National Global Imaginaries

This article looks at the relationship between globalization and nationalism through the eyes of the Angolan novelist Pepetela and his exploration of angolanidade, Angolan national identity. Two novels are compared: Mayombe, set during the anti-colonial struggle, and Predadores, set in the era of globalization. The comparison illustrates how and why the depiction of Angolan nationalism has changed

"Over the past three decades, relations between African emigrants and their home-states have been changing from antagonism to attempts to embrace and structure emigrant behaviors. This transformation in the conception of emigration and citizenship has hardly been interrogated by the growing scholarship on African and global migrations. Three of the most contentious strategies to extend the frontiers of loyalty of otherwise weak African states, namely dual citizenship or dual nationality, the right to vote from overseas, and the right to run for public office by emigrants from foreign locations are explored. Evidence from a wide range of African emigration states suggests that these strategies are neither an embrace of the global trend toward extra-territorialized states and shared citizenship between those at 'home' and others outside the state boundaries, nor are they about national development or diaspora welfare. Instead, they seem to be strategies to tap into emigrant resources to enhance weakened state power. The study interrogates the viability and advisability of emigrant voting and political participation from foreign locations, stressing their tendency to destabilize homeland political power structures, undermine the nurturing of effective diaspora mobilization platforms in both home and host states, and export homeland political practices to diaspora locations."

"Multiple citizenship has in recent decades moved from an unwanted phenomenon in international relations to a fairly common transnational status. Multiple citizenship has nevertheless so far been studied mainly as a political and juridical status by comparing national legislations. Much less notice has been given to actual dual citizens' citizen participation and construction of citizens' identities. Only when citizenship is studied as these kinds of practices do the hypothetic possibilities and problems associated with the status get their meanings and contents. This paper concentrates on examining dual citizens' identifications to their respective citizenships and how these affiliations transfer into possible citizen participation. Results are based on extensive analysis of survey (n = 335) and interviews (n = 48) carried out among dual citizens living in Finland. Contents and forms of dual citizens' national identification and citizen participation were reviewed through ideal types: resident-mononationals, expatriate-mononationals, hyphenationals, and shadow-nationals."

"The burgeoning literature on transitional justice, truth commissions, reconciliation and official apologies tends to ignore the conditions of settler states in which 'reconciliation' needs to take account of indigenous minorities. The settler colonialism literature is worth including in the general discussion because it is exceptionally reflective about political theory (the constitutional recognition of indigenous rights) and ethnogenesis (the origin and viability of both settler and indigenous identities), challenging mainstream liberalism, in particular, to account for difference beyond platitudes about multiculturalism. This article highlights the postcolonial critiques of the Australian governments' apology to the indigenous peoples of the country. The authors of these critiques seek to protect indigenous alterity from the Australian state, which they regard as irredeemably colonialist, especially in its liberal and progressive mode. The article suggests that Indigenous political agency transcends the resistance/co-option dichotomy presented in much of the apology's commentary."

"The historical and metaphysical connection between humans and the soil seems to be of vital significance to the recuperative power associated with the provision grounds, a relationship I trace by turning to Erna Brodber's allegorical novel, The Rainmaker's Mistake (2007). Drawing upon the work of Sylvia Wynter and others about the differing plots of the plantation and the provision grounds, this essay explores how Brodber challenges the plot of plantation narratives and employs allegory to excavate the roots of the provision grounds, particularly the figure of the yam. While roots are a generative metaphor for cultural origins, Brodber demonstrates that decay is the material way in which we know history has passed and thus is key to the articulation of time and nature itself, a position with profound implications for the region's historiography."

"Why and how do issues expire? This paper applies the concept of path dependency to issue-life cycle and argues that the manner in which an issue dies is closely associated with how it comes to life. This paper argues that, on the Access to Medicines issue, the first actors (1) to have called attention to a legal problem, (2) to have capitalised on the HIV/AIDs crisis, and (3) to have used the example of Africa, were also the first to have felt constrained by their own frame in their attempt to (1) look for economical rather than legal solutions, (2) expand the list of medicines covered beyond anti-AIDs drugs, and (3) allow large emerging economies to benefit from a scheme designed by countries without manufacturing capacities. In order to escape an issue in which they felt entrapped, issue-entrepreneurs worked strategically to close the debate in order to better reframe it in other forums."

"This article offers a historical materialist response to the "Clash of Civilizations" thesis put forth by Samuel Huntington. The thesis has merely been addressed by critical theorists, let alone Marxists, "en passant", thereby overlooking its persistent theoretical influence upon contemporary world politics. The essay thus seeks to extend historical materialism's critical endeavour by theoretically challenging Huntington's paradigm. It argues that Huntington's incoherent form of "civilizational" realism underpins the theoretical-empirical shortcomings of his thesis. Yet it consciously overlooks meta-theoretical flaws and follows Huntington's line of reasoning to challenge his more compelling arguments."

