Interrogating the Cultural Production of Mexico

2020 ◽  
pp. 48-57
Author(s):  
Brian M. Napoletano
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Art History ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
The West ◽  
Tourist Town ◽  
Mexican State ◽  
Cultural Power ◽  
Del Rio ◽  
Lazaro Cardenas

As part of a deconstruction of national identity, Jennifer Jolly, in her Creating Pátzcuaro, Creating Mexico: Art, Tourism, and Nation Building under Lázaro Cárdenas, analyzes the tourist town of Pátzcuaro in the west-central Mexican state of Michoacán as a microcosm of cultural power in which tourism, art, history, and ethnicity were woven together under the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas del Río (1934–40).

scholarly journals ‘Art is my language’: Afghan cultural production challenging Islamophobic stereotypes

2019 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-129
Author(s):  
Bilquis Ghani ◽  
Lucy Fiske
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Asylum Seekers ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
September 11 ◽  
Open Spaces ◽  
The West ◽  
Popular Imagination ◽  
Afghan Women ◽  
In Transit

Afghans and Afghanistan have, since September 11, risen to prominence in Western popular imagination as a land of tradition, tribalism and violence. Afghan women are assumed to be silent, submissive, and terrorised by Afghan men, who are seen as violent patriarchs driven by an uncompromising mediaeval religion. These Islamophobic tropes also inform perceptions of Afghans seeking asylum. In transit, identities are further reduced; asylum seekers lose even a national identity and become a Muslim threat – criminals, terrorists or invaders. These narrative frames permeate political discourse, media, and reports of non-governmental organisations (seeking donor funds to ‘save’ Afghan women). Drawing on fieldwork in Afghanistan and Indonesia, this article looks at how Afghans in Kabul and Indonesia are using art and other forms of cultural production to challenge over-simplified hegemonic narratives in the West, to open spaces for dialogue and expression within their own communities, and to offer a more nuanced account of their own identities.

Aesthetic Dilemmas of Adaptation and the Politics of Subjectivity: Animating the Chinese ClassicJourney to the West

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chengcheng You
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Modern China ◽  
Historical Time ◽  
The West ◽  
The Real ◽  
Quest For Meaning ◽  
National Allegory ◽  
Canonical Text ◽  
The Fantastic ◽  
Monkey King

This article reviews four major Chinese animated adaptations based on the classic Journey to the West. It shows how these adaptations, spanning four historical phases of modern China, encapsulate changes in Chinese national identity. Close readings underpin a developmental narrative about how Chinese animated adaptations of this canonical text strive to negotiate the multimodal expressions of homegrown folklore traditions, technical influences of western animation, and domestic political situations across time. This process has identified aesthetic dilemmas around adaptations that oscillate between national allegory and individual destiny, verisimilitude and the fantastic quest for meaning. In particular, the subjectivisation of Monkey King on the screen, embodying the transition from primitivistic impulse, youthful idealism and mature practicality up to responsible stewardship, presents how an iconic national figure encapsulates the real historical time of China.

Enemies within, Enemies without: the Ideology of a Conservative West-Russianist Newspaper During World War I (1914–1915)

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-103
Author(s):  
Aliaksandr Bystryk
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Russian Empire ◽  
Russian Society ◽  
World War ◽  
The West ◽  
The North ◽  
National Solidarity ◽  
North Western

Abstract This paper deals with the topic of conservative West-Russianist ideology and propaganda during World War I. The author analyzes the most prominent newspaper of the movement at the time – Severo-Zapadnaia Zhizn (The North-Western Life). The discourse of the newspaper is analyzed from the perspective of Belarusian nation-building, as well as from the perspective of Russian nationalism in the borderlands. The author explores the ways in which the creators of the periodical tried to use the rise of the Russian patriotic feelings to their advantage. Appealing to the heightened sense of national solidarity which took over parts of Russian society, the periodical tried to attack, delegitimize and discredit its ideological and political opponents. Besides the obvious external enemy – Germans, Severo-Zapadnaia Zhizn condemned socialists, pacifists, Jews, borderland Poles, Belarusian and Ukrainian national activists, Russian progressives and others, accusing them of disloyalty, lack of patriotism and sometimes even treason. Using nationalist loyalist rhetoric, the West-Russianist newspaper urged the imperial government to act more decisively in its campaign to end ‘alien domination’ in Russian Empire, and specifically to create conditions for domination of ‘native Russian element’ – meaning Belarusian peasantry, in the Belarusian provinces of the empire.

