scholarly journals Heroic Masculinity in Post-Soviet Ukraine: Cossacks, UPA and “Svoboda”

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tetyana Bureychak ◽  
Olena Petrenko
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Hegemonic Masculinity ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Social Hierarchies ◽  
Common Trend ◽  
Historical Periods

<p class="EW-abstract"><strong>Abstract:</strong> Revisiting the national past and searching for new heroes has become a common trend in many post-communist states, including Ukraine. An aspect that commonly remains invisible when imagining national heroes is gender. Cossacks and fighters of the UPA (<em>Ukrains'ka povstans'ka armiia</em>; Ukrainian Insurgent Army) exemplify some of the most common historical models of Ukrainian heroes. Although the two warrior groups represent rather different historical periods and are treated as national heroes in different ways, this paper seeks to uncover commonalities between them, while pointing out their specificities. In particular, the analysis here looks at the mechanisms that mythologize and naturalize Cossacks and the UPA as an integral part of the current discourses on national identity and hegemonic masculinity. Separately, we focus on the role played by the far-right party, the All-Ukrainian Union “Freedom” (“Svoboda”) in these processes. The paper also addresses broader processes of renegotiation of the national historical narrative and promotion of its androcentric heroic version, which strengthen<strong> </strong>gender neotraditionalism and social hierarchies in post-Soviet Ukraine.</p><p class="EW-Keyword">Keywords: Masculinity, Cossacks, Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), Gender</p>

Ein Pilger auf Wanderschaft: Europäische Wirkungen von Adam Mickiewiczs romantischem Messianismus

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 328-342
Author(s):  
ALFRED GALL
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
European Context ◽  
Nationale Identität

Abstract Der Aufsatz geht der europäischen Wirkung von Adam Mickiewiczs Traktat Die Bücher des polnischen Volkes und der polnischen Pilgerschaft (1832) nach. Im Fokus stehen ein slowakischer – L’udovít Štúr – und ein mit der Ukraine verbundener Autor – Nikolaj (Mykola) Kostomarov –, die beide Mickiewiczs sakralisierende Geschichtsbetrachtung neu kontextualisieren. Untersucht wird die Konstruktion eines nationale Identität stiftenden Geschichtsnarrativs und die dabei angewandte Begrifflichkeit der Pilgerschaft.The paper examines the influence of Adam Mickiewicz’s treatise The Books and the Pilgrimage of the Polish Nation (1832) in a European context. The focus rests on a Slowak writer - L’udovít Štúr – and an author with an Ukrainian background – Nikolaj (Mykola) Kostomarov –, both of which are contextualizing Mickiewicz’s sacralisation of historiography in a new way. The article highlights the construction of national identity within a historical narrative and the applied vocabulary of pilgrimage.

Strindberg's A Dream Play: Postmodernist Visions on the Modernist Stage

1999 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 43-70
Author(s):  
Klaus van den Berg
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Spatial Relationships ◽  
Theatre History ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Architectural Styles ◽  
Theatre Theory ◽  
Theatre Historiography ◽  
Historical Periods

Since the 1980s, new approaches to theatre historiography, the study of what Sue-Ellen Case has called the “convergence of history and theory,” have begun to arise in a challenge to generally accepted principles of theatre history, such as the supremacy of independent facts, the autonomy of dramatic texts, and the hierarchy of text, performance, and culture. The French critic and philosopher Michel Foucault has pointed out that the grouping and ordering of events into historical periods creates a “space of reference,” which lends some events a heightened meaning, while obscuring or submerging others. In a substantial challenge to traditional methods of theatre history, historiographers influenced by this view have begun to examine the theoretical underpinnings of historical periodization. In theatre theory, Thomas Postlewait has investigated the often unarticulated assumptions by which theatre historians isolate a group of historical events and designate them with period names.Many scholars now center their attention on historical discontinuity: searching for ruptures in the historical narrative, focusing on dynamics which lend instability rather than stability to historical periods, and reconceptualizing temporal historical narratives into spatial relationships. For example, from a perspective of discontinuity, a play is conceived not simply as a fixed entity created at some moment in history, but as a representation of layers of historical influences; likewise, a theatre building is not simply a material location in space, but a physical expression of historically emergent architectural styles and sociopolitical circumstances, and a performance is not simply a translation of a text to the stage, but a collage of past and emergent cultural and aesthetic processes.

