Subverting rules and reinforcing stereotypes: Italianness in Madonna of the Seven Moons

This article focuses on a key Gainsborough costume melodrama, Madonna of the Seven Moons (1944). Following the critical revaluation of the ‘woman's film’, feminist film scholars have celebrated Madonna's feminine aesthetics and extravagant Italian setting, seen as an alternative to the austerity of Britain's wartime self‐definition. Using this position as a point of debate, I explore some hitherto ignored implications of the film's representation of Italianness, arguing that Madonna actually reinforces national boundaries by relying on long‐established notions of ‘Britishness’ and ‘Italianness’, and owes its box‐office success to the validation of Italy's ambivalent place in British fantasy.     

Thank you Jah Jah fe give me this a colour: Yellowman's revalorization of the dundus

In 1982, Winston ‘Yellowman’ Foster rose to prominence as Jamaica's king of dancehall reggae and popularized the music genre internationally in the wake of Bob Marley's death. As a dundus, or black person with albinism, Yellowman challenged colonial-derived Jamaican social codes that questioned his blackness and masculinity. By using white society's stereotypes of black hypersexuality and symbols of blackness derived from Rastafari and its ideological forebears, Yellowman was able to transform the dundus identity by portraying himself as African, black, and included in what Carnegie in ‘The Dundus and the Nation’ (1996) calls the imaginary racially homogeneous (i.e. black) Jamaican nation. Furthermore, through his performance of slack or sexually themed songs Yellowman contested embedded cultural definitions of the dundus as impotent and instead successfully represented the body with albinism as the sexually desirable ‘modern body.’ This paper uses interpretive methodologies from interrelated fields such as cultural studies, religious studies and anthropology in recognition that the context of Yellowman's racial critique is found not only in his songs but in his life story as well. Therefore it draws on ethnographic fieldwork, textual analysis of song lyrics and a study of the discourse on Yellowman in the popular and scholarly literature.     

Jewish Geopolitics: Nationalism and the Ties between the State and the Land

Professor Yosseph Shilhav's article in this issue of National Identities entitled ‘Jewish Territoriality between Land and State’ is an important addition to the literature on territoriality and national sovereignty. His carefully researched and insightful study of the religious affinity between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel is especially timely because of the urgency that the present intifada has given to the debate within Israel over the political future of the West Bank and Gaza. What is most provocative, as well as innovative, is Dr Shilhav's thesis that the clash of opinion within Israel over the solution to the Occupied Territories is not, as commonly understood, a political debate between ‘hawks’ and ‘doves’, but is rooted in differences of religious interpretation concerning the ‘sanctity of the Land’. It is with this thesis that I take issue.     

National art and Britain made real: the London 2012 Olympics opening ceremony

Danny Boyle's opening ceremony for the London 2012 Olympics presented an extraordinary spectacle to the watching world. This article is about what it said to people in Britain, how it said it and why. By comparing (1) Boyle's version of a new Jerusalem with William Blake's ‘Jerusalem’, and (2) the content of the ceremony with the realisation of Britain in works of art around Blake's time as analysed in Anthony D. Smith's The Nation Made Real, it is possible to see how Boyle reworks old themes and where he breaks new ground. There follow discussions of the ceremony's reception according to polling evidence, its broad-left political message, and the singular character of an event that sparked something akin to a moment of ‘collective effervescence’.     

The dragon is not always red: the extreme right and ultra-nationalism in Wales

By focusing on the ultra-nationalism of the recently defunct Welsh Defence League (WDL), which in turn had a direct influence on the formation of its more infamous relation the English Defence League, this paper re-examines the long-entrenched discourses of competing nationalisms in Wales. By doing so, it highlights a tendency to emphasise only left-leaning cultural and linguistic nationalist types in that country's historiography, as opposed to the more violent, albeit minority, racist/new racist varieties to be found amongst recent extreme right groupings. Such extreme right antipathy in Wales is not Anglophobic but is directed rather at the ‘substantial numbers of immigrants and minorities … [who] have arrived as a result of empire and its postcolonial aftermath’, particularly those who are Islamic. By taking this new perspective on a heretofore generally ignored, but by no means insignificant Welsh subaltern group, this work further underlines the theoretical difficulties in understanding nationalism(s) generally. More importantly, the paper concludes by tracking the newer and smaller far right groups to have emerged in Wales in the wake of the WDL's collapse. It argues that these derivative groups and the far right ideology which they represent are likely to remain marginalised but still need to be monitored closely.     

