass media construct and represent social identities in relation to nationalism. Depicting and at the same time creating social groups, media representations are permeated by questions of inclusion and exclusion. As a result, it is important to study media representations of social identities as strategic ideologies that debilitate or stabilize, support or condemn a specific identity discourse. In this study, we explore how Kurdish identity has been represented in Newroz TV, one of the most popular satellite TV channels among Iranian Kurds. Findings show that Kurdish nationalism is first defined in opposition to Persian, Arabic (as in Syria and Iraq) and Turkish national identity. However, the resulting images are permeated by partisan ideological divisions among Kurdish political groups.

Sport and National Identity

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dilwyn Porter
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Cultural Practice ◽  
National Identities ◽  
Imagined Communities ◽  
Nation States ◽  
The Mass Media ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter explores the role of sport in the construction of national identity. It focuses initially on sport as a cultural practice possessing the demonstrable capacity to generate events and experiences through which imagined communities are made real. The governments of nation-states or other political agencies might intervene directly in this process, using sport as a form of propaganda to achieve this effect. More often, however, the relationship between sport and national identity is reproduced in everyday life, flagged daily by the mass media as an expression of banal nationalism. Particular attention is given to the role of sports that are indigenous to particular nations and also to sports engaged in competitively between nations. These have contributed in different ways to the making of national identities.

Bottom-up nationalism and discrimination on social media: An analysis of the citizenship debate about refugees in Turkey

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (5) ◽  
pp. 712-730
Author(s):  
Çiğdem Bozdağ
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
Media Representations ◽  
Imagined Communities ◽  
Syrian Refugees ◽  
Citizenship Rights ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Communication Space ◽  
Refugee Issues

This study analyzes social media representations of refugees in Turkey and discusses their role in shaping public opinion. The influx of millions of Syrian refugees in Turkey has created heated debates about their presence and future in the country. One of these debates was triggered by President Erdoğan’s statement that Turkey would issue citizenship rights to Syrians in July 2016. Due to a lack of critical voices about refugee issues in Turkey’s mass media sphere, social media has become a key platform for citizens to voice their opinions. Through a discourse analysis of tweets about the issue of refugees’ citizenship, I will map different perceptions of refugees in Turkey. I argue that despite contesting discourses about Syrians, the debate on social media reinforces nationalism and an ethnocentric understanding of citizenship in Turkey. As the number of refugees and migrants increases rapidly worldwide, they become the new ‘others’ of national imagined communities. Social media becomes a key communication space where the nation is discursively constructed in a bottom-up manner through manifestations of ‘us’ and ‘them’. The analysis shows that social media contributes to trivialization and normalization of discrimination and hatred against Syrian refugees through disseminating overt discourses of ‘Othering’. Social media also enables more covert forms of discrimination through ‘rationalized’ arguments that are used to justify discrimination through the basis of false/non-verified information. Thus, Twitter becomes a space for critical, bottom-up, yet nationalistic and discriminatory statements about refugees.

scholarly journals “There'll Always Be an England”: Representations of Colonial Wars and Immigration, 1948–1968

2001 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 557-584 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wendy Webster
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Racial Difference ◽  
Media Representations ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Common Theme ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
Daily Mail ◽  
National Community ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
The 1950S

“In Malaya,” theDaily Mailnoted in 1953, “three and a half years of danger have given the planters time to convert their previously pleasant homes into miniature fortresses, with sandbag parapets, wire entanglements, and searchlights.” The image of the home as fortress and a juxtaposition of the domestic with menace and terror were central to British media representations of colonial wars in Malaya and Kenya in the 1950s. The repertoire of imagery deployed in theDaily Mailfor the “miniature fortress” in Malaya was extended to Kenya, where the newspaper noted wire over domestic windows, guns beside wine glasses, the charming hostess in her black silk dress with “an automatic pistol hanging at her hip.” Such images of English domesticity threatened by an alien other were also central to immigration discourse in the 1950s and 1960s. In the context of the decline of British colonial rule after 1945, representations of the empire and its legacy—resistance to colonial rule in empire and “immigrants” in the metropolis—increasingly converged on a common theme: the violation of domestic sanctuaries.Colonial wars of the late 1940s and 1950s have received little attention in literatures on national identity in early postwar Britain, but the articulation of racial difference through immigration discourse, and its significance in redefining the postimperial British national community has been widely recognized. As Chris Waters has suggested in his work on discourses of race and nation between 1947 and 1963, these years saw questions of race become central to questions of national belonging.

The American Ghetto, Gangster, and Respect on the Streets of Copenhagen: Media(tion)s between Structure and Street Culture

2021 ◽  
pp. 089124162110569
Author(s):  
Hakan Kalkan
Keyword(s):  
Mass Media ◽  
Cultural Factors ◽  
Media Representations ◽  
Structural Factors ◽  
Perceived Similarity ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Street Culture ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Relationship

“Street culture” is often considered a response to structural factors. However, the relationship between culture and structure has rarely been empirically analyzed. This article analyzes the role of three media representations of American street culture and gangsters—two films and the music of a rap artist—in the street culture of a disadvantaged part of Copenhagen. Based on years of ethnographic fieldwork, this article demonstrates that these media representations are highly valuable to and influential among young men because of their perceived similarity between their intersectional structural positions and those represented in the media. Thus, the article illuminates the interaction between structural and cultural factors in street culture. It further offers a local explanation of the scarcely studied phenomenon of the influence of mass media on street culture, and a novel, media-based, local explanation of global similarities in different street cultures.

Counter-hegemony in today's Belarus: dissident symbols and the mythological figure of Miron Vitebskii

2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (5) ◽  
pp. 713-730
Author(s):  
Anastasiya Astapova
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
Political Development ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Civil State ◽  
Multiple Functions

Tackling the role of state symbols in negotiating national identity and political development, this research focuses on Belarus where the alternative white-red-white flag became instrumental in protests against the dominant political discourse. Since 1995, oppositional mass media have been reporting about cases of this tricolor being erected in hard-to-reach and/or politically sensitive places. These actions were mainly attributed to some “Miron,” whose identity remained concealed and served as a simulacrum of a national superhero in non-conformist discourse. The image of Miron immediately acquired multiple functions: condemning the Soviet colonial past, struggling for the European future, and creating a nation-state rather than the Russian-speaking civil-state of Belarus. Yet, first and foremost, Miron became a means for contesting the authority of the president who has been in power since 1994. Concentrating on the methods employed for the construction of the counter-hegemonic fakelore project of Miron and its aims, this article explores the vernacular response to its creation.

scholarly journals Negotiating Egyptian Nationalism: Militant Islamist Confrontations with the State and the Fragmentation of Political Authority

2011 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-44
Author(s):  
Catherine Musekamp
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
Authoritarian Regimes ◽  
The State ◽  
Coup D'etat ◽  
State Institutions ◽  
State Security ◽  
Political Groups

Since Egypt’s 1952 Free Officer coup d’état, Egypt has been governed by authoritarian regimes and nationalism has served as the central ideological basis for political authority. This paper explores the period from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, when militant Islamist opposition toward the Sadat and Mubarak regimes was one of the most significant threats to state security and one of the biggest challenges to the ruling regimes’ hegemony over political authority. This paper argues that the negotiation of national identity was crucial to the Egyptian state’s confrontation with militant Islamist groups during the late Sadat presidency and the Mubarak era to the 1990s; however, the state’s endorsement of an “Islamized” Egyptian nationalism was co-opted by various state institutions and competing political groups, leading to a fragmentation of political authority.

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