Unbecoming Nationalism

Unbecoming Nationalism
Author: Helene Vosters
Publisher: Univ. of Manitoba Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2019-09-04
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0887555853

Canada’s recent sesquicentennial celebrations were the latest in a long, steady progression of Canadian cultural memory projects. Unbecoming Nationalism investigates the power of commemorative performances in the production of nationalist narratives. Using “unbecoming” as a theoretical framework to unsettle or decolonize nationalist narratives, Helene Vosters examines an eclectic range of both state-sponsored social memory projects and counter-memorial projects to reveal and unravel the threads connecting reverential military commemoration, celebratory cultural nationalism, and white settler-colonial nationalism. Vosters brings readings of institutional, aesthetic, and activist performances of Canadian military commemoration, settler-colonial nationalism, and redress into conversation with literature that examines the relationship between memory, violence, and nationalism from the disciplinary arenas of performance studies, Canadian studies, critical race and Indigenous studies, memory studies, and queer and gender studies. In addition to using performance as a theoretical framework, Vosters uses performance to enact a philosophy of praxis and embodied theory.

Unbecoming British

Unbecoming British
Author: Kariann Akemi Yokota
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 367
Release: 2010-11-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199779910

What can homespun cloth, stuffed birds, quince jelly, and ginseng reveal about the formation of early American national identity? In this wide-ranging and bold new interpretation of American history and its Founding Fathers, Kariann Akemi Yokota shows that political independence from Britain fueled anxieties among the Americans about their cultural inferiority and continuing dependence on the mother country. Caught between their desire to emulate the mother country and an awareness that they lived an ocean away on the periphery of the known world, they went to great lengths to convince themselves and others of their refinement. Taking a transnational approach to American history, Yokota examines a wealth of evidence from geography, the decorative arts, intellectual history, science, and technology to underscore that the process of "unbecoming British" was not an easy one. Indeed, the new nation struggled to define itself economically, politically, and culturally in what could be called America's postcolonial period. Out of this confusion of hope and exploitation, insecurity and vision, a uniquely American identity emerged.

Unbecoming Blackness

Unbecoming Blackness
Author: Antonio Lopez
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2012-11-26
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0814765475

2014 Runner-Up, MLA Prize in United States Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies In Unbecoming Blackness, Antonio López uncovers an important, otherwise unrecognized century-long archive of literature and performance that reveals Cuban America as a space of overlapping Cuban and African diasporic experiences. López shows how Afro-Cuban writers and performers in theU.S. align Cuban black and mulatto identities, often subsumed in the mixed-race and postracial Cuban national imaginaries, with the material and symbolic blackness of African Americans and other Afro-Latinas/os. In the works of Alberto O’Farrill, Eusebia Cosme, Rómulo Lachatañeré, and others, Afro-Cubanness articulates the African diasporic experience in ways that deprive negro and mulato configurations of an exclusive link with Cuban nationalism. Instead, what is invoked is an “unbecoming” relationship between Afro-Cubans in the U.S and their domestic black counterparts. The transformations in Cuban racial identity across the hemisphere, represented powerfully in the literary and performance cultures of Afro-Cubans in the U.S., provide the fullest account of a transnational Cuba, one in which the Cuban American emerges as Afro-Cuban-American, and the Latino as Afro-Latino.

On the Other Side(s) of 150

On the Other Side(s) of 150
Author: Linda M. Morra
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2021-05-20
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1771125152

On the Other Side(s) of 150 explores the different literary, historical and cultural legacies of Canada’s sesquicentennial celebrations. It asks vital questions about the ways that histories and stories have been suppressed and invites consideration about what happens once a commemorative moment has passed. Like a Cubist painting, this modality offers a critical strategy by which also to approach the volume as dismantling, reassembling, and re-enacting existing commemorative tropes; as offering multiple, conditional, and contingent viewpoints that unfold over time; and as generating a broader (although far from being comprehensive) range of counter-memorial performances. The chapters in this volume are thus provisional, interconnected, and adaptive: they offer critical assemblages by which to approach commemorative narratives or showcase lacunae therein; by which to return to and intervene in ongoing readings of the past from the present moment; and by which not necessarily to resolve, but rather to understand the troubled and troubling narratives of the present moment. Contributors propose that these preoccupations are not a means of turning away from present concerns, but rather a means of grappling with how the past informs or is shaped to inform them; and how such concerns are defined by immediate social contexts and networks.

East Asian Pop Culture

East Asian Pop Culture
Author: Beng Huat Chua
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2008-02-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9789622098923

The contributors analyse the subject of Asian pop culture arranged under three headings: 'Television Industry in East Asia', 'Transnational-Crosscultural Receptions of TV Dramas' and 'Nationalistic reactions'.