The Modern Colonial Politics of Citizenship and Whiteness in France

While there is no blatantly racist discourse among the French political class per se, the modern politics of citizenship in France is rooted in France's racialized colonial legacy. Upon critical examination, contemporary French political discourse and policy implementations indeed speak to France's colonial past. The concept of ‘otherness’ is situated at the centre of French political discourse, and is manifested in constructions of whiteness. ‘Otherness’ has created a double standard for legal non-European immigrants compared with French and European citizens. The politics of integration and assimilation are founded on the ideological backdrop of universality, which falsely represents French society in colour-blind terms. This is evident in both moderate and extremist political party rhetoric in regards to new policies of immigration, citizenship and nationality. We contend that the contemporary political discourses in France closely resemble the colonial period in spite of (and precisely because of) France's historical amnesia. In this article, we explore the redefinition of French citizenship as an expansion of whiteness as rooted in the concept of ‘otherness’. In so doing, we contextualize the contemporary discourse of inclusion, exclusion, citizenship, and whiteness on the backdrop of France's colonial legacy.     

Come get these memories: gender,history and racial uplift in Bill Condon's Dreamgirls

On the release of the screen adaptation of Dreamgirls (2006), ex-Motown songwriter William ‘Smokey’ Robinson fielded speculations about corruption at America's most successful black-owned business. In the broader context of racial inequalities in media ownership and distribution, this article asks how spectacles of hard-won individual success, juxtaposed sharply against sexually and financially corrupt ‘music moguls’, continue to shape popular mythologies of the US music industry. In particular, the article focuses on the ways that sexual combat, corrupt masculinities and the politics of respectability inform Dreamgirls’ dramatization of the shift from pre-integration to post-Civil Rights America. Finally, the notion of post-racial discourse is used to make sense of the competing historical interpretations at work in the film and its critical reception, especially with regard to the use of past entertainment icons to make sense of Beyoncé Knowles’ and Jennifer Hudson's own success stories. Throughout, the article argues that myths of meritocracy cannot be separated from the racialized and gendered cultures of production that continue to shape the contemporary repackaging of popular histories and musical genres.     

‘A Geography of Racism’: Internal Orientalism and the Construction of American National Identity in the Film Mississippi Burning

This article examines the contribution of the film Mississippi Burning to the construction of American national identity within the context of the discourse of internal orientalism. This discourse consists of a tradition of representing the American South as fundamentally different from the rest of the United States, and an important strand of this tradition involves construing ‘the South’ as a region where racism, violence, intolerance, poverty and a group of other negative characteristics reign. In contrast, ‘America’ is understood as standing for the opposite of these vices. Mississippi Burning continues this tradition by creating a ‘geography of racism’, juxtaposing the brutality of white Southerners with the morality of two FBI agents sent to Mississippi to investigate the disappearance of three civil rights workers. A variety of the film's devices, including the comparison between the racist white Southerners and the FBI agents, reproduces an American national identity that stands for tolerance, justice and peace.     

One of us? Reaction formation and inclusion as a strategy in the ethnic state

Many states question how to manage burgeoning migration. This is particularly problematic for ethnic states whose foundation myths imagine the state as the home for the nation. In this paper, we argue that ethnic states engage a type of defense mechanism, ‘reaction formation’, as part of migration policy to distract attention from threats to the claimed ethnic homogeneity that undergirds the reason for the state's existence. Using Israel as a case of a planned ethnic state, we show how a state develops a spectrum of membership models to incorporate ‘others’ into the nation-state. We suggest that Israel could conceivably devise some arrangement to incorporate the several hundred thousand labor migrants currently resident there. We argue that the state is reluctant to recognize these migrants as ‘Israeli’ because to do so would reveal a hidden truth: Israel may be becoming more Israeli than Jewish and, thus, the recognition of labor migrants and their children provokes questions about Israel's very reason for existence, that is, being a Jewish state.     

Marketing an imagined Muslim woman: Muslim Girl magazine and the politics of race,gender and representation

