Nationalism and Decolonization

MoMA's C-MAP research program developed an extended focus on historical alliances such as Bandung, the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), pan-Africanism, pan-Arabism, and other south-south, east-east, and Third World nexuses. This focus has been part of a broader effort to consider methodological approaches that don't simply insert hitherto unacknowledged protagonists, events, and artworks into a global or Western hegemonic history. This conversation addresses such pasts, and their reverberations in the present, as they appear in Mohaiemen's media-based practice.

La presente tesis plantea investigar el desarrollo de proyectos urbanos en la ciudad palestina en tiempos posteriores a la ocupación, tomando un caso de estudio específico ubicado en la ciudad de Ramallah. El trabajo se basó en la suposición de aplicar cualquiera de las dos soluciones políticas disponibles y más probables: la solución de dos Estados o la solución de un Estado. Encontrar las ubicaciones potenciales para los proyectos urbanos había sido una de las misiones, especialmente dentro del contexto geopolítico palestino - israelí. La investigación destaca y clasifica grupos de zonas en la ciudad, que nunca habían sido incluidas en cualquier tipo o nivel de planificación palestino, y por lo tanto abre horizontes potenciales para la inclusión y el urbanismo.
Otra misión fue proponer un modelo de actividades para el plan maestro del proyecto urbano, que no solamente responde a las necesidades urgentes de la ciudad y los residentes palestinos, sino que también respeta la cultura local, la escala y la memoria del espacio. Asimismo, debe integrarse con la ciudad e invertir los efectos de la ocupación.
Metodológicamente, este trabajo utiliza una combinación de métodos de investigación (cuali y cuantitativos) y de enfoques proyectuales y predictivos (modelos), así como también un mapeo documental, análisis y desarrollo creativo.
El primer capítulo desarrolla la cuestión palestina israelí, el contexto geopolítico y sus efectos, con una visión detallada sobre la situación actual y anterior. El segundo capítulo plantea los marcos teóricos y conceptuales mediante el cual se desarrolla él trabajo de la tesis; los conceptos y los tipos de proyectos urbanos, los términos de post-ocupación y zonas potenciales, posteriormente, expone otros proyectos urbanos en Palestina, casos globales de proyectos urbanos en áreas de post-conflicto, y la deformación del estilo de arquitectura local de la ciudad. El tercer capítulo muesrta el caso del estudio: la ciudad de Ramallah; su historia, configuración, demografía, análisis urbano y diagnóstico. El cuarto capítulo explica los instrumentos de planificación aplicados en Cisjordania, a través de la exploración de los planes maestros de Ramallah, Jerusalén y zonas intermedias. El quinto capítulo expone suposiciones y proyecciones futuristas de la post-ocupación, explorando proyectos arquitectónicos, planos urbanos y proyecciones de otras disciplinas, así como resumiendo observaciones sobre datos explorados. El sexto capítulo identifica, localiza y mapea las zonas potenciales. El séptimo capítulo explora la zona del proyecto: Beit Eil la colonia israelí y Beitin la aldea palestina; sus nombres, historia, arqueología, características, demografía y posteriormente la configuración y posición urbana de Beit Eil. El octavo capítulo presenta el plan maestro del proyecto urbano: su ubicación, función específica, describe las ideas e intenciones detrás del diseño, sintetiza las actividades del proyecto, la estrategia de implementación metodológica y de gestión, las estrategias proyectuales adoptadas y, por último, la documentación grafica del del diseño que incorpora el proyecto.

In this journal article I explore student-constructed narrative interpretations of Canada’s History Hall. Drawing from an empirical investigation that included student visitors, as well as adult facilitators at the Canadian Museum of History, I reveal the “big ideas” that students (n=26) constructed about Canada’s past, and how these related to their museum experience.

This inquiry is part of a larger investigation (supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council) that explores: 1) how the Canadian History Hall represents such difficult topics in history as First Nation settler colonial experiences and Residential Schools; 2) the national narratives that students construct from such a learning experience; and 3) the potential role for museum spaces in enabling Historical Thinking.

Review by Vicki Angelaki in Performing Ethos
"The two books that this review is concerned with are representative of a welcome trend in the recent period, especially following the ‘Long Summer of Migration’ (2015): bridging the empathy gap and promoting involvement. The combined coverage of these volumes is remarkable. Another shared quality of these otherwise very different titles is the lucid critical perspectives they bring to what has been one of the most urgent, but also challenging topics developing in contemporary theatre studies.

Upon the assassination of Qassem Soleimani and Abu Mahdi Al-Muhandis, the US president stated, “We took action last night to stop a war. We did not take action to start a war.” His statement tapped into the logic of preemption, a prevailing paradigm by which the war on terror was launched two decades ago. The underlying assumptions embedded in his statement reflect trends in security discourse (Gusterson and Besteman 2019) more broadly: that imperialism is morally defensible, that preemptive aggression prevents rather than provokes violence, and that social and historical layers can be glossed in order to elicit confusion and consent by the American public for “peace” via perpetual war.

