Memory, National Identity Formation, and (Neo)Colonialism in Hannah Khalil’s A Museum in Baghdad

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 304-319
Author(s):  
Majeed Mohammed Midhin ◽  
David Clare ◽  
Noor Aziz Abed
Keyword(s):  
Identity Formation ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Community Building ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Shared Experiences ◽  
Time Periods ◽  
Gertrude Bell ◽  
National Identity Formation ◽  
Future Date

Abstract According to Ernest Renan, a nation is formed by its collective memory; it is a country’s shared experiences which enable it to become (in Benedict Anderson’s much later coinage) an “imagined community.” Building on these ideas, commentators such as Kavita Singh and Lianne McTavish et al. have shown how museums play a key role in helping nations to form an identity and understand their past. However, as these critics and those from other disciplines (including postcolonial studies) have noted, museums can also reflect and reinforce the unequal power dynamics between nations which result from colonialism and neocolonialism. This article demonstrates that these ideas are directly relevant to the 2019 play A Museum in Baghdad by the Palestinian-Irish playwright Hannah Khalil. This play is set in the Museum of Iraq in three different time periods: “Then (1926), Now (2006), and Later” (an unspecified future date) (3). Khalil uses specific characters – most notably, Gertrude Bell during the “Then” sections, the Iraqi archaeologists Ghalia and Layla during the “Now” sections, and a “timeless” character called Nasiya who appears across the time periods – to question the degree to which the museum is perpetuating Western views of Iraq.

War and Memory in the Napoleonic Wars

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Identity Formation ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
The Arts ◽  
National Memory ◽  
Occupied Territories ◽  
Ultimate Failure ◽  
National Identity Formation

The Napoleonic Wars took place from 1802 to 1815 and fundamentally altered the political, social, cultural, and military structures of Europe and, to a lesser extent, the rest of the world. This created a collective memory that influenced, and continues to influence, the modern world in a myriad of ways. The conflicts were a continuation of the French Revolutionary Wars, which bear their own collective and historical memory. They involved nearly every power in Europe, affecting them each to varying degrees. Political and legal systems changed, both as a result of Revolutionary ideals and the introduction of the Code Napoléon. Nationalism and national identity formation accelerated during the period, often benefiting from opposition to Napoleon or the destruction of existing systems wrought by the Revolutionary spirit that French armies brought to occupied territories, spurring the creation of national memory wherever they appeared. Napoleon and his power, undeniable genius, success, and ultimate failure have proven an irresistible and enduring figure of autobiographical and biographical memory in realms as diverse as fiction, wargaming, and history, both popular and academic. The methods of his armies became the paradigm for contemporary militaries, and their legacy continues to form the bedrock of collective, institutional, and popular memory. The arts contain their own cultural memory of Napoleon, many of which remain current. Collectively, the various aspects of the cultural and historical memory of the Napoleonic Wars have become a part of many important areas of history and historiography. As a result, works on Napoleon, his empire, and the Napoleonic Wars are voluminous and grow significantly every year.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alistair Fox
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Essential Role ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Financial Returns ◽  
Self Recognition ◽  
International Audience ◽  
National Identity Formation

The conclusion reaffirms the essential role played by cinema generally, and the coming-of-age genre in particular, in the process of national identity formation, because of its effectiveness in facilitating self-recognition and self-experience through a process of triangulation made possible, for the most part, by a dialogue with some of the nation’s most iconic works of literature. This section concludes by point out the danger posed, however, by an observable trend toward generic standardization in New Zealand films motivated by a desire to appeal to an international audience out of consideration for the financial returns expected by funding bodies under current regimes.

scholarly journals State, identity, and the politics of music: Eurovision and nation-building in Azerbaijan

2012 ◽  
Vol 40 (6) ◽  
pp. 833-851 ◽  
Author(s):  
Murad Ismayilov
Keyword(s):  
Identity Formation ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
State Identity ◽  
Cultural Encounters ◽  
Cultural Elements ◽  
Eurovision Song Contest ◽  
Cultural Domain ◽  
National Identity Formation

Albeit often — and fairly — degraded in the world of high culture as a populist and politicized representation of music, the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) — by sheer virtue of the populist and politicized nature of its essence — stands among the most consequential cultural encounters to which post-independence Azerbaijan has been exposed, in that the extent to which Baku's victory in the ESC-2011 — and the further developments this victory has generated — can potentially impact on, and contribute to, the very process of nation-building and national identity formation, with which this post-Soviet Muslim-majority country is currently struggling, is unparalleled by any of the state's earlier encounters of the kind. This paper focuses on, and examines, four intimately related ways in which the ESC and Azerbaijan's successful involvement with the latter worked to interfere with the country's nation-building: as a dubious factor in the evolution of the Western sense of self among Azerbaijanis; as a unifying force within the structure of the country's rapidly maturing civil society; as a medium working to open up a channel through which Western popular cultural elements could interfere with the evolving dynamics of, and work to globalize, indeed de-endogenize, indigenous Azerbaijani culture, on one hand, and unify the discursive realm within which the country's cultural domain is to further evolve, on the other; and, finally, as an important element serving to decouple the evolving processes within the country's cultural domain from the unfolding dynamics of conflict settlement and hence conducive to the diversification of public discourse in Azerbaijan.