This article examines the magazine Muslim Girl (started publication 2007) and explores how the representations on the magazine's pages construct a particular type of identity for Muslim women: an ‘idealized’ Muslim woman who is both North American/Western and Muslim. Such a woman is portrayed as liberal, educated, fashionable, a ‘can-do’ woman, who is also committed to her faith. This ‘ideal’ woman is situated squarely as a neo-liberal subject in an increasingly consumerist world: she is ‘marketable’ (and marketed) as the ‘good Muslim’ (Mamdani, 2004) and is positioned as the ‘familiar stranger’ (Ahmed, 2000) in North America. This so-called ‘modern’ Muslim (read: ‘good Muslim’) is juxtaposed both against the ‘fundamentalist’ Muslim (read: ‘bad Muslim’) and the ‘normalized’ white North American subject. Against the discourse of post 9/11 nationalism and within the context of (gendered) Orientalism, this article argues that such idealized representations present easily recognizable tropes, which serve important political, ideological and cultural purposes within North American society. An analysis of these representations – and the purposes which they serve – provides an important window into the nuances of the structured discourses that seek to control and discipline the gendered Muslim body. On the one hand, the representations in Muslim Girl focus on the so-called ‘integrated North American Muslim’ – a ‘modern’ or ‘good’ Muslim – within the context of the multicultural, neo-liberal and post 9/11 nation-state. On the other hand, these representations also highlight examples of Muslim women, who seemingly remain committed to their faith and community. Such representations of hybridized North American Muslims speak powerfully to the forces – ideological, cultural, political and social – that are at play in the post 9/11 world. In analyzing the representations found in Muslim Girl, this paper provides an insight into some of these forces and their implications.     

‘Being while black’: resistance and the management of the self

‘Being while black’ is ultimately an ‘everyday revolution’, Despite the fact that people manage their selves by their own choosing, especially as their desires are being shaped (Foucault, 1977), their selves remains the basic revolutionary unit. Foucault's oeuvre on power and concept of dressage is utilized to explain racial profiling of blacks of what I call ‘racial dressage’, intended primarily to discipline the ‘black body’ (el-Khoury, 2009). In this paper, I argue that despite this false sense of presence of power and internalized social-control, blacks actively construct their day-to-day activities as a discursive object of resistance. Critical awareness to racial oppression is in itself is a form of opposition to it (Collins, 1990). I argue that social control and resistance are coproduced. Using discursive analysis of interviews I identified the following modes of resistance: disposition to steadiness (constituting an ethical self, sustaining an internal dialogue, and emotional management), rejecting criminalizing identities, discursive consciousness, refusing the spatial power, and lastly disbelief in the system. Ultimately, blacks live against ‘themselves’ and this is because the soul that has become the prison of the body, is being dismantled (Luxon, 2008).     

The institutional concealment of the Romanies’ culture: the ongoing legacy of Fascist Italy

This paper presents the case of the Romanies in Italy and the ‘forgotten’ nature of their genocide. The crimes committed by the Fascist regime towards these peoples during the Second World War were not disclosed until recently. In past decades it was commonly believed that Fascism had targeted Romanies merely as a problem of ‘public order’, rather than as a racial issue. This study argues that a lack of official acknowledgement, together with recent authoritarian approaches towards them (such as the introduction of 2008 ‘Nomad Emergency’ and the ongoing adoption of the highly criticized ‘camps policy’), could all be interpreted as an indirect consequence of the government's incapacity to deal with a shameful past and its unbroken ties. The existence of ‘gaps’ in Italian collective memory is now harming the health of Italy's democratic polity, allowing racism to re-emerge, while resuscitating a deep-seated belief in the ‘legendary generosity’ of Italians.     

England? Whose England? (Re)constructing English identities in Julian Barnes and W. G. Sebald

This article is an interdisciplinary look at notions of identity construction. Focusing on ‘Englishness’, it examines theories of identity formation, memory creation and nation-building alongside travel writing and notions of the picturesque. The focus of the debate throughout is on two novels of the 1990s: Julian Barnes’ dystopian England, England of 1998 and W. G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn of 1995 (English translation, 1998). Both novels play with traditional ideas of national identities and stereotypes by presenting their readers with the literal ‘construction’ of alternative versions of England and the English.     

Dignity,happiness and being able to live a ‘normal life’ in the UK – an examination of post-accession Polish migrants' transnational autobiographical fields

This article examines data from a qualitative study of post-accession Polish migrants living in the UK. We examine themes from our interviews such as ‘dignity’, ‘normality’, ‘happiness’ and the ‘affordability’ and ‘ease’ of life in the UK (compared to Poland). We focus on the autobiographical or intra-personal discursive practices that define what Habib calls migrants' continuing relationship with their ‘homeland’. We draw on Emirbayer and Mische's analysis of the relationship between ‘agency’ and what they call ‘embedded temporalities’ to examine the interaction between our participants' recollections of life in Poland and their evaluation of their present lives in the UK in order to examine the impact of these on their future plans (to stay in the UK or return to Poland). We locate this analysis in what we call a transnational autobiographical field which is a modification of what Levitt and Glick Schiller call a transnational social field. Rather than examine, for example, how decisions to migrate, settle and re-migrate are embedded in inter or trans-personal social relations and networks, in this article we examine the self-dynamics associated with our participants' articulation of their intra-personal and autobiographical embedded temporalities. Our argument is that articulations of individuals' pasts, presents and anticipated futures are also significant factors shaping their migration, settlement, and re-migration decisions.     