"The cultural charisma of the Sámi people has served to inscribe them in the nation myths of the Scandinavian states. This charisma was also built into the self-image of the Nordic countries when they established as a political organisation in the 1950s. While this charisma was to some extent created by leaders of the majority population, its symbolic value has also been used by the Sámi movement as a tool for political mobilisation. The global resistance by indigenous people towards colonialism resulted in a shift of the Sámi people's strategy from national to global action, and in the redefinition from a 'nature people' within the nation-state to an 'indigenous people' in a global legalistic discourse. At the same time, Sámi politicians strive to unite the different Sámi groups through a common homeland, Sápmi, which crosses the nation-state borders. The political territory of Sápmi can culturally be regarded as an imagined nation in the same way as a nation-state, even if it is scattered across four countries. The creation of a Sámi nation also faces the same kind of inter-ethnic problems as the nation-state."

By imagining their audiences, intellectuals invented and constructed the collective identities of nations and transnational communities like Europe or humankind. Four ideal types of intellectuals are outlined by describing them in their relation to politics: the intellectual as cosmopolitan ascetic; the intellectual as enlightened legislator; the intellectual as revolutionary; and the intellectual as the voice of a traumatic memory. These ideal types change over time in response to their focus of attention and their mode of communication. Because of changes in their media (from handwritten to printed books) and changes in their written language (from Latin to French and Italian, and further to vernacular languages), intellectuals were able to change views on past, present and future times. Today, they are involved in (civic) resistance but rarely in politics per se. By renewing the tension of the sacred and profane - the so-called axial-age revolution - contemporary intellectuals in Eastern Europe are decoupled from direct political power.

"This article considers the relationship between ethnic and racial minority rights and citizenship in Asia. The most ethnically divided and populous region in the world, Asia is home to some of the most contrasting state responses to ethnic minority assertions of diversity and difference. Asia is also awash with wide-ranging claims by geographically-dispersed ethnic minorities to full and equal citizenship. In exploring the relationship between ethnic minority rights claims and citizenship in Asia, this article considers the relevance of certain core assumptions in Western-dominated citizenship theory to Asian experiences. The aim is to look beyond absolutist West-East and civic-ethnic bifurcations to consider more constructive questions about what Asian and Western models might learn from one another in approaching minority citizenship issues."

"This paper offers a normative argument for reconfiguring borders that rests on a critique of intersecting logics bearing on security, incorporation, agency, subjectivity, encounter, and citizenship. Especially important to my critique is the mutually reinforcing relationship between border security and prevalent assimilationist and integrationist forms of incorporation associated with the dominant single-citizenship model. I offer instead an alternative framing of incorporation I call enfoldment, which is anchored in the contingent and negotiated agency and subjectivity of mobile persons and a multiversal understanding of societies. As I argue, one avenue for opening the possibilities of migrant agency and subjectivity is via what I term 'mediated passage'. It entails shielding migrants and travellers from the direct control of movement by states at borders, allowing for passage across borders mediated by civil society organizations possessing independent power and authority."

But with the enormous pressure to expand the current global nuclear fleet of 436 operating reactors to 958 by 2030,9 we don't hear much about the ongoing devastation wrought by the Chernobyl accident. A new narrative has taken hold, one that downplays the health and environmental impacts of Chernobyl and instead apportions more blame for the health problems of those in the fallout region on emotional factors like stress, poverty, and bad habits such as a poor diet, smoking, and drinking too much.

"This article entertains the possibility that new, locally-embedded cosmopolitanisms, critical of the violence inflicted by various forms of colonialism and globalization, are not just a matter of locus, or location, or topos, but also a question of the utopian. I begin with some autobiographically based observations related to a certain barely-documented social formation I witnessed as a young woman in colonial Rhodesia, and develop the scope of analysis by relating the notion of utopian solidarity among pariahs to cultural imaginings of three differently cosmopolitan cities. It will be proposed that what is at stake in defining utopian cosmopolitanism is a certain cultural metaphori city (a term that will be gradually explicated), encapsulated here in the process of tracing submerged similarities in the cultural histories of Harare, Ramallah and Cairo, and engaging with the work of Dambudzo Marechera, Mourid Barghouti, Alaa Al Aswany and Ahdaf Soueif."

"Historians of imperialism and postcolonial literary scholars have inherited a series of derogatory categories from colonial discourse, labels that were kept firmly in place by local elites in their anti-colonial cultural nationalism. In particular, in the colonial period the category of "mimic" was frequently used to keep distinctive social classes (and also ethnic groups) out of the political sphere. By continuing to recognize and debate mimicry, we indirectly inherit this negative bias. This article debates the ways in which cosmopolitan theory can help us to see the ambivalent mimic-man in a slightly different light from received opinion. If we re-classify colonial "mimics" as cosmopolitans or, more accurately, as local cosmopolitans, an array of new cultural and historical questions comes to the fore highlighting the relationships between elites and sub-elites, and the politics of representation in local contexts."