Reasserting hegemonic masculinity: women's leadership within the far right

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Owen Worth
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Gender Gap ◽  
Hegemonic Masculinity ◽  
Women's Leadership ◽  
Significant Part ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Significant Development ◽  
Extreme Form ◽  
National Movements ◽  
Hegemonic Construction

Abstract The emergence of a global far right has been seen as a significant development in recent years and as a challenge to wider forms of neo-liberal globalization. While much has been written about its significance and representation, little has been written on either the gendered nature of the far right and the role that women have played as actors within it. Though there still remains a gender gap in terms of the support and participation of the far right, there has been an increasing rise of leaders and figureheads within the respective movements themselves. This article argues that despite the emergence of these women, the far right looks to construct an extreme form of masculinity in which anti-feminism appears as a significant part of its overall strategy. By engaging with both the Gramscian understandings of hegemonic construction and subsequent notions of masculinist hegemony, it argues that the appearance of women both as leaders and ‘organic intellectuals’ within respective national movements allows them to gain greater legitimacy. Rather than ‘feminizing’ or indeed moderating the form of far-right narratives, women had looked to re-inforce such extreme masculinity by adding to existing understandings of anti-immigration, nationalism and in particular of the meaning of ‘anti-feminism'. Thus, recent leaders of far-right political parties appear alongside media columnists and ‘celebrities’ in contributing to the construction of extreme masculinity with the far right.

Commentary: Between Invention and Imagination—Nationalism, National Identity, Trieste, and the International Context

2004 ◽  
Vol 35 ◽  
pp. 253-257
Author(s):  
Alessandro Brogi
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
World War I ◽  
Local Politics ◽  
Diplomatic History ◽  
General Interest ◽  
Liberal State ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Great Chance ◽  
International Context ◽  
Missed Opportunity

This is a story of a missed opportunity. Italian national identity emerged in the modern era on a feeble institutional basis. However, the completion of the country's unity with World War I offered the Italian Liberal state and its administrative elites a great chance. Italy's leaders and officials made the most conspicuous attempt to assert their function as genuine public servants of the general interest—the most effective way to corroborate a sense of national community from the top—by mastering the fervent irredentism in the Venezia Giulia with a mixture of encouragement and moderation. And yet, after four years, this enlightened conduct had to yield to the fanatic and counterproductive nationalism of the far right. Maura Hametz provides a perceptive explanation of this missed opportunity by focusing on the interplay between national choices and local politics in Trieste. Even better, Hametz's essay narrates the story at the microlevel with frequent reference to the international context, thus using a rare combination of ethnocultural and diplomatic history approaches. Few studies of national identity dare encroach on traditional diplomatic history territory. But when dealing with the border disputes among Austria's successor states, it becomes crucial to fit the anthropological and sociological aspects of microhistory into the general history of Europe's balance of power.

‘The sweet tang of rape’: Torture, survival and masculinity in Ian Fleming’s Bond novels

2017 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-158 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Adams
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Hegemonic Masculinity ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The Body ◽  
World War ◽  
Political Upheaval ◽  
Literary Meaning ◽  
Second World ◽  
Scholarly Attention

Little scholarly attention has been paid to the torture scenes in Ian Fleming’s canon of Bond novels and short stories (1953–1966), despite the fact that they represent some of the most potent sites of the negotiations of masculinity, nationhood, violence and the body for which Fleming’s texts are critically renowned. This article is an intersectional feminist reading of Fleming’s canon, which stresses the interpenetrations of homophobia, anticommunism and misogyny that are present in Fleming’s representation of torture. Drawing on close readings of Fleming’s novels and theoretical discussions of heteronormativity, homophobia and national identity, this article argues that Fleming’s representations of torture are sites of literary meaning in which the boundaries of hegemonic masculinity are policed and reinforced. This policing is achieved, this article argues, through the associations of the perpetration of torture with homosexuality and Communism, and the survival of torture with post-imperial British hegemonic masculinity. Fleming’s torture scenes frequently represent set pieces in which Bond must reject or endure the unsolicited intimacy of other men; he must resist their seductions and persuasions and remain ideologically undefiled. Bond’s survival of torture is a metonymy for Britain’s survival of post-Second World War social and political upheaval. Further, the horror of torture, for Fleming, is the horror of a hierarchy of hegemonic masculinity in disarray: Bond’s survival represents the regrounding of normative heterosexual masculinity through the rejection of homosexuality and Communism.

