Group items tagged

Intellectuals were important to the spread of nationalist ideology in nineteenth-century Europe for a variety of reasons. Firstly, their works facilitated the international spread of the discourse of nationalism; secondly, they mediated between the fields of political institutions and cultural reflection. This article looks at the international mobility and networks of romantic-nationalist intellectuals, and uses the case of August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben (1798-1874) as an example.

This essay argues that the failures of U.S. immigration enforcement institutions functioned as a strategic policy from 2003 to 2010, when the undocumented population in the United States reached an unprecedented twelve million people. The author examines how the so-called broken immigration system installed a repressive form of governmentality based in failure. While deferring any legalization, federal and state authorities fostered a regime of exclusion and removal that constituted a class of minimal subjects, those of unauthorized migrants and their kin who would effectively exist outside the community of rights. During this period, immigration arrests and deportations reached unprecedented levels, at a moment when the majority of the undocumented remained an irredeemably criminalized status. By disavowing any intention to conduct mass deportations, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents gained sanction for more targeted campaigns of militarized raids, racial profiling, and detentions. The author argues that heightened enforcement, including the 287g program, created dangerous opportunities for government agents to suspend basic democratic restraints on state power, often for interests of racial and class antagonism that exceeded the bounds of immigration enforcement-with severe consequences for Latino communities. By mobilizing a social imaginary predicated on the necessity of uprooting the undocumented, federal, state, and local officials committed themselves to the actions of a police state and sanctioned a system of apartheid governance within the boundaries of the United States.

In both popular discourse and many academic works, the existence of national identity is largely taken as given. Although researchers disagree on whether national identities are modern or perennial, and how best to gauge the intensity of identification with a particular nation, there is near unanimity on the view that national identities are real and perceptible entities. In contrast to this view I argue not only that there was no national identity before modernity but also that there is little empirical evidence for the existence of national identities in the modern age either. While it is obvious that many individuals show great affinity for their nations and often express sincere devotion to the 'national cause', none of these are reliable indicators of the existence of a durable, continuous, stable and monolithic entity called 'national identity'. To fully understand the character of popular mobilisation in modernity it is paramount to refocus our attention from the slippery and non-analytical idiom of 'identity' towards well-established sociological concepts such as 'ideology' and 'solidarity'. In particular, the central object of this research becomes the processes through which large-scale social organisations successfully transform earnest micro-solidarity into an all-encompassing nationalist ideology.

This article examines the politics of the majoritarian binary, 'The West and the Rest', and more specifically, 'Western Theory, Asian Reality', as a politics of power that serves specific interests ranging from imperialism and nationalism to the suppression of heterogeneity in languages, ethnicities, and cultures. The Sinophone is posited here as a presence, literary and otherwise, that interrupts this majoritarian binary by challenging the chain of equivalence among ethnicity, language, and nationality.

What can an Asian theory be? Is the question a blatant oxymoron, or some intellectual anomaly? What is at stake in this enquiry is not the character of Asia at all. On the contrary, what makes the pairing of Asia and theory somewhat strange is our presumption that theory is something we normally expect of Europe or the West. (Europe and the West must be differentiated historically and geopolitically, but for reasons of space the two designations are treated almost interchangeably in this article.)

In the last two decades, we have witnessed dramatic developments in the production of media cultures and their transnational circulation in non-Western regions. East Asia is one of the key regions in which these alternative cultural expressions flourish, in which cultural mixing and corporate collaboration intensify, and in which intra-regional consumption is set in motion. These developments have posed serious questions about the continuing plausibility of Euro-American cultural domination, and they necessitate the de-Westernization of the study of media and cultural globalization. Yet the degree to which the rise of East Asian media culture challenges West-centred power configurations remains a matter of debate-especially as new configurations of global governance in media culture have emerged which are subtly superseding the East-West binary, and permeating both Western and non-Western regions. This article analyses the rise of East Asian media cultures in terms of the governance of global media culture connectivity, with a particular focus on how the growing regional circulation of media products has promoted dialogic cross-border linkages.

