‘Both an Arab and a woman’: gendered,racialised experiences of female Palestinian citizens of Israel

Following feminist and postcolonial discourses, this paper uses the concept of ‘everyday experience’ as a tool to trace the social world of educated Palestinian women in Israel. The term refers to the complex array of these women's experiences in racialised and gendered social sites, as well as within the class, religious, and ethnic contexts in the subordinated group and its relations with the dominant Jewish group. Based on 108 in‐depth interviews with Palestinian women citizens of Israel, the paper claims that educated Palestinian women are located in a ‘third place’ between cultural, gender, class, national and racial structures that generates a continual ambivalence. Within this marginal, ‘unhomely’ space women negotiate their own identities and challenge dominant social definitions. Women create various modes of interim spaces and multi‐dimensional, shifting identities for themselves. The ambivalent attitudes generated by the women's experiences expose the possibility of shedding categorising markers. The omnipresent existence of the gendered, racialised regime of knowledge makes every place a potential site of subversion and resistance.     

Colonial Sainthood in Australasia

Concerned with the formation of national identities in postcolonial Australasia, this article compares and contrasts representations of religious women Mary MacKillop (1842–1909) and Suzanne Aubert (1835–1926). MacKillop, constructed as a contemporary popular ‘Australian legend’ is set to become Australasia's first saint, while in April 2004 investigation began into the beatification of New Zealand nun Aubert. Combining religious and secular explanations, despite the two women's lives and work displaying many similar characteristics, the article offers an explanation as to why it is that MacKillop, and not Aubert, will be Australasia's first saint. The article argues that representations of the two women are embedded in the construction of national identities in Australia and New Zealand that draw upon gendered ‘white settler society’ mythologies.     

Gendered projects of national identity formation: The case of Turkey

The consolidation of the Turkish Republic in 1923 took place in opposition to multiple ‘others’ – that is, multiple ideologies with alternative models of modernity and state formation. An important aspect of the resulting negotiations was their gendered nature. This article explores the multiplicity of subject-positions made available to women using the nationalist literary production of the first half of the twentieth century. By linking literary production with the official discourse, it argues that blurring the distinction between public and private discourses can better capture the gendered character of the nationalist discourse. The analysis details the common denominators between articulations about women's bodies and familial ties, and the building of a nationalist discourse. In these works, typologies of mothers, fathers, daughters, step and adopted ones, and those female figures seen as threats to these families tallied with the ongoing attempts to popularise a particular imagining of the nation. The desired unity of the republic, figuring in these roles, seemed to depend on controlling, taming and erasing a variety of designated identities and ideologies.     

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.     

Genderacing immigrant subjects: ‘anchor babies’ and the politics of birthright citizenship

Birthright citizenship is often a subject of important national debates on immigration. From a historical perspective, the influx of Mexican and Chinese immigrants to the United Stated has elicited politically charged efforts to deny the right of US citizenship to their children. Based on a review of popular discursive frames concerning the politics of birthright citizenship, this essay identifies and critiques the arguments from both ends of the political spectrum. We conclude that, by and large, the substance of their legal and philosophical arguments is old, hackneyed responses from decades ago. However, on many symbolic levels, the current rhetoric is quite uncharacteristically caustic, with a focus on racialized and gendered discourses among nationalist groups. We seek to explain why this is the case. Framed as ‘genderacing immigrant subjects’, this essay examines the politics of naming (or nomenclature) through the construction of the racially gendered referent in public discourse, thereby ascribing socially resonant meanings that naturalize a call for draconian policy measures in order to socially engineer the national body.     

