The Creation of National Identities

The Creation of National Identities
Author: Anne-Marie Thiesse
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2021-11-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004498834

From the barbarian epics to the ethnographic museums, from the national languages to emblematic landscapes or typical costumes, this book retraces the cultural fabrication of the European nations. National identities are not facts of nature, but constructions.

The Culture of National Security

The Culture of National Security
Author: Peter J. Katzenstein
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 586
Release: 1996
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780231104692

The political transformations of the 1980s and 1990s have dramatically affected models of national and international security. Particularly since the end of the Cold War, scholars have been uncertain about how to interpret the effects of major shifts in the balance of power. Are we living today in a unipolar, bipolar, or multipolar world? Are we moving toward an international order that makes the recurrence of major war in Europe or Asia highly unlikely or virtually inevitable? Is ideological conflict between states diminishing or increasing?

National Identity, Popular Culture and Everyday Life

National Identity, Popular Culture and Everyday Life
Author: Tim Edensor
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2020-06-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 100018367X

The Millennium Dome, Braveheart and Rolls Royce cars. How do cultural icons reproduce and transform a sense of national identity? How does national identity vary across time and space, how is it contested, and what has been the impact of globalization upon national identity and culture?This book examines how national identity is represented, performed, spatialized and materialized through popular culture and in everyday life. National identity is revealed to be inherent in the things we often take for granted - from landscapes and eating habits, to tourism, cinema and music. Our specific experience of car ownership and motoring can enhance a sense of belonging, whilst Hollywood blockbusters and national exhibitions provide contexts for the ongoing, and often contested, process of national identity formation. These and a wealth of other cultural forms and practices are explored, with examples drawn from Scotland, the UK as a whole, India and Mauritius. This book addresses the considerable neglect of popular cultures in recent studies of nationalism and contributes to debates on the relationship between ‘high' and ‘low' culture.

Culture and National Identity in Republican Rome

Culture and National Identity in Republican Rome
Author: Erich S. Gruen
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 372
Release: 1992
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780801480416

A compelling account of the assimilation and adaptation of Greek culture by the Romans during the middle and later Republic.

Riverscapes and National Identities

Riverscapes and National Identities
Author: Tricia Cusack
Publisher:
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2010-03-02
Genre: Art
ISBN:

Drawing on the symbolic potential of rivers to represent life and time, the riverscape provided a metaphor for the mythic stream of national history flowing unimpeded out of the past and into the future. Tricia Cusack is a lecturer at the Centre for European Languages and Cultures at the University of Birmingham. She coedited Art, Nation and Gender: Ethnic Landscapes, Myths and Mother-Figures and has published numerous articles in anthologies and journals including National Identities, Nations and Nationalism, and Art History

Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation

Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation
Author: Sandra Bermann
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 424
Release: 2005-07-25
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0691116091

In recent years, scholarship on translation has moved well beyond the technicalities of converting one language into another and beyond conventional translation theory. With new technologies blurring distinctions between "the original" and its reproductions, and with globalization redefining national and cultural boundaries, "translation" is now emerging as a reformulated subject of lively, interdisciplinary debate. Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation enters the heart of this debate. It covers an exceptional range of topics, from simultaneous translation to legal theory, from the language of exile to the language of new nations, from the press to the cinema; and cultures and languages from contemporary Bengal to ancient Japan, from translations of Homer to the work of Don DeLillo. All twenty-two essays, by leading voices including Gayatri Spivak and the late Edward Said, are provocative and persuasive. The book's four sections--"Translation as Medium and across Media," "The Ethics of Translation," "Translation and Difference," and "Beyond the Nation"--together provide a comprehensive view of current thinking on nationality and translation, one that will be widely consulted for years to come. The contributors are Jonathan E. Abel, Emily Apter, Sandra Bermann, Vilashini Cooppan, Stanley Corngold, David Damrosch, Robert Eaglestone, Stathis Gourgouris, Pierre Legrand, Jacques Lezra, Françoise Lionnet, Sylvia Molloy, Yopie Prins, Edward Said, Azade Seyhan, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Henry Staten, Lawrence Venuti, Lynn Visson, Gauri Viswanathan, Samuel Weber, and Michael Wood.