Orientalism, as Edward Said used the term, can be defined as an ideology which promotes the 'West-and-Islam' dualism and the idea that 'Others are less human'. Since Said first published his ideas in 1978, however, the world seems to have become much more interdependent and political interrelations between the West and Islam have changed dramatically. Consequently this dualism, though more or less in place, has been influenced by escalating waves of globalisation and redistributed and reshaped in a different form. Some promising changes, as well as some additional dualistic tendencies, that can define neo-Orientalism are found in this new era. This paper attempts to analyse elements of change in traditional Orientalism. To portray a better future for our interdependent world some new approaches to identity, global ethics and global civil society are suggested. Eradicating the roots of Orientalism and Occidentalism alike and accepting, protecting and even promoting diversity are first steps towards countering the devastating threats that endanger humankind as a whole.

Post-colonial states in the Asian region have frequently been subject to political tensions derived from their multi-ethnic make-up and, what some have argued to be, the failure of states to adequately represent the interests of their ethnic minorities. This article will look at examples of where states in Asia have failed to adequately represent or otherwise incorporate their ethnic minorities as full and equal citizens. It also considers the range of responses to such perceived or actual state failure in adequately incorporating all citizens, including inter-ethnic and racial violence and separatist conflict. The article will conclude by considering conceptual and actual models of state organization intended to resolve racial and ethnic tensions in the Asian region.

Reviewing the literature on the domain of virtual communities, this research finds that there is still an important gap in the scholarly understanding of how institutions influence online spaces of interaction. The theme of institutions has been marginal to most of the academic research in the domain of virtual communities, with few exceptions. This paper proposes that an institutional perspective would permit a better understanding on the whys of online behaviours and explores the potential contributions of such an approach.

The focus here is on seeking out alternative modes of knowledge production by using inter-comparisons within East Asia and the Third World to establish a mutual frame of reference. This special volume introducing Paik Nak-chung, Korea's foremost critical intellectual, is just such an effort. Paik has worked both to determine the relationship between the problems facing Koreans and global issues and to examine the possibilities for solidarity by reflecting upon the theoretical and practical struggles of Koreans from a global perspective. If one of the major tasks confronting Asia's critical intellectuals is 'to create other critical routes of globalization' (Cho and Chen 2005), it could be argued that Paik Nak-chung has already been engaged in this type of activity since the 1960s.

In February 2008, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologised to Indigenous Australians for past injustices. The apology was presented as a turning point in the history of the nation. According to Rudd, 'there comes a time in the history of a nation when peoples must become fully reconciled to their past if they are to go forward with confidence to embrace their future'. The apology marked a new step in the reconciliation process in Australia, but as this article argues, the treaty issue - another controversial aspect of reconciliation - remains a major challenge to the Australian nation.

Diversity has become a key factor of societal transformation during the last couple of decades. It has challenged the notion of the nation and its traditional representation as one community of people sharing the same 'national values' (eg. Goldberg, 2002). Diversity raises the question how we can, as people with all our mutual differences of, amongst others, sexuality, race and religion, form a community that enables its members to develop themselves, to flourish and prosper. Migration, especially, has had a considerable bearing on the idea of pluralism and its implication for social and political processes of inclusion or exclusion in contemporary societies. Migration has entailed an increasing awareness of diversity within each nation and national community (Heerma van Voss & van der Linden, 2002; Horton, 1995). This special issue of National Identities assembles articles from different disciplines that try to understand what it means for people, around the world, to be citizens in rapidly changing national, social and political landscapes.

Inequality is far from being an unequivocal expression. Although one may say that the various meanings of the concept were somehow always present because of the link between equality and justice, modernity and its natural rights doctrine expanded its reach. Inequality became ultimately related to the material level of an unequal distribution of goods. Nowadays, this is not to be taken for granted anymore. The word "inequality" may be found applied not only to political or moral issues, but also to culture, gender, environment, education, race, or social esteem, to mention but a few. The sort of unifying substratum once given by the material background of the concept is now largely considered to be just one among many other components of inequality, so that when referred to, this type of inequality receives the specific label of "economic income inequality."

The paper considers the virtualization of sovereignty today in the context of the Arctic debates. These are debates in which various parties, including the Government of Canada, First Nations groups, Inuit, international organizations, scholars, policy-makers and others, use the term sovereignty in diverse and at times divisive ways. We investigate several of the epistemological and ontological stakes of these discussions. We draw attention to the ways in which sovereignty as an abstract concept is actualized in the course of social and political disputes in the North in the twenty-first century.

