Reconstructing a National Identity

Reconstructing a National Identity
Author: Marsha L. Rozenblit
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2004
Genre: Austria
ISBN: 0195176308

This book explores the impact of war and political crisis on the national identity of Jews, both in the multinational Habsburg monarchy and in the new nation-states that replaced it at the end of World War I. Jews enthusiastically supported the Austrian war effort because it allowed them to assert their Austrian loyalties and Jewish solidarity at the same time. They faced a grave crisis of identity when the multinational state collapsed and they lived in nation-states mostly uncomfortable with ethnic minorities. This book raises important questions about Jewish identity and about the general nature of ethnic and national identity.

State Building and National Identity Reconstruction in the Horn of Africa

State Building and National Identity Reconstruction in the Horn of Africa
Author: Redie Bereketeab
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2017-02-10
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 331939892X

This book examines post-secession and post-transition state building in Somaliland, Somalia, South Sudan and Sudan. It explores two intimately linked, yet analytically distinct themes: state building and national identity reconstruction following secession and collapse. In Somaliland and South Sudan, rearranging the state requires a complete metamorphosis of state institutions so that they respond to the needs and interests of the people. In Sudan and Somalia, the reconfiguration of the remains of the state must address a new reality and demands on the ground. All four cases examined, although highly variable, involve conflict. Conflict defines the scope, depth and momentum of the state building and state reconstruction process. It also determines the contours and parameters of the projects to reconstitute national identity and rebuild a nation. Addressing the contested identity formation and its direct relation to state building would therefore go a long way in mitigating conflicts and state crisis.

Making Identity Count

Making Identity Count
Author: Ted Hopf
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2016
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 019025548X

Making Identity Count presents a new constructivist method for the recovery of national identity, applies the method in nine country cases, and draws conclusions from the empirical evidence for hegemonic transitions and a variety of quantitative theories of identity.

Cinema in Democratizing Germany

Cinema in Democratizing Germany
Author: Heide Fehrenbach
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 381
Release: 2000-11-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807861375

Heide Fehrenbach analyzes the important role cinema played in the reconstruction of German cultural and political identity between 1945 and 1962. Concentrating on the former West Germany, she explores the complex political uses of film--and the meanings attributed to film representation and spectatorship--during a period of abrupt transition to democracy. According to Fehrenbach, the process of national redefinition made cinema and cinematic control a focus of heated ideological debate. Moving beyond a narrow political examination of Allied-German negotiations, she investigates the broader social nexus of popular moviegoing, public demonstrations, film clubs, and municipal festivals. She also draws on work in gender and film studies to probe the ways filmmakers, students, church leaders, local politicians, and the general public articulated national identity in relation to the challenges posed by military occupation, American commercial culture, and redefined gender roles. Thus highlighting the links between national identity and cultural practice, this book provides a richer picture of what German reconstruction entailed for both women and men.

Modern Roots

Modern Roots
Author: Alain Dieckhoff
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 318
Release: 2017-07-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1351917005

Interest in the study of national identity as a collective phenomenon is a growing concern among the social and political sciences. This book addresses the scholarly interest in examining the origins of ideologies and social practices that give historical meaning, cohesion and uniqueness to modern national communities. It focuses on the various routes taken towards the construction of cultural authenticity as an inspirational purpose of nation-building and reveals the diversity of the themes, practices and symbols used to encourage self-identification and communality. Among the techniques explored are the dramatization of suffering and tragedy, the exaltation of heroes and deeds, the evocation of landscape, nature and the arts and the delimitation of collective values to be pursued during reconstruction in post-war periods.

Blood Cinema

Blood Cinema
Author: Marsha Kinder
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 567
Release: 1993-12-06
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0520081579

"This is the most complete, in-depth, sophisticated study of Spanish cinema available in any language."—Marvin D'Lugo, author of The Films of Carlos Saura

(Re)Constructing Memory: Education, Identity, and Conflict

(Re)Constructing Memory: Education, Identity, and Conflict
Author: Michelle J. Bellino
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 339
Release: 2017-02-08
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9463008608

