Author Archives: Eviane

Featured weekly article: Bent Twigs and Olive Branches: Exploring the Narratives of Dissident Israeli Jews

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Bent Twigs and Olive Branches: Exploring the Narratives of Dissident Israeli Jews

By Katie Attwell

Volume 13, Issue 1, pages 20-37

Abstract

This article explores symbolic boundaries and identity‐formation of the ‘ethnonational Us’, using narrative analysis of eleven Israeli‐Jewish dissidents. The hegemonic nationalist discourse in Israel – Zionism – constructs the dissidents’ identities as the ‘Virtuous Us’, yet these individuals genuinely try to connect with the ‘Demonized Palestinian Other’. I suggest that the dissidents attempt to use alternative national identity discourses to overcome symbolic boundaries. I highlight inconsistencies within individual dissidents’ narratives and attribute them to the employment of multiple discourses, suggesting that some discourses fail to coherently reconcile ‘national’ history with the well‐being of the Other, whilst others repel dissidents by appearing to negate or destroy their identities. The dissidents, therefore, cannot use the available discourses to fully overcome symbolic boundaries. Only the hegemonic nationalist discourse can offer a self‐evident and compelling enunciation of the dissidents’ political reality, leading one insightful dissident to conclude that there is ‘no way out’ of his dilemma.

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Featured weekly article: Invisible Americans: Migration, Transnationalism, and the Politics of Difference in HIV/AIDS Research

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Invisible Americans: Migration, Transnationalism, and the Politics of Difference in HIV/AIDS Research

By Thurka Sangaramoorthy

Volume 8, Issue 2, pages 248-266

Abstract

Using the scholarship on transnationalism and citizenship, this paper examines the politics of difference in HIV/AIDS prevention programmes in the United States and their impact on Haitian migrants and immigrants. It finds that there is a tremendous amount of complex movement of knowledge production and expertise among various constituents who work in the field of HIV/AIDS, and these individuals circulate ideas and technologies of HIV/AIDS across different fields in multiple ways. Through these circulations, information about HIV/AIDS becomes entangled in the debates about relevant knowledge bases, and as a result, questions over culture and modernity. This paper traces how such discourses become framed under the rubric of risk and difference and operate at the level of situated experience. Through ethnographic fieldwork observations and interviews, this paper argues that notions of individual responsibility in HIV/AIDS risk management often become inseparable from notions of racial, ethnic and immigrant identity.

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Featured weekly article: The Emergence of a New Form of Mexican Nationalism in San Antonio, Texas

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The Emergence of a New Form of Mexican Nationalism in San Antonio, Texas

By Luis Xavier Rangel-Ortiz

Volume 11, Issue 3, pages 384-403

Abstract

This article explores the role played by a growing community of Mexican national entrepreneurs who are crafting a new form of Mexican nationalism in San Antonio, Texas. This population of Mexican business people is growing in size and influence in the city. The experiences of Mexican entrepreneurs differ from understood forms of Mexican immigration and acculturation to the United States. They differ from previous waves of affluent groups of political and religious Mexican refugees that flourished in San Antonio from 1908 through the 1940s. The integration and cultural adaptation experiences of Mexican entrepreneurs represent a new form of Mexican nationalism that engages both Mexican and American nationalisms in a bidirectional acculturation process. Blending attitudes, values, beliefs, and behaviours of both countries represent a new form of Mexican and American culture emerging in San Antonio at the beginning of the twenty‐first century. To better understand the experiences and dynamics of these business people, this study builds on Pierre Bourdieu’s principles of capital and power.

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Featured weekly article: Ethnoregionalism, Multicultural Nationalism and the Idea of the European Third Way

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Ethnoregionalism, Multicultural Nationalism and the Idea of the European Third Way

By Alberto Spektorowski

Volume 7, Issue 3, pages 45-63

Abstract

While the idea of a Europe of its peoples, or a post‐nation‐state ‘regionalist Europe’ is largely applauded by liberal, radical democratic, and post‐colonial theorists, who welcome this development as an antidote to narrow nationalism, ideologues of the New Right had adopted this idea to their exclusionist political design. Based on what can be defined as ‘multiculturalism of the Right’, the New Right proposes a new European nationalist resurrection based upon the idea of the reemergence of multiple European organic identities that would set a cultural barrier against immigrant communities. In order to elaborate this plan the New Right makes use of the intellectual contribution of old anti‐liberal integralist sources at the fringes of fascism. The latter set the path for a European ‘third way’ in the 1930s and the New Right attempts to reestablish this trend in a post‐modern Europe. This article does not claim that Europe of the peoples is an anti‐liberal project, but asks to heed ‘unexpected’ political uses of the idea.

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Featured weekly article: Sovereign Dignity, Nationalism and the Health of a Nation: A Study of China’s Response in Combat of Epidemics

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Sovereign Dignity, Nationalism and the Health of a Nation: A Study of China’s Response in Combat of Epidemics

By Sung-Won Yoon

Volume 8, Issue 1, pages 80-100

Abstract

This paper seeks to understand the role of nationalism in China’s policy towards the combat of emerging infectious diseases. By locating nationalism as a factor which facilitates or impedes global governance and international collaboration, this paper explores how nationalism influences China’s political decision‐making. Given her historical experience, China has in its national psyche an impulse never to become ‘the sick man of the East’ again. Today, China’s willingness to co‐operate with international bodies emanates out of reputational concerns rather than technical‐medical considerations. This was clearly manifested in her handling of two epidemics in recent years: the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and HIV/AIDS episodes. This paper concludes that China’s nationalism plays an inhibiting role in China’s attempts to further incorporate herself into the architecture of global health governance in the long run.

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