This article addresses a crucial dimension which has distinguished studies of colonialism in Malaysia from those of other formerly colonized lands: the lack of a comprehensive analysis of the ways in which the colonized thought and wrote about their colonial experiences. Aljunied argues that Malay intellectuals in the postwar period have indeed contributed to the formulation of theories about colonialism in Malaysia in particular and the Malay world in general. In demonstrating such a claim, this article directs its analytical gaze to a seminal text entitled Perjuangan Kita written by a Malay intellectual and activist, Dr Burhanuddin Al-Helmy (1911-1969). By exploring a variety of influences that shaped Burhanuddin's ideas, the methods he applied to systematically explain the roots and persistence of colonialism in the Malay world, and his definition and discussion of the causes and impact of colonialism, the article attempts to place Burhanuddin's ideas within the ranks of established Third World theories of colonialism in his time.

Examining two published narrative accounts of the signing of Treaty 8 in northwest Canada at the close of the nineteenth century, this essay highlights how the administrative practices and spatial discourses inscribed in the accounts of Charles Mair and Dr O C Edwards are implicated in the geographical fashioning of the Canadian north. The Treaty 8 Commissions of 1899 and 1900 were empowered by the Dominion Government of Canada to extinguish Aboriginal title to the vast territory of the Athabasca District. What the written narrative accounts of the treaty signing reveal are how the administrative practices of treaty making were strongly marked by the physicalities of travel, by the visual economies of spatial and cultural encounter, and by the recoding of the social and historical geographies of Aboriginal occupancy by an emergent national order. The accounts examined in the essay underscore how the geographies of northern Canada have been particularly drawn around the misapprehending of the patterns of Aboriginal land use and economy within governmental frames of knowledge.

In this article we examine the cosmopolitanization of national memory cultures as a matter of reflexive particularism, referring to negotiations over 'the national' driven by the endogenization of European norms and discourses. Reflexive particularism emerges from a historically specific memory imperative that issues two demands - first, that national polities reckon with the Other, and second, that they engage with, critique and challenge exclusionary or heroic modes of nationalism. Our findings, based on the analysis of official discourse and 60 open group discussions conducted in Austria, Germany and Poland, suggest that reflexive particularism is manifested in an ongoing negotiation between variable modes of national belonging and cosmopolitan orientations toward the supranational or pan-European. More specifically, reflexive particularism is expressed in co-evolving articulations of Europeanness and shared European memory practices that include: affirmative and ambivalent perspectives; sceptical narratives about nationhood (for example those that emphasize legacies of perpetratorship); and a disposition to (ex)change perspectives and recognize the claims of Others.

There have been two distinctive aspects to James Tully's approach to the study of imperialism over the years, and both are put to work in these remarkable volumes.1 The first is his belief in two seemingly contradictory claims: (i) that imperialism is much more pervasive than usually thought (conceptually, historically and practically); and yet (ii) that there are many more forms of resistance to it than usually appreciated. The second is the way Tully places the situation of indigenous peoples at the heart of his analysis.

This special issue features ethnographies that examine the trajectories of mobile people within particular places, moments and networks of connection. Critiquing the ready equation of cosmopolitanism with experiences of mobility, we examine the encounters of pilgrims, migrants, missionaries or members of a diaspora. Defining cosmopolitanism as a simultaneous rootedness and openness to shared human emotions, experiences and aspirations rather than to a tolerance for cultural difference or a universalist morality, the authors explore the degree to which mobility produces cosmopolitan sociability.

Recent trends of mass-level euroscepticism seriously challenge Deutsch's transactionalist theory that increased transnational interactions trigger support for further political integration. While transnational interactions have indeed proliferated, public support for European integration has diminished. This article aims to solve this puzzle by arguing that transnational interaction is highly stratified across society. Its impact on EU support therefore only applies to a small portion of the public. The rest of the population not only fails to be prompted to support the integration process, but may see it as a threat to their realm. This is even more the case as, parallel to European integration, global trends of integration create tensions in national societies. The following hypotheses are proposed: first, the more transnational an individual, the less she or he is prone to be eurosceptical; and second, this effect is more pronounced in countries that are more globalised. A multilevel ordinal logit analysis of survey data from the 2006 Eurobarometer wave 65.1 confirms these hypotheses.