Renovating ethnic identity on Restaurant Makeover

Food can be a novel way of understanding and explaining some of the pointed paradoxes of multiculturalism and the ‘management’ of ethnicity. Many studies of culinary culture are attentive to the exoticization of ethnicity in and through food media, which now includes a vertiginous array of cookbooks, travel literature, magazines and, most important for our purposes here, television series. Among various programs is Restaurant Makeover, a popular Canadian reality series broadcast on Home and Garden Television (HGTV) as well as the Food Network Canada. In each episode, dining experts are hired by struggling restaurateurs (often ethnic) to ‘spice up’ the existing menu, ‘modernize’ the décor and, by extension, ensure the welfare of the (immigrant's) family. While the series is not explicitly directed at ethnic restaurants, it seems to be increasingly interested in ‘non-white’ establishments (i.e., Mexican, Chinese, Thai, etc.). This participation in culinary multiculturalism may be symptomatic of wider political changes in immigration and ‘diversity’ in Canada. Based on the authors analyses of specific episodes this paper argues, firstly, the growing interest in ethnic cuisine on Restaurant Makeover can be read as a (neo)liberal response to an emerging conservative ‘multicultural’ agenda that recognizes migrants predominantly as laborers (as opposed to citizens) and, secondly, that behind its rehearsal of liberal benevolence is a skewed set of power relations that authorize the experts’ (re)construction, cultivation and containment of ethnicity.     

A president,A scholar,and an immigration bill

ABSTRACT

In this paper I look critically at George Borjas's scholarship on immigration. Borjas is widely considered to be academia's leading immigration skeptic. He consistently contends that low skilled and low educated immigrants (both ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’) hurt the US economy in many different ways, including suppressing the wages of different minority groups. However, a rigorous reading of Borjas's scholarship reveals many troubling epistemological assumptions.     

Beyond Islamophobia? The role of Englishness and English national identity within English Defence League discourse and politics

ABSTRACT

Unsurprisingly, most scholarship on the English Defence League (EDL) focuses on the Islamophobic nature of the group's politics. This has found that, whilst the group presents a more moderate, public-facing image, the EDL's backstage discourse is a far less nuanced brand of Islamophobia and cultural racism (Allen, C. (2011). Opposing Islamification or promoting Islamophobia? Understanding the English Defence League. Patterns of Prejudice, 45(4), 279–294; Kassimeris, G., & Jackson, L. (2015). The ideology and discourse of the English Defence League: ‘Not racist, not violent, just no longer silent’. British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 17, 171–188). A more fundamental area of EDL ideology has been left unexamined, however: what notion of ‘England’ is the EDL trying to ‘defend’? Using content analysis of EDL online discourse, this article examines how the EDL articulates, represents, and uses English national identity within its discourse and politics.     

Fearing yellow,imagining white: media analysis of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was a watershed event in the context of race, nation, and the law because it denied Chinese immigration into the USA for over 80 years. This paper analyses the media coverage of the Chinese in the San Francisco Chronicle during the year of the Act's passage. The theoretical framework of ‘Purity and Danger’ provides a starting point in analyzing how whiteness and nation are constructed as ‘pure’, while Chinese immigration is constructed as a ‘danger’ within a symbolic, racial and political manner. Discourse analysis was applied to the data for an intersectional investigation of race, class, gender, and nation, to determine how the discourse is organized thematically, as well as uncover ideological meanings in relation to how ‘fearing yellow’ also reflected ‘imaging white’ in media discourse.     

Native subjects on display: reviving the colonial exposition in Marcos' Philippines

At the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, 1100 Filipino ‘natives’ were used as human displays to argue for the colonial enterprise in the Philippines. Seventy years later, the Marcos regime staged Kasaysayan ng Lahi (History of the Race), a mass ceremony that reworked the visual, performative and commercial dynamics of the 1904 colonial exposition to promote heritage tourism in the Philippines. While the use of human displays in colonial expositions has been well documented and analyzed as a constitutive element of a Eurocentric ‘exhibitionary complex’, its uptake in developing nations seeking entry into an emergent cultural economy has yet to be explored. This article places critical analyses of colonial expositions, human displays and heritage tourism in productive dialogue, and examines the continuities and discontinuities between the Philippine exhibit at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair and the 1974 staging of Kasaysayan ng Lahi by the Marcos regime. Against established views of ‘staged authenticities’ as either exploitative or socially empowering, this case study advances a more complex framework for critical histories of the exhibitionary complex, and foregrounds the internal contradictions that inhere within the staging of indigenous heritage for purposes of cultural revitalization and economic development.