How do schools protect young people and call on the youngest citizens to respond to violent conflict and division operating outside, and sometimes within, school walls? What kinds of curricular representations of conflict contribute to the construction of national identity, and what kinds of encounters challenge presumed boundaries between us and them? Through contemporary and historical case studies—drawn from Cambodia, Egypt, Northern Ireland, Peru, and Rwanda, among others—this collection explores how societies experiencing armed conflict and its aftermath imagine education as a space for forging collective identity, peace and stability, and national citizenship. In some contexts, the erasure of conflict and the homogenization of difference are central to shaping national identities and attitudes. In other cases, collective memory of conflict functions as a central organizing frame through which citizenship and national identity are (re)constructed, with embedded messages about who belongs and how social belonging is achieved. The essays in this volume illuminate varied and complex inter-relationships between education, conflict, and national identity, while accounting for ways in which policymakers, teachers, youth, and community members replicate, resist, and transform conflict through everyday interactions in educational spaces.

History Education in the Formation of Social Identity

History Education in the Formation of Social Identity
Author: K. Korostelina
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2013-12-18
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1137374764

In order to determine how history education can be harnessed to reduce conflict attitudes and intentions and create a culture of peace, this book examines how history curricula and textbooks shape the identities of their students through their portrayals of ingroup and outgroup identity, intergroup boundaries, and value systems.

Constructing Nationalities in East Central Europe

Constructing Nationalities in East Central Europe
Author: Pieter M. Judson
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 318
Release: 2005
Genre: Europe, Central
ISBN: 9781571811769

"The hundred years between the revolutions of 1848 and the population transfers of the mid-twentieth century saw the nationalization of culturally complex societies in East Central Europe. This fact has variously been explained in terms of modernization, state building, and nation-building theories, each of which treats the process of nationalization as something inexorable, a necessary component of modernity. Although more recently social scientists gesture to the contingencies that may shape these larger developments, this structural approach makes scholars far less attentive to the "hard work" (ideological, political, social) undertaken by individuals and groups at every level of society who tried themselves to build "national" societies." "The essays in this volume make us aware of how complex, multi-dimensional and often contradictory this nationalization process in East Central Europe actually was. The authors document attempts and failures by nationalist politicians, organizations, activists, and regimes from 1848 through 1948 to give East-Central Europeans a strong sense of national self-identification. They remind us that only the use of dictatorial powers in the 20th century could actually transform the fantasy of nationalization into a reality, albeit a brutal one."--BOOK JACKET.

Austrian Historical Memory and National Identity

Austrian Historical Memory and National Identity
Author: Gunter Bischof, Anton Pelinka
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
Total Pages: 412
Release:
Genre:
ISBN: 9781412817691

When the Hapsburg monarchy disintegrated after World War I, Austria was not considered to be a viable entity. In a vacuum of national identity the hapless country drifted toward a larger Germany. After World War II, Austrian elites constructed a new identity based on being a "victim" of Nazi Germany. Cold war Austria, however, envisioned herself as a neutral "island of the blessed" between and separate from both superpower blocs. Now, with her membership in the European Union secured, Austria is reconstructing her painful historical memory and national identity. In 1996 she celebrates her 1000-year anniversary. In this volume of Contemporary Austrian Studies, Franz Mathis and Brigitte Mazohl-Wallnig argue that regional identities in Austria have deeper historical roots than the many artificial and ineffective attempts to construct a national identity. Heidemarie Uhl, Anton Pelinka, and Brigitte Bailer discuss the post-World War II construction of the victim mythology. Robert Herzstein analyses the crucial impact of the 1986 Waldheim election imploding Austria's comforting historical memory as a "nation of victims." Wolfram Kaiser shows Austria's difficult adjustments to the European Union and the larger challenges of constructing a new "European identity." Chad Berry's analysis of American World War II memory establishes a useful counterpoint to construction of historical memory in a different national context. A special forum on Austrian intelligence studies presents a fascinating reconstruction by Timothy Naftali of the investigation by Anglo-American counterintelligence into the retreat of Hitler's troops into the Alps during World War II. Rudiger Overmans' "research note" presents statistics on lower death rates of Austrian soldiers in the German army. Review essays by Gunther Kronenbitter and Gunter Bischof, book reviews, and a 1995 survey of Austrian politics round out the volume. Austrian Historical Memory and National Identity will be of intense interest to foreign policy analysts, historians, and scholars concerned with the unique elements of identity and nationality in Central European politics.