Revolutionaries, Reactionaries and the Dilemmas of Russian Conservatism

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander M. Martin
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
The State ◽  
Social Hierarchies ◽  
Imperial Russia ◽  
The Matrix ◽  
Individual Consciousness ◽  
The Right

A peculiarity of the right in imperial Russia was the weakness of conservatism—that portion of the right which equates national identity with the currently dominant cultural values and social hierarchies. Instead, the Russian right was more often palingenetic, that is, it looked to the state to revitalize a nation whose potential was allegedly stifled by the very same cultural values and social hierarchies that conservatives embraced. Russia and its people appeared to lack the rootedness and the matrix of organically evolved local and communal identities that were central to conservatism’s socio-political vision elsewhere. Russians were drawn instead to Utopian schemes resting on palingenetic notions that the nation was capable of, indeed in need of, a ‘regeneration’ that hinged on remaking the collective and individual consciousness. Palingenetic nationalism proved to be a revolutionary force that both destabilized Russia itself and became one of the country’s most explosive exports.

Die frühe Sultanatsarchitektur in Nordindien im 12.–14. Jahrhundert als herrschaftspolitisches, identitätsstiftendes Ausdrucksmittel im Spannungsfeld wechselnder Legitimierungsstrategien

2015 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-28
Author(s):  
Daniel Redlinger
Keyword(s):  
Visual Experience ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Political Elite ◽  
Ruling Class ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
Social Hierarchies ◽  
Northern India ◽  
Historical Images ◽  
Visual Systems ◽  
Friday Mosque

Abstract The following paper discusses how the experience and perception of contingency and strategies to cope with it are evident in the architecture of the Muslim ruling class during the early Delhi Sultanate (1190–1320). The discussed building is the most important Friday Mosque in this context, a quasi-visualized symbol of the thematic concept of rulership for the new Muslim political elite. This ruling class established itself in Northern India in the late 12th century within a multi-ethnic, multi-religious and socially heterogeneous society, in which extremely different forms of communication, social hierarchies, worldviews, religious concepts, social norms and perceptions of historical images and experiences met. From the 13th century onwards, the countless immigrants and refugees from Persian-speaking areas had a remarkable influence on the local culture which was already multifaceted due to the various indigenous Northern Indian conceptions of life, faith and perception. Examining the architecture of the mosque as well as its decoration and systems of inscriptions, it will be shown how these almost text-like visual systems where adapted and used by different rulers as part of their diverging strategies of legitimization of their rule and how they created visualized reference systems to promote a coherent, specific historical narrative and a visual experience and language of a meaningful collective past to which all social and religious groups in Northern India could relate.

scholarly journals Historical Memory in the Process of Formation and Reproduction of Modern National Identity: the French Experience (Part 1)

2021 ◽  
pp. 9-52
Author(s):  
O. Shmorhun
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Social Activity ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
French History ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Far Right ◽  
National Memory ◽  
The People ◽  
The Status

The article is devoted to the study of the role of historical tradition and national memory in the formation of modern types of ethno-national identity and mechanisms of consolidation of citizens at the stage of formation of the French state of the modern type. In this regard, various versions of French history were analyzed by representatives of historical and historiographical schools, which still compete with each other for the status of creators of a generally accepted interpretation of important historical events. It was found that consistently patriotic motivation, which ensures the formation and realization of the innovative potential of the people and social activity of this creative core of the nation, aimed at overcoming any crisis challenges, is formed only on the basis of maximum meaningful synthesis of existing interpretations of French history. In particular, the effectiveness of memory policy is ensured by the fact that symbols, traditions and historical monuments that positively influence the dynamics of national-patriotic motivations and feelings are inevitably (and often, quite consciously) filled with qualitatively new meanings and values. The complete failure of neoliberal and left-wing radical critiques of Holism's theory and practice has been proved, the conservative elements of which, in particular the appeal to the heroic past, are not at all identical with medieval archaism and almost neo-Nazi political preferences. On the contrary, the typological similarity of Bonapartism and Hollism is due precisely to their ability to effectively oppose reactionary and revolutionary extremism, which is equally destructive to the nation-state. In this regard, the exceptional relevance of the use of historical memory to form their own traditionalist and authoritarian charisma (in their relationship) by the creator and first president of the Fifth Republic Charles de Gaulle in the process of his opposition to anti-national provocations of far-right and far-left.

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