Architecture, Modernism and Nation-Building in Kemalist Turkey

1994 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 37-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sibel Bozdoğan
Keyword(s):  
Nation Building ◽  
Critical Force ◽  
Modern Architecture ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
The West ◽  
Industrial City ◽  
The Social ◽  
Great Transformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 19Th Century

Deeply rooted in “the great transformation” brought about by capitalism, industrialization and urban life, the history of modern architecture in the West is intricately intertwined with the rise of the bourgeoisie. Modernism in architecture, before anything else, is a reaction to the social and environmental ills of the industrial city, and to the bourgeois aesthetic of the 19th century. It emerged first as a series of critical, utopian and radical movements in the first decades of the twentieth century, eventually consolidating itself into an architectural establishment by the 1930s. The dissemination of the so-called “modern movement” outside Europe coincides with the eclipse of the plurality and critical force of early modernist currents and their reduction to a unified, formalist and doctrinaire position.

Environmental Violence, Water Rights, and (Un) Due Process in Northwestern Mexico

2015 ◽  
Vol 42 (5) ◽  
pp. 27-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucero Radonic
Keyword(s):  
Due Process ◽  
Capital City ◽  
Past Century ◽  
Production Of Space ◽  
Mexican State ◽  
Development Plans ◽  
Northwestern Mexico ◽  
Rights Discourse ◽  
Del Rio ◽  
Human Rights Discourse

Water-related struggles worldwide may not involve armed conflict or direct bodily harm, but they are still violent in nature. Over the past century the Yaqui Tribe has continually contested water development plans and challenged distribution schemes, seeking to regain control over its livelihoods and the production of space in its ancestral homeland. In the Mexican state of Sonora we are currently witnessing a new chapter of the violent saga around water access in the Yaqui River valley. In fighting the proposed construction of the Independencia Aqueduct, intended to transfer water from the Yaqui River to the capital city of Hermosillo, the tribe’s struggles for recognition as a rightful resource holder have intensified. Paradoxically, dispossession is justified through an international human rights discourse and the relentless interrogation of indigenous authenticity aimed at delegitimizing Yaqui traditional resource claims.Las luchas relacionadas con el agua en todo el mundo no necesariamente conllevan conflicto armado o daño físico directo, pero todavía son violentas por naturaleza. Durante el ultimo siglo la tribu yaqui han impugnado continuamente los planes de desarrollo del agua y cuestionado los programas de distribución, con el propósito de recobrar el control sobre sus medios de subsistencia y la producción del espacio en su tierra ancestral. En el estado mexicano de Sonora estamos siendo testigos de un nuevo capítulo en la saga violenta en torno al acceso al agua en el Valle del Río Yaqui. Con la batalla contra el proyecto de construcción del Acueducto Independencia— diseñado para transportar agua del Río Yaqui a la ciudad capital de Hermosillo—las luchas de la tribu por el reconocimiento como dueños legítimos del recurso se han intensificado. Paradójicamente, el despojo se justifica por medio de un discurso de derechos humanos internacionales y el cuestionamiento implacable de la autenticidad indígena con el propósito de deslegitimar los reclamos yaquis sobre los recursos.

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.

For Science and Country: History Writing, Nation Building, and National Embeddedness in Third Republic France, 1870–1914

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Guillaume Lancereau
Keyword(s):  
Nation Building ◽  
Third Republic ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
History Writing ◽  
The West ◽  
Academic Competition ◽  
The Past ◽  
Methodological Nationalism ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Territorial Claims

This article examines late nineteenth and early twentieth-century historiographical practices and convictions in Third Republic France. It shifts the focus from the question of whether French academic historians were nationalists to the issue of how they were nationalists. If republican academic historians took a critical stance on nationalist distortions of the past, they nevertheless associated the teaching of history with patriotism and opposed historiographical “pan-Germanism” in ways favorable to French cultural and territorial claims. Meanwhile, the growing internationalization of the field stimulated scholarly competition across the West and spurred reflections about nationals’ epistemological privilege over national histories, methodological nationalism, and the invention of national historiographical traditions. Uncovering the anxieties of continual debate with foreign historians and the nationalist right wing, this article offers a prehistory of present-day dilemmas over global, national, and nationalist histories in an international field characterized by structural inequalities and academic competition.

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