Cultural Realism

Cultural Realism
Author: Alastair Iain Johnston
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2020-05-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 0691213143

Cultural Realism is an in-depth study of premodern Chinese strategic thought that has important implications for contemporary international relations theory. In applying a Western theoretical debate to China, Iain Johnston advances rigorous procedures for testing for the existence and influence of "strategic culture." Johnston sets out to answer two empirical questions. Is there a substantively consistent and temporally persistent Chinese strategic culture? If so, to what extent has it influenced China's approaches to security? The focus of his study is the Ming dynasty's grand strategy against the Mongols (1368-1644). First Johnston examines ancient military texts as sources of Chinese strategic culture, using cognitive mapping, symbolic analysis and congruence tests to determine whether there is a consistent grand strategic preference ranking across texts that constitutes a single strategic culture. Then he applies similar techniques to determine the effect of the strategic culture on the strategic preferences of the Ming decision makers. Finally, he assesses the effect of these preferences on Ming policies towards the Mongol "threat." The findings of this book challenge dominant interpretations of traditional Chinese strategic thought. They suggest also that the roots of realpolitik are ideational and not predominantly structural. The results lead to the surprising conclusion that there may be, in fact, fewer cross-national differences in strategic culture than proponents of the "strategic culture" approach think.

Art, Culture, and National Identity in Fin-de-siècle Europe

Art, Culture, and National Identity in Fin-de-siècle Europe
Author: Michelle Facos
Publisher:
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2003
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780521815659

At the turn of the twentieth century, nations, both sovereign and aspiring, feverishly worked to define, foster, and promote national identity. While historians have recognized the significance of this moment for modern identity formations, it has largely been neglected by art historians. Art, Culture and National Identity in Fin-de-Siècle Europe examines the phenomenon of politicized art and its connections to modernism. In eleven essays that focus on as many nations, an international team of authors explore the complex issues facing artists who helped to form a distinct national identity to audiences at home and abroad. The detailed case studies unravel the matrix of circumstances that fostered nationalistic developments, thereby offering a more nuanced understanding of European art and culture around 1900.

Nature and National Identity After Communism

Nature and National Identity After Communism
Author: Katrina Z. S. Schwartz
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
Total Pages: 309
Release: 2006-11-26
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0822973146

In this groundbreaking book, Katrina Schwartz examines the intersection of environmental politics, globalization, and national identity in a small East European country: modern-day Latvia. Based on extensive ethnographic research and lively discourse analysis, it explores that country's post-Soviet responses to European assistance and political pressure in nature management, biodiversity conservation, and rural development. These responses were shaped by hotly contested notions of national identity articulated as contrasting visions of the "ideal" rural landscape.The players in this story include Latvian farmers and other traditional rural dwellers, environmental advocates, and professionals with divided attitudes toward new European approaches to sustainable development. An entrenched set of forestry and land management practices, with roots in the Soviet and pre-Soviet eras, confront growing international pressures on a small country to conform to current (Western) notions of environmental responsibility—notions often perceived by Latvians to be at odds with local interests. While the case is that of Latvia, the dynamics Schwartz explores have wide applicability and speak powerfully to broader theoretical discussions about sustainable development, social constructions of nature, the sources of nationalism, and the impacts of globalization and regional integration on the traditional nation-state.

Performing National Identity

Performing National Identity
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2008-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 940120523X

National identity is not some naturally given or metaphysically sanctioned racial or territorial essence that only needs to be conceptualised or spelt out in discursive texts; it emerges from, takes shape in, and is constantly defined and redefined in individual and collective performances. It is in performances—ranging from the scenarios of everyday interactions to ‘cultural performances’ such as pageants, festivals, political manifestations or sports, to the artistic performances of music, dance, theatre, literature, the visual and culinary arts and more recent media—that cultural identity and a sense of nationhood are fashioned. National identity is not an essence one is born with but something acquired in and through performances. Particularly important here are intercultural performances and transactions, and that not only in a colonial and postcolonial dimension, where such performative aspects have already been considered, but also in inner-European transactions. ‘Englishness’ or ‘Britishness’ and Italianità, the subject of this anthology, are staged both within each culture and, more importantly, in joint performances of difference across cultural borders. Performing difference highlights differences that ‘make a difference’; it ‘draws a line’ between self and other—boundary lines that are, however, constantly being redrawn and renegotiated, and remain instable and shifting.