scholarly journals National Identity: Formation and Realisation Through Poetry

wisdom ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 146-161
Author(s):  
Tetiana URYS ◽  
Tetiana KOZAK ◽  
Svitlana BARABASH
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
National Culture ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
Effective Factor ◽  
Functional Aspects ◽  
Creative Personality ◽  
Important Means ◽  
The Individual ◽  
National Identity Formation

National culture, especially literature, contains invaluable nation-building potential and is an effective factor in influencing the development of the national identity of the individual and the ethnic group as a whole. In the process of forming literary works, the author’s consciousness and subconscious play an im­portant role, so they are not only one of the best ways of expressing a creative personality and a form of its reaction to events occurring in the outside world, but also one of the most important means of forming the national identity of the recipients. Therefore, such a literary work contains a modus of national identity. The main content of this concept in the literature is revealed in the article. Its theoretical components and their functional aspects in the text are defined and analysed. The modus of national identity is formulated as a way of realising the identity of one with his nation through certain aesthetic elements and structures at all levels of literary work as an artistic system. Such element-dominants are motives, artistic imagery, lyrical character as the main expression of the author’s thoughts, as well as archetypes, symbols and place names.

Lexicography, discourse and power

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 601-629
Author(s):  
Wenge Chen
Keyword(s):  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
The Body ◽  
Subject Position ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Power And Resistance ◽  
Ideological Struggle ◽  
Cultural Power ◽  
A Site ◽  
International English

Abstract This paper conceptualizes dictionary bilingualization as a recontextualizing practice and explores how ideology and power play out in the recontextualization of lexicographic discourse across languages and cultures to result in the transformation of meaning. It first proposes viewing the (bilingualized) dictionary as discourse and emphasizes bilingual lexicography as a site of an asymmetrical linguistic and cultural power dynamics. The paper then argues that a synergy of critical discourse analysis and postcolonial studies can reveal the inter-cultural ideological struggle implicit in the bilingualizing lexicographic practice. The body of the study is devoted to the analysis of those shifts taking place in the entries, definition, illustrative examples and pragmatic labels in a bilingualized English-Chinese dictionary, which, when viewed cumulatively, significantly reshape the ideological positioning of the dictionary. The paper discusses the implications for critical lexicographic studies and for research into the interplay between power and resistance between dominating and dominated cultures. It concludes that Periphery English dictionary compilers are able to negotiate the different subjectivities and ideologies inherent in dictionary making and to adopt a subject position favorable to their empowerment in the international English lexicography, although such resistance is far from capable of restructuring the order of lexicography.

Hanns Eisler and Faust in the German Democratic Republic

2019 ◽  
pp. 202-220
Author(s):  
Joy H. Calico
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
German Democratic Republic ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
The United States ◽  
East Berlin ◽  
Soviet Occupation ◽  
East German ◽  
National Identity Formation ◽  
Soviet Occupation Zone

When Austrian composer and committed Marxist Hanns Eisler was forced out of the United States in 1948, he returned to Vienna and hoped to settle there. Instead, a commission for Goethe’s bicentennial celebration the following year drew him to East Berlin and the SBZ (Soviet Occupation Zone), soon to be the German Democratic Republic (GDR, or East Germany), and set him on the path to be that country’s most prominent composer. This chapter examines the piece Eisler wrote for that commission, Rhapsodie für großes Orchester (Rhapsody for large orchestra) (1949), which set text from Goethe’s Faust II, as well as his libretto for a proposed opera entitled Johann Faustus. East German reception of these pieces reveals the centrality of Goethe’s Faust for national identity formation in the fledgling GDR.

NELIDA FUCCARO, The Other Kurds: Yazidis in Colonial Iraq, Library of Modern Middle East Studies, vol. 14 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1999). Pp. 246. $55 cloth.

2001 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 463-465
Author(s):  
SARAH SHIELDS
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
The Other ◽  
Ongoing Debate ◽  
British Mandate ◽  
Mandatory Rule ◽  
Collective Self ◽  
Middle East Studies ◽  
National Identity Formation

The Other Kurds: Yazidis in Colonial Iraq offers an ambitious effort to reinterpret communal identities in Iraq during the British Mandate. Although this work focuses explicitly on Yazidis, Fuccaro engages the ongoing debate about the process of group identity formation in non-national states. In this monograph, Fuccaro argues that changing Yazidi communal identities are constructed within a broader context of government centralization, national identity formation, and British Mandatory rule. She shows that this context is crucial in understanding the reconstruction of Yazidi collective self-definitions.

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