Featured weekly article: The Politics of Identity and Mimetic Constructions in the Philippine Transnational Experience

The Politics of Identity and Mimetic Constructions in the Philippine Transnational Experience

By Sharon Orig

Volume 6, Issue 1, pages 49-68

Abstract

As Filipinos traverse transnational space, the Filipino ethnic identity becomes enmeshed in a politics of identity. Filipinos witness how their identities are eroded, subordinated and, sometimes, corrupted. Identity politics relegates Filipinos to second-class citizens whenever other nationalities view Filipinos as racially inferior or as they sexualise and objectify the Filipino image. Racial prejudice at large may lead Filipinos to expunge their own ethnic identity and crave for an identity that is not their own. Identity issues are therefore relevant to Filipino migration. When reflecting on identity politics, it is crucial to consider the unique experiences relevant to a people’s race and nationality. Literature has the capacity to take snapshots of the ethnic and nationalistic experience and transpose them into creative writing. These writings inevitably reflect the interplay of politics, nationalism, and ethnic identity in the migrant experience. Migration narratives thus become important in unearthing the identity politics that transpire on a global scale. This paper describes some of the issues concerning Filipino ethnic identity in global transnationalism as established from three contemporary narratives.

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Featured weekly article: Defending National Identity and Interests: The Lega Nord’s Asymmetric Model of Globalisation

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Defending National Identity and Interests: The Lega Nord‘s Asymmetric Model of Globalisation

By Michel Huysseune

Volume 10, Issue 2, pages 221-233

Abstract

As a movement defending the interests of the wealthier northern regions of Italy, the Lega Nord proposes a nation-building discourse emphasising the successful insertion of Padania (i.e. northern Italy) in the global economy. While its rhetoric exalts the virtues of a liberal economic model, in recent years, the party has also defended the exclusive right of Padania to economic protection. This economic protectionism finds a parallel in the party’s defense of cultural identity, although this identity equally expresses the capacity of Padanians to participate in the global economy. This defence intends to assign Padanians a privileged position in their territory and hence proposes discriminatory practices towards outsiders, especially immigrants. The party thus solves the tension between its legitimisation of and resistance against globalisation by proposing an asymmetric model of globalisation that envisions an internal and international political order based on unequal rights and obligations – and thus privileges for Padania.

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Cultural Constructions of Nation and Nationality

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By Dr. Michael Goodrum, Department of History, Canterbury Christ Church University

Nations exist as constructed spaces, both geographically and emotionally. Political projects of defining borders and allocating national identity to the incumbents of those spaces, as in President Woodrow Wilson’s rhetoric of ‘self-determination’ after the First World War, can only do so much. The national spaces carved out by Wilson were homogenous, a move away from the polyglot empires of the long nineteenth century such as the Habsburg and the Ottoman. Nationalist projects have often fallen back on mythic histories to provide a sense of permanence, the notion that rather than a political construct imposed on the landscape, this space is historically ‘ours’, and to foster a sense of community among those who live there. Language plays a key part in this, as do the products of language such as literature, both academic and popular.

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

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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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Featured weekly article: Pedagogy, Provocation and Paradox: Denmark’s Kunstnernes Studieskole

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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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