Imagination Beyond Nation


Book Description

Can scholarly pursuit of soap operas and folk art actually reveal a national imagination? This innovative collection features studies of iconography in Mexico, telenovelas in Venezuela, drama in Chile, cinema in Brazil, comic strips and tango in Argentina, and ceramics in Peru. In examining these popular arts, the scholars gathered here ask the same broad questions: what precisely is a national culture at the level of the popular? The national idea in Latin America emerges from these pages as a problematic, divided one, worth sustained attention in the field of culture studies. Many different arts come forth in all their richness and vitality, compelling us to look, listen, and understand.




Beyond the Nation-State


Book Description

A revisionist account of Zionist history, challenging the inevitability of a one-state solution, from a bold, path-breaking young scholar The Jewish nation-state has often been thought of as Zionism’s end goal. In this bracing history of the idea of the Jewish state in modern Zionism, from its beginnings in the late nineteenth century until the establishment of the state of Israel, Dmitry Shumsky challenges this deeply rooted assumption. In doing so, he complicates the narrative of the Zionist quest for full sovereignty, provocatively showing how and why the leaders of the pre-state Zionist movement imagined, articulated and promoted theories of self-determination in Palestine either as part of a multinational Ottoman state (1882-1917), or in the framework of multinational democracy. In particular, Shumsky focuses on the writings and policies of five key Zionist leaders from the Habsburg and Russian empires in central and eastern Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Leon Pinsker, Theodor Herzl, Ahad Ha’am, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, and David Ben-Gurion to offer a very pointed critique of Zionist historiography.




Beyond Imagination?


Book Description

The United States is a nation of laws, and its Constitution and the rule of law have allowed it to confront and successfully navigate many threats to democracy throughout the nation's complex history, including a Civil War. All of these threats challenged the nation in various ways, but never has there been a challenge to the truth of our elections like what happened on January 6, 2021. The Insurrection represents a turning point in America's history. In addition to the unprecedented assault on the U.S. Capitol, members of the government sought to undermine an election and supported an attack on the government. Exposing the issues that led us to January 6, Beyond Imagination? brings together 14 deans of American law schools to examine the day's events and how we got there, from a legal perspective, in hopes of moving the nation forward towards healing and a recommitment to the rule of law and the Constitution.




Imagined Communities


Book Description

What are the imagined communities that compel men to kill or to die for an idea of a nation? This notion of nationhood had its origins in the founding of the Americas, but was then adopted and transformed by populist movements in nineteenth-century Europe. It became the rallying cry for anti-Imperialism as well as the abiding explanation for colonialism. In this scintillating, groundbreaking work of intellectual history Anderson explores how ideas are formed and reformulated at every level, from high politics to popular culture, and the way that they can make people do extraordinary things. In the twenty-first century, these debates on the nature of the nation state are even more urgent. As new nations rise, vying for influence, and old empires decline, we must understand who we are as a community in the face of history, and change.




Redrawing The Nation


Book Description

This volume discusses the role of comics in the formation of a modern sense of nationhood in Latin America and the rise of a collective Latino identity in the USA. It is one of the first attempts - in English and from a cultural studies perspective - to cover Latin/o American comics with a fully continental scope. Specific cases include cultural powerhouses like Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, as well as the production of lesser-known industries, like Chile, Cuba, and Peru.




Brexit and Beyond: Nation and Identity


Book Description

This volume explores the cultural significance of Brexit, situating it in debates about nation and identity. Contributors to this collection seek to contextualize Britain's decision to leave the EU and to assess its reverberations in language, literature, and culture. Addressing such aspects as British exceptionalism, myth-making, medievalism, and nostalgia, contributions range from travelogues, Ladybird books, and rural cinema-going to ageing. An important focus lies on marginalized groups and geographical fringes, as contributors attend to the Irish situation and the scarcity of EU migrants in Brexit literature (BrexLit). Finally, two essays widen the perspective to assess American parallels to the discourses about a Brexit that is still far from "done."




Politics and Racism Beyond Nations


Book Description

This book brings together theoretical knowledge from diverse fields as anthropology, biology, neurology, peace studies, political science, psychology, and sociology to address key challenges that transcend borders. It demonstrates how differences are created on many levels to reveal how the “othering project” is evident through national policies of immigration, through aspiring nationalisms, through genocidal inhumanity, and the subsequent effects of such othering evident in racial trauma. It further argues that we cannot limit our understanding of racism to forms of “white nationalism” or “whiteness movements” in the developed world and regions but look to the global formulation of such discrimination in colonial histories. The book introduces each chapter by providing rich ethnographic narratives from informants based upon the author’s research on nationalism, racism, genocide, terrorism, trauma, scientific tolerance, and love and peace as well as some auto-ethnographic narratives from the author’s research on these themes.




Dream Nation


Book Description

Against the backdrop of ever-increasing nationalist violence during the last decade of the twentieth century, this book challenges standard analyses of nation formation by elaborating on the nation's dream-like hold over the modern social imagination. Stathis Gourgouris argues that the national fantasy lies at the core of the Enlightenment imaginary, embodying its central paradox: the intertwining of anthropological universality with the primacy of a cultural ideal. Crucial to the operation of this paradox and fundamental in its ambiguity is the figure of Greece, the universal alibi and cultural predicate behind national-cultural consolidation throughout colonialist Europe. The largely unpredictable institution of a modern Greek nation in 1830 undoes the interweaving of Enlightenment and Philhellenism, whose centrifugal strands continue to unravel the certainty of European history, down to the internal predicaments of the European Union or the tragedy of the Balkan conflicts. This 25th Anniversary edition of the book includes a new preface by the author in which he situates the book's original insights in retrospect against the newer developments in the social and political conditions of a now globalized world: the neocolonial resurgence of nationalism and racism, the failure of social democratic institutions, the crisis of sovereignty and citizenship, and the brutal conditions of stateless peoples.




Modernity At Large


Book Description




Nation at Play


Book Description

Reaching as far back as ancient times, Ronojoy Sen pairs a novel history of India's engagement with sport and a probing analysis of its cultural and political development under monarchy and colonialism, and as an independent nation. Some sports that originated in India have fallen out of favor, while others, such as cricket, have been adopted and made wholly India's own. Sen's innovative project casts sport less as a natural expression of human competition than as an instructive practice reflecting a unique play with power, morality, aesthetics, identity, and money. Sen follows the transformation of sport from an elite, kingly pastime to a national obsession tied to colonialism, nationalism, and free market liberalization. He pays special attention to two modern phenomena: the dominance of cricket in the Indian consciousness and the chronic failure of a billion-strong nation to compete successfully in international sporting competitions, such as the Olympics. Innovatively incorporating examples from popular media and other unconventional sources, Sen not only captures the political nature of sport in India but also reveals the patterns of patronage, clientage, and institutionalization that have bound this diverse nation together for centuries.