But the Iraqi people are clear on the central aim of mass protests this year: they are simply calling for a government that represents them, and they want imperial forces out of their lives.

Though not indigenous to the Eastern Mediterranean, the national state model has had enormous impact in shaping the trajectory of political and social change within the region (Tilly 1992). Political entrepreneurs in this region have responded to the emergence of national states in a number of ways and experimented with a plethora of understandings of nationhood and statehood. They have tried to sequence state-building, nation-building, and territorializing policies in ways that at once paralleled and diverged from their counterparts in Western Europe (Kitromilides 1989; Mylonas 2013). Novel institutional designs for sovereignty continue to appear to this day. Some of these designs, such as the emergence of the Islamic State, an unbounded but still territorial de facto state, were seen as direct challenges and dangers to the international system. Others, such as the development of a vast channel of refugees and migrants connecting the region with the capital centers of EU member states, have been even more difficult to assess.

Dünü, bugünü ve yarını ile eleştirel aklımızın süzgecinden geçirmek zorunda olduğumuz milliyetçilik nedir? Nereden doğdu, hangi yollardan geçti ve moden ulus devletlerin kurulmasını nasıl sağladı? Bugünün politik ikliminde neden tekrar canlandı ve etki alanını genişletti?  Elinizdeki kitap bir tarih kitabı değildir. Tam aksine tarihselliğine göz atan ama özünde güncel olarak bir problem haline gelen milliyetçiliği anlama gayretidir. Bunun için modernite bağlamına yani dünyayı dönüştürüp şimdiki haline getiren iktisadi, toplumsal ve siyasi süreçlere milliyetçiliği sağlam bir şekilde oturtmamız gerekir. 

Milliyetçi, ayrılıkçı ve kimileri tarafından neo-milliyetçi olarak adlandırılan hareketlerin gelişimi, gittikçe küreselleştiği düşünülen bir dünyada yeniden ivme kazandı. Bu tür hareketlerde Doğu’dan Batı’ya, Güney’den Kuzey’e bir canlanma gözleniyor. Buna ek olarak, Avrupa’da, Avusturalya’da, ABD’de ve daha birçok başka yerde, ideolojilerinin ana bileşeni milliyetçilik olan aşırı sağın siyasi faaliyetlerine verilen siyasi destekte de bir artış görülüyor.

Milliyetçilik modern ulus devletleri yönetenler tarafından, ayakta kalma stratejisine güç veren bir kuvvet olarak algılanıyor ve ihtiyaç duyuluyor. Etnisite, kimlik, ulusalcılık, yurtseverlik, muhafazakarlık gibi doğrudan milliyetçiliğe gönderme yapmayan mahçup kavramlar da her geçen gün daha popüler oluyor.

Milliyetçiliğin demokrasi kavramı ile ilişkisi de problemli. Biri dışlayıcı bir tutum takınırken, ikincisi ötekini tanıyan, konuşmak ve tartışmak isteyen ve varlığını farklı görüş ve toplulukların ifade gücüne dayayan siyasi bir kavram.

Milliyetçiliğin inşa süreci, özünde çok yeni tarihselliği ve bütün etrafında dolanan kavramlarla ilişkisi enine boyuna elinizdeki kitap boyunca tartışılıyor. Günlük sosyolojik hayatımızı, modern ulus devletlerin politik duruşlarını, sınırları, sınır ötesi ve içindekilerle ilişkilerimizi ve en sonunda küresel dünyanın bütün problemlerinin içinde bulunan milliyetçiliği daha fazla tartışmaya ihtiyacımız var.

This chapter examines the process by which Puerto Rican nationalists engaged with the Olympic Movement in their struggle for decolonization. Sotomayor shows not only shifting meanings of colonial Olympic sport for nationalists, but, more generally, that the Olympic Movement has been used and serves as a platform to negotiate nationalism and decolonization. Thus, this chapter displays the intricacies of colonialism, nonsovereign nationalism, and decolonization struggles within the Olympic Movement in the Caribbean.

FR Cette présentation, réalisée dans le cadre du séminaire du GRIC (Groupe de recherche sur l'Italie contemporaine) du Centre d'Histoire de Science Po Paris, essaie de montrer, d'un côté, quels éléments ont contribué à développer un sentiment d'italianité chez les Juifs de Libye, de l'autre, quels facteurs ont contribué, au contraire, à développer un sentiment d'exclusion de la société libyenne après l'indépendance du pays.

ENG This presentation, given within the framework of the GRIC (Research Group on Contemporary Italy) seminar at the History Center of Science Po Paris, tries to show, on the one hand, what elements contributed to developing a feeling of Italianness among the Jews of Libya, on the other, what factors contributed, on the contrary, to developing a feeling of exclusion from Libyan society after the independence of the country.

