Bound from Head to Toe: The Sari as an Expression of Gendered National Identity

By Shauna Wilton

Volume 12, Issue 1, pages 190-205

Abstract

This article explores the clothing choices of Indian women and the relationship between clothing and the construction of the nation in contemporary India. Building on the existing literature on nationalism, combined with feminist and cultural studies approaches, the article uses interviews with young Indian women as an entry point into exploring the symbolic role of women and the sari within Indian nationalism. In doing so, this article questions to what extent choosing what to wear is an example of choosing the nation, whether it is a free and conscious choice, and whether it is appropriate to see these choices as constitutive of national identity or merely ornamental. In conclusion, I argue that something as ordinary as choosing what to wear has the potential to undermine dominant discourses surrounding the nation. While choosing to wear the sari does not always reflect a conscious choosing of the Indian nation, the clothing choices of Indian women do allow them to navigate complex social and cultural identities in their everyday lives and reflect the importance of the ‘everyday’ within theorising and explaining the construction and maintenance of nations.

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Pedagogy, Provocation and Paradox: Denmark’s Kunstnernes Studieskole

By Kerry Greaves

Volume 13, Issue 3, pages 373-393

Abstract

The last two decades of the nineteenth century witnessed an apparent revolution in art education in Denmark with the establishment of the ‘Free Schools’, a group of alternative schools that provided students with a choice other than the Royal Academy. The most important of these schools, the Kunstnernes Studieskole (Artists’ Study School, established in 1882), was subsidised by the government and headed by Laurits Tuxen, P.S. Krøyer, and Kristian Zahrtmann, Academy-trained artists who modeled the school’s education on the French atelier system. The debate that formed the Study School was at its core one of democratization, which was perceived to be synonymous with international modernism. Yet its artists functioned within a network of fluid roles designed to openly augment the existing pedagogical structure from within – a specifically Danish phenomenon. This article proposes an alternative framework for late-nineteenth-century Danish art education systems that situates the Study School within the context of Danish culture and as an extension of the social democratic tendencies proliferating at this time, which were significantly influenced by the preacher N.F.S. Grundtvig. Danish artists’ actual situation had more to do with assimilating a myriad of local and international impulses into a specifically Danish version of modernism.

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‘Whose Game They’re Playing’: Nation and Emotion in Canadian TV Advertising during the 2010 Winter Olympics

By Steven J. Mock

Volume 12, Issue 1, pages 206-222

Abstract

Through the examination of four commercials advertising products by transnational corporations broadcast to Canadian audiences during coverage of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, this article explores how certain images, particularly those related to hockey, appeal to emotion through the conduit of national identity. Drawing out recurring symbols and themes, I demonstrate that it is not one’s love of hockey in itself, or the excitement one feels watching hockey to which these commercials appeal. Rather, hockey serves in these commercials as a national ‘totem’, an empty signifier like a flag whose primary meaning lies in its status as emblem of the group, recognised in common by members of the group as encapsulating and organising the otherwise heterogeneous assortment of myths, symbols, and values that constitute group identity. What these commercials do, intentionally or not, is re-enact a ritual of almost religious function in which the national group reaffirms its agreement to be a group by unanimously experiencing the same emotion over the same object. The success of the advertisement rests in the ability of the advertiser to incorporate the product as a participant in the ritual; as a vital ingredient to the successful completion of the ritual, if not as an honorary non-human member of the group itself.

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