This paper focuses on the demands for autonomy of the Kogui, Arhuaco, Wiwa and Kankwamo peoples of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta with regard to control over their territories, self-determination, indigenous legal jurisdiction, management of the environment, food sovereignty, and political control through their own authorities. The main argument is that the autonomy of indigenous peoples is being influenced by the current context of local, national and international conflicts and other specific circumstances in the region in such a way as to require viewing autonomy as a complex process that transcends national and supranational legal frameworks. Indigenous autonomy is articulated within local, national and international dynamics and within processes of recognition of, and disregard for, indigenous rights - obliging us to understand it as a relational indigenous autonomy. It is relational because it is expressed in different ways depending on the interactions among different social actors and the specificities of the historical contexts.

When speaking of the Caribbean, one often finds it difficult to reconcile the singular term used to refer to it and its linguistic, social, historical and aesthetic plurality. Even if the archipelago has shared similar experiences of traumatic transportation and indentureship, the specificities of each island have hindered the emergence of a shared Caribbean identity. Emphasis has been put on the extinction of the indigenous Amerindian peoples, but Amerindian resilience has not been granted sufficient scope. Only a few writers have chosen to imaginatively return to that Amerindian past that precedes the trauma of forced transportation - a past that has almost receded out of collective memory, dominated as it has been by the African dimension. In the wake of Wilson Harris, Pauline Melville is one of the writers who have been trying to gain access to a collective identity that might be termed ante-colonial. With reference to the work of Melville, Jan Carew and Cyril Dabydeen, this article reads the presence of Amerindian culture in Caribbean literature as a renewed symbol of resistance to domination and a symbol of a shared identity, providing a stronger bond between the land and the people. It argues that this dtour through Amerindian culture finds its meaning in the desire to override colonial dispossession, thus providing a possible focal point of connection for the Caribbean at large.

This paper analyses the impact of cultural diversity on cultural policies through an international overview of case studies and reflections. Cultural diversity is generally perceived as a threat toward national cultures. However, this paper argues that (1) there exist substantial national differences in the way in which diversity is perceived and integrated as a policy paradigm; and (2) cultural diversity can be used as an instrument for reconfiguring cultural policies, regardless of the governmental level in question. The authors discuss whether cultural policies of diversity exist and what they are. They also examine the practical consequences of the emergence of a new paradigm concerning the redefinition and implementation of cultural policies within a triple context: the plurality of the territorial configurations of diversity, the simultaneous coexistence of several levels of understanding this issue, and the economic dimensions of cultural diversity.

Although the impressive diversity of the World Social Forum (WSF) is regularly noted, there has been little analytical work done on the degree to which the praxis of the WSF is enabling communicability across previously unbridged difference and how relations of power, particularly the coloniality of power, shape these interactions. Based on extensive participant observation at the WSF, this article analyses the 'open space' of the WSF as a 'contact zone' that, in different facets of this complex praxis, is both cosmopolitan and colonial. The author employs the differing conceptions of the contact zone, drawing on the work of Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Mary Louise Pratt, in dialogue with notions of coloniality and colonial difference arising from Latin American studies to illumine the analysis.

The problem studied consists of the relations between the interests and militancy and the differences in expectations of rewards in an agrarian reform settlement linked to the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST). In this settlement, many 'leaders' gathered the 'socialisation of production'. The situation arising from these circumstances produced the different reasons for engagement and different relations with the militancy. In the transition from the encampment to the settlement, it becomes important for the leaders to reinforce their positions both of 'leadership' and as mediators of policies and public resources, while it becomes difficult for those settled to maintain their previous investments in strong engagement. Consequently, these new conditions tend to increase the differences between the expectations of rewards from the militancy. These expectations can be pragmatic, such as viability as a farmer, or have a more symbolic character, which is associated with the struggle to create social organisation models.

It has been said that in Brazil the Catholic Church, by the adoption of the Theology of Liberation, chose the poor, but the poor chose the ever growing churches and sects of Pentecostal derivation. This paradox haunts the sociology of religion, in Brazil and elsewhere. This paper suggests to its solution a hypothesis inspired by Weber's 'Religious Directions of the World and their Directions' (the 'Zwischenbetrachtung').The social, political and economic efficacy of a given religious movement is essentially linked to its theodicy. In other words, the passage of religion to politics, if understood as the exit from religion as allegedly motivated by religion itself, involves a contradiction as it implies the elimination of its basic religious motivation. The inner-worldly success of a religious tendency depends, therefore, on the persistence of a properly religious 'rejection of the world'. In fact the whole of the Theology of Liberation movement falls under a certain cognitive penumbra, a kind of theological and philosophical syncretism, which constitutes both its main strength and its main weakness.