Ingredients of empire: An oceanic approach to the study of Dutch imperialism and its aftermath

This article turns to the figure of the ship in the controversial Dutch Sinterklaas celebration to explore what an oceanic framework might bring to the study of Dutch imperialism, colonialism, and slavery. Drawing on what Renisa Mawani calls an ‘oceanic approach and method’ for the study of colonial history, law, and colonial–racial orders, I examine the ship as an anchor point for abstracting, enacting, and rehearsing a colonial–racial order that emerged during the highpoint of Dutch imperialism and continues to permeate the national imaginary at present. Looking at how a Dutch ‘maritime imagination’ conditions imperial fantasies and desires, this article is an exercise in developing what I call a ‘cultural oceanography’ of Dutch imperialism and its aftermath.

‘The Dagger of Dispossession Will Be Ripped Out’: The Malvinas/Falkland Islands in Argentine Song (1941–82)

In April 1982, Great Britain and Argentina went to war over the Falkland Islands/Malvinas. On 14 June, the defeated Argentine military began the evacuation of the Islands. Most Argentines came to view this short war as an absurd adventure entered into by a military dictatorship in decline trying to cling on to power. Yet by analysing Argentine songs about the Malvinas from 1941 to 1982, this article shows that the national imaginary had long included ideas of sovereignty usurped and captive islands awaiting redemption. Argentine songs about the Malvinas, I maintain, can be analysed as expressions of an ‘emotional community’ around the Islands. By examining the emphases, constants and changes in the songs emerging from that community, we get a clearer picture of how ideas about the territory and its recovery changed over time.

Understanding the Māori Television Service’s Policy and Legislation: The First Ten Years

<p>he Māori Television Service emerged in 2004 after many years of political agitation by Māori for the New Zealand government to protect and promote Māori language and culture. Given the subsequent broadcaster’s role in promoting te reo me ngā tikanga Māori, this research project seeks to answer the questions: what strategies for language revitalisation are revealed in the Māori Television Service’s governing policy documents produced from 2003-2013, and how are the Māori Television Service’s strategies for language revitalisation informed by the operating environment of the broadcaster? To answer these questions, discourse analysis of the Māori Television Service’s governing policy documents, and those which inform it, is used to reveal the broadcaster’s strategies for language revitalisation. These documents are contextualised in relation to the wider Māori language struggle, the New Zealand broadcast industry, and socio-political, cultural and economic shifts between 2003 and 2013. Such contextualisation demonstrates the purpose of the broadcaster’s strategies for language revitalisation, how and why these strategies have changed and how these shifts reflect the Māori Television Service’s negotiation of different stakeholders. Research findings suggest that the Māori Television Service has deployed a range of strategies that enable it to meet its legislative obligations as well as respond to community and industry stakeholders. These strategies include building an audience for its language programming content, operating as a financially prudent Māori organisation, and developing programming strategies in light of technological shifts. The thesis argues that these strategies contribute to the naturalisation and normalisation of te reo me ngā tikanga Māori within the national imaginary, and that these reflect key tactics for language revitalisation as set out in the 2003 Māori Language Strategy. The thesis also identifies a shift from the Māori Television Service’s focus on language programming quantity to language programming quality, and a shift to focusing on te reo speakers over a broad viewer base, across the ten year period of the broadcaster’s existence. The thesis aligns these more recent language programming strategies in relation to current changes in language revitalisation activities. In revealing the competing pressures faced by the broadcaster, this thesis highlights the role the Māori Television Service has played in increasing the symbolic value of te reo Māori, as well as how it has contributed to language revitalisation strategies in sectors beyond broadcasting.</p>

Understanding the Māori Television Service’s Policy and Legislation: The First Ten Years

<p>he Māori Television Service emerged in 2004 after many years of political agitation by Māori for the New Zealand government to protect and promote Māori language and culture. Given the subsequent broadcaster’s role in promoting te reo me ngā tikanga Māori, this research project seeks to answer the questions: what strategies for language revitalisation are revealed in the Māori Television Service’s governing policy documents produced from 2003-2013, and how are the Māori Television Service’s strategies for language revitalisation informed by the operating environment of the broadcaster? To answer these questions, discourse analysis of the Māori Television Service’s governing policy documents, and those which inform it, is used to reveal the broadcaster’s strategies for language revitalisation. These documents are contextualised in relation to the wider Māori language struggle, the New Zealand broadcast industry, and socio-political, cultural and economic shifts between 2003 and 2013. Such contextualisation demonstrates the purpose of the broadcaster’s strategies for language revitalisation, how and why these strategies have changed and how these shifts reflect the Māori Television Service’s negotiation of different stakeholders. Research findings suggest that the Māori Television Service has deployed a range of strategies that enable it to meet its legislative obligations as well as respond to community and industry stakeholders. These strategies include building an audience for its language programming content, operating as a financially prudent Māori organisation, and developing programming strategies in light of technological shifts. The thesis argues that these strategies contribute to the naturalisation and normalisation of te reo me ngā tikanga Māori within the national imaginary, and that these reflect key tactics for language revitalisation as set out in the 2003 Māori Language Strategy. The thesis also identifies a shift from the Māori Television Service’s focus on language programming quantity to language programming quality, and a shift to focusing on te reo speakers over a broad viewer base, across the ten year period of the broadcaster’s existence. The thesis aligns these more recent language programming strategies in relation to current changes in language revitalisation activities. In revealing the competing pressures faced by the broadcaster, this thesis highlights the role the Māori Television Service has played in increasing the symbolic value of te reo Māori, as well as how it has contributed to language revitalisation strategies in sectors beyond broadcasting.</p>

Molecular Sovereignty: Building a Blood Screening Test for the Brazilian Nation

This article interrogates the relationship between the development of national diagnostic technologies and the exercise of sovereignty, by analysing a Brazilian project to produce a nucleic acid test (NAT) for the country’s blood screening programme. The concept of ‘molecular sovereignty’ is proposed to demonstrate that exercising sovereignty demands not only technological resources but also a sufficiently powerful and national imaginary to support local knowledge production as a means of advancing national healthcare priorities. First, this research article contextualises the political importance of blood safety for Brazil during its transition to democracy in the 1980s and the creation of its universal healthcare system. Then, it investigates how adopting the NAT led the state to invest in the production of a national technology. Third, the article unpacks the diagnostic test to consider how certain aspects of the project might ultimately strengthen the ability of global capital to cross national boundaries and create new markets. Lastly, it discusses how the project ended up creating a centralised and ‘closed’ system to avoid leaving the country vulnerable to the entry of global diagnostic companies. This case demonstrates how the molecularisation of blood, through the construction of a unified healthcare system driven by the constitutional right to health, can be deployed to construct imagined communities on the scale of a nation.

‘The instinct of resistance to evil’: Postmemory and the Ukrainian national imaginary in Oksana Zabuzhko’s novel The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

Building on Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory, this article examines Oksana Zabuzhko’s latest novel The Museum of Abandoned Secrets as postmemorial fiction, which articulates the trauma of Soviet political repressions in the post–World War II period and in the 1970s via the perception of the second and third generation. The affiliative postmemory about World War II in Ukraine from the viewpoint of Ukrainian Insurgent Army partisans is emplotted via an original generic combination of contemporary Holocaust fiction and romances of the archive. Postmemory is used in the novel to shape a mythologised alternative historical narrative that reconceptualises the country’s difficult past as a story of heroic resistance.