Comparing postcolonial identity formations: legacies of Portuguese and British colonialisms in East Africa

Colonial ties constitute the basis upon which Indian migration to the UK occurred. In the post-war years, while Punjabi migrants more than fulfilled the gap in expanding British industry, Indian elites also arrived to take up professional jobs. During the 1960s and 1970s, in a context of increasingly restrictive (and racially politicized) immigration legislation, there was a significant settlement of the so-called East African Indians, among them an important percentage of East African Gujaratis who had close links with England long before the processes of Africanisation began. Since the 1990s, those East African families also were the ‘hosts’ of a considerable number of Portuguese Indians of Gujarat origin, most of whom had been born in Mozambique during the colonial period and had lived in post-colonial Portugal. This paper will attempt to show how different experiences of intersubjectivity between colonizers and colonized in British and Portuguese African colonial contexts still constitute a source of (re)invention and pluralization of identities within post-colonial Gujarat diasporas settled in the UK. An analysis of these narratives in process will serve to underline the significance of dialectic processes of remaking colonial and post-colonial experiences in order to understand post-colonial identity formations, their ex-tensions and in-tensions, as well as the identity strategies of postcolonial subjects to deal with ‘old’ and ‘new’ multicultural dilemmas.     

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.     

Im/possible lives: gender,class, self-fashioning,and affinal solidarity in modern South Asia

Drawing on ethnographic research and employing a micro-historical approach that recognizes not only the transnational but also the culturally specific manifestations of modernity, this article centers on the efforts of a young woman to negotiate shifting and conflicting discourses about what a good life might consist of for a highly educated and high caste Hindu woman living at the margins of a nonetheless globalized world. Newly imaginable worlds in contemporary Mithila, South Asia, structure feeling and action in particularly gendered and classed ways, even as the capacity of individuals to actualize those worlds and the ‘modern’ selves envisioned within them are constrained by both overt and subtle means. In the context of shifting cultural anchors, new practices of silence, literacy, and even behaviors interpreted as ‘mental illness’ may become tactics in an individual's negotiation of conflicting self-representations. The confluence of forces at play in contemporary Mithila, moreover, is creating new structures of feeling that may begin to reverse long-standing locally held assumptions about strong solidarities between natal families and daughters, on the one hand, and weak solidarities between affinal families and new daughters-in-law, on the other.     

Cultural change,knowledge change

This article examines the use of genealogy in the politics of colonial Bunyoro, a kingdom within the modern state of Uganda. In particular, the article focuses on Bunyoro's attempt to have territory that had been transferred to a neighbouring kingdom at the time of conquest, known as the ‘lost counties’, restored to their homeland. Such ethnic, irredentist political activity in Africa has often been regarded as retrogressive and anti-modern. In Bunyoro, early attempts to win back the lost counties did emphasise the ruling dynasty's genealogical claim for regional pre-eminence on the grounds that Bunyoro was the oldest and formerly the largest of the Great Lakes kingdoms. What is significant is that when Bunyoro's leaders realised that this concentration on the ancient past was counterproductive, they revised their strategy. The Banyoro began to use imperial ideology against local colonial policy, by turning the rhetoric of indirect rule, anti-slavery and ultimately self-determination against their British over-rulers. Similarly, the royal government employed petitions based on archival research, effective lobbying of nationalist politicians, British Queen's Counsels, and finally low-level terrorism in an increasingly modern and sophisticated campaign.     

Orthodoxy and political myths in Balkan national identities

This article analyses the relationship between Balkan national identities and the region's dominant religion: Eastern Orthodox Christianity. After examining the concept of ‘symphonia’ between Orthodoxy and politics that developed during the Byzantine Empire, this article argues that the political myths that have emerged from Orthodoxy are the most potent in the Balkan mythical imaginary. Political myths have a direct impact on contemporary politics developing a threefold structure: the sacralisation of politics; the perception of the nation as a divine manifestation; and, the construction of a divine realm on earth.     

The ‘Habsburg Dilemma’ Today: Competing Discourses of National Identity in Contemporary Austria

This article analyses discourses of Austrian national identity. It discusses the reproduction (and contestation) of national identities on the levels of everyday language, political debate and policy. Three discursive formations of the nation—and their histories—are discussed: a nowadays marginal and de-legitimated discourse of pan-Germanic ethnicism; the hegemonic paradigm of ‘Austrian-ness’, which itself comprises a range of ideological positions and constitutes the over-arching framework to most (relevant) debates; and counter-hegemonic discourses including European- and ‘post-national’ identity formations. The article also discusses individuals’ ongoing negotiation of, and possible resistance to, discourses of national belonging, and concludes by relating its findings to the contemporary salience of national identities as a reaction to the (perceived) consequences of economic globalisation.     