The 1920s were a vital period for the evolution of Christianity in China, during which the Anti-Christian Movement of 1922–7 brought Christianity under serious attack. A new conception of nationalism, influenced by Lenin's theory of imperialism, dramatically changed the way in which Christianity (and especially mission schools) was regarded, from being viewed as a positive factor in China's modernization to being seen as a hated cultural imperialist invasion. The period from 1924 to 1927 featured the demand for the restoration of educational rights, during which the identity of mission schools was used to stir up nationalist hatred. This article takes Tientsin Anglo-Chinese College (TACC) of the London Missionary Society (LMS) as a case study. It examines how the TACC missionary authorities responded to nationalistic sentiments emerging within the college and in society, and how they reacted towards the compulsory registration and consequent abolition of compulsory school religious education. It explores key issues behind the interaction between mission schools and the socio-political context, such as how TACC reconstructed its identity during the process of school registration, and how it negotiated with the Ministry of Education under the tension between two divergent approaches of Christianizing and nationalizing mission schools, a tension which became acute as a consequence of the application of regulations making school religious education and practice optional.

States of Denial: Katanga, Rhodesia, and the Bantustans This book compares and contrasts the failed independence bids of Katanga, Rhodesia, Transkei, and Bophuthatswana. Pulling out these four would-be states and analyzing them together has never been done before. On their surfaces they appear to be quite different from one another, but this book argues that these four independence bids were linked in certain fundamental ways, something that was understood by both their friends and enemies at the time. All four were all despised as outcasts by international society, and they were all despised for essentially the same reasons, as each presented very serious, related challenges to the then dominant paradigm of African anticolonial nationalism. Those with a stake in the postwar African state system succeeding or failing viewed the successes or failures of these would-be states as vitally important to their respective causes. As a result, the importance of these four independence bids transcended the regional politics of central and southern Africa and all four were seen as global concerns. As examined in this book, the battles over these bids forced out into the open debates over the meanings of African authenticity, autochthony, and self-determination. States of Denial is organized around a series of contests over the expressions of sovereignty made by these aspirant states and their friends abroad, and their enemies' reactions to those expressions; these flashpoints included the statuses of their foreign representatives and missions, the commemorations of their independence days, and efforts to extort recognition from neighboring states. Sometimes these were rather prosaic struggles, such as the impoundment of Basotho sheep in Transkei, but other times they could spark brightly, as with the controversies over celebrities performing at the Sun City resort in Bophuthatswana. In unpacking the claims and counter claims, representations and counter representations, and performances and counter performances, this book brings forward why the fates of these four rightist would-be states were seen to be so important at the time and why their precedents continue to matter to this day.

Lat utilises the tensions of self-representation in autobiographical comics to construct a visual narrative that engages with critiques of the colonial impact on developing Malaysian identity. Through the characterisation of Mat, Lat claims ownership of a Malaysian lifestyle and identity that forms the foundations of the postcolonial nation. The natural use of stereotype and caricature in comic art allows Lat to explore how unity in a nation must acknowledge diversity, while multilingualism in the text demonstrates a functioning version of racial hybridity. Through the use of visual metaphor Lat ties colonial power and urbanisation in the anthropomorphised tin dredge and explores the resulting tensions between it and Mat’s Kampung identity, critiquing the impact such forces had on the loss of rural Malaysian identity.

Very little has been written on Anglophone Caribbean theatre (the few publications include work by Judy Stone, Errol Hill, Richardson Wright, Rex Nettleford, and Wycliffe and Hazel Bennett). As for theatre from the French-speaking Caribbean, it also remains an understudied field. A few book-length studies (Bérard, Sahakian, Artheron) on theatre from the French Caribbean (Martinique, Guadeloupe and French Guyana) have emerged in recent years; however, the extraordinary and rich theatre tradition of Haiti has almost been entirely neglected by scholars and critics of Caribbean theatre. Yet drama, in the form of dance theatre, music theatre, various forms of ritual theatre, political theatre, and national pantomimes, has not only been at the heart of the Caribbean literary and cultural sensibility. The genre in its various forms has played a major role in nationalist movements across the Caribbean, and in attempts at cultural decolonization viewed as indispensable to the process of political and social decolonization. This paper focuses on ritual theatre during the decades of the 1930s to the 1970s in the English- and French-speaking Caribbean, an era in playwriting and staging marked by returns to the Haitian Revolution; major investments in history; ancestral recuperation; politics and traditional culture; and cultural decolonization through the project of rewriting colonial narratives. I argue that ritual theatrical forms, enlisting Afro-derived Caribbean ontologies, reflected the importance of the sacred in affecting the material conditions of existence in the colonized post-slavery societies of the Caribbean.