Critical Racial and Decolonial Literacies

Critical Racial and Decolonial Literacies
Author: Debbie Bargallie
Publisher: Policy Press
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2024-08-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1529234417

This collection offers a unique exploration of critical racial literacy and anti-racist praxis in Australia's educational landscape. Combining critical race and Indigenous theories and perspectives, contributors articulate a decolonial liberatory imperative for our times. In an age when 'decolonization' has become a buzzword, the book demystifies 'critical anti-racism praxis,' advocating for critical and multidisciplinary approaches. Educators from a range of disciplines including Law, Indigenous Studies, Health, Sociology, Policy and the Arts collectively share compelling stories of educating on race, racism and anti-racism, offering strategies that can be put into practice in classrooms, activism and structural reforms.

Gendered Citizenship

Gendered Citizenship
Author: Anupama Roy
Publisher: Orient Blackswan
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2005
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9788125027973

Adopting a historical conceptual approach, this book examines the gendering of citizenship. It argues that through successive historical periods, `becoming a citizen has involved a gradual extension of the status, to more and more persons and groups, in particular, women, which resulted in a more inclusive and egalitarian structure. But, the promise of equal membership in the politcal community masks the exclusionary framework that defines citizenship as found in caste hierarchies, gender differences, and divides between religious communities based on majority and minority status. Engaging with contemporary debates on citizenship that place themselves within the framework of multiculturalism and world citizenship this work asserts the need to redefine the notion of community by focussing on citizenship as a measure of activity and practice, and by exposing the subtleties of role definition of women implicit in community norms.

The Idea of a Human Rights Museum

The Idea of a Human Rights Museum
Author: Karen Busby
Publisher: Univ. of Manitoba Press
Total Pages: 433
Release: 2015-09-25
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0887554695

"The Idea of a Human Rights Museum" is the first book to examine the formation of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights and to situate the museum within the context of the international proliferation of such institutions. Sixteen essays consider the wider political, cultural and architectural contexts within which the museum physically and conceptually evolved drawing comparisons between the CMHR and institutions elsewhere in the world that emphasize human rights and social justice. This collection brings together authors from diverse fields—law, cultural studies, museum studies, sociology, history, political science, and literature—to critically assess the potentials and pitfalls of human rights education through “ideas” museums. Accessible, engaging, and informative, the collection’s essays will encourage museum-goers to think more deeply about the content of human rights exhibits. The Idea of a Human Rights Museum is the first title in the University of Manitoba Press’s Human Rights and Social Justice Series. This series publishes work that explores the quest for social justice and the basic rights and freedoms to which all human beings are entitled, including civil, political, economic, social, collective, and cultural rights.

Unbecoming

Unbecoming
Author: Anuradha Bhagwati
Publisher: Atria Books
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2020-03-03
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1501162551

Brimming “with the ebullient Bhagwati’s fierce humanism, seething humor, and change-maker righteousness,” (Shelf Awareness) a raw, unflinching memoir by a former US Marine Captain chronicling her journey from dutiful daughter of immigrants to radical activist fighting for historic policy reform. After a lifetime of buckling to the demands of her strict Indian parents, Anuradha Bhagwati abandons grad school in the Ivy League to join the Marines—the fiercest, most violent, most masculine branch of the military—determined to prove herself there in ways she couldn’t before. Yet once training begins, Anuradha’s GI Jane fantasy is punctured. As a bisexual woman of color in the military, she faces underestimation at every stage, confronting misogyny, racism, sexual violence, and astonishing injustice perpetrated by those in power. Pushing herself beyond her limits, she also wrestles with what drove her to pursue such punishment in the first place. Once her service concludes in 2004, Anuradha courageously vows to take to task the very leaders and traditions that cast such a dark cloud over her time in the Marines. Her efforts result in historic change, including the lifting of the ban on women from pursuing combat roles in the military. “Bhagwati’s fight is both incensing and inspiring” (Booklist) in this tale of heroic resilience and grapples with the timely question of what, exactly, America stands for, showing how one woman learned to believe in herself in spite of everything.

American Nationalisms

American Nationalisms
Author: Benjamin E. Park
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2018-01-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108355994

America was born in an age of political revolution throughout the Atlantic world, a period when the very definition of 'nation' was transforming. Benjamin E. Park traces how Americans imagined novel forms of nationality during the country's first five decades within the context of European discussions taking place at the same time. Focusing on three case studies - Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina - Park examines the developing practices of nationalism in three specific contexts. He argues for a more elastic connection between nationalism and the nation-state by demonstrating that ideas concerning political and cultural allegiance to a federal body developed in different ways and at different rates throughout the nation. American Nationalisms explores how ideas of nationality permeated political disputes, religious revivals, patriotic festivals, slavery debates, and even literature.