White Australian identities and Indigenous land rights

Land has been central to debates about the relationship between Indigenous (First Nations) and non-Indigenous Australian identities since colonial violence founded the nation. How do white Australians understand Indigenous land rights? This paper draws on an empirical ethnographic study with rural people who self-identify as ‘white Australian’ to analyze the key discourses of land, identity and nation and the complexities of how whiteness and race is socially produced and lived in rural Australia. The study found that white Australian discourses of nation and identity limit most of the respondents' ability to construct their identity in relation to Indigenous sovereignty.     

From consensual reconciliation to a discourse of friendship

When in multicultural states the concept of reconciliation is tied to national unity in order to institute consensus and stability, the outcome often is exclusion and oppression of those others who do not ‘fit’ or who ‘disturb’ the very consensus and unity reconciliation purports to form. The hidden side of violence embedded in consensual reconciliation is the main theme of this paper. Our aim is to problematize the relations between reconciliation and nationalism on the one hand, and to offer an alternative working concept of friendship on the other. Based on an ethnographic case study of conflict between religious and secular groups in Israel, we examine the language of reconciliation and its semiotic gestures, in order to demonstrate that sentiments of ‘neither/nor’ or ‘either this or that’, when rooted in nationalist ideology of unity, obfuscate identities for purposes of homogeneity, closing the social and cultural space for different others who are present but not included in the discourse of reconciliation. By contrast, a discourse of friendship signifies a movement (rather than diffusion) between social and cultural identities. Our concept of friendship is based on a civic idea of causing no harm to others as a way of life.     

A national pride or a colonial construct? Touristic representation and the politics of Fijian identity construction

Identity research in the Pacific region has been dominated in the past by discussions of reconstruction and mobilisation of symbols of cultural tradition as a medium of anti-colonial resistance and nationalism. The present article proposes to widen the scope of this literature by exploring mass tourism as a contested field of collective identification. It outlines the historical making of the colonial and post-colonial imagery of indigenous Fijians and its subsequent reification and essentialisation in the context of twentieth-century mass tourism. It further highlights the implication of this process in colonial, anti-colonial and post-independence national politics, in which indigenous Fijians have been variously located: the imagery has been claimed by Western colonialism, transnational corporate capitalism, ethno-nationalism, and counter-hegemony. The article illustrates that collective identity construction is not political in a uni-dimensional manner but constitutes a dynamic arena of ongoing ‘cultural battle’ where multiple power relations unfold simultaneously.     

Necronationalism: managing race,death and the nation's skeletons

This paper examines the construction of the Simon Wiesenthal Center ‘Museum of Tolerance (Jerusalem)’ over Mamilla Cemetery, one of the largest Muslim burial grounds in the region. Tracing the politics of death as exercised through the excavation of the cemetery, I consider how access to settler colonial memory is managed and renewed through the purging of Indigenous corporeality. Inspired by Achille Mbembe's sobering account of necropower, this paper conceptualizes power as a system of domination inscribed through the colonial management of deceased racial subjects and asks how we might understand systems of settler colonial power arranged through dehumanization of the already dead. I contend that the capacity to govern life after death is still firmly rooted in the reach of colonial power, and that by attending to the excavation and erasure of Mamilla Cemetery's deceased Palestinian subjects, we see a particular configuration of sovereignty defined through a calculus of absence. Identifying this practice of settler colonial nation building as ‘necronationalism’, I consider how power over life after death becomes the very terrain through which a nation is imagined.     

Role models without guarantees: corrective representations and the cultural politics of a Latino male teacher in the borderlands

In recent years mentorship has become a popular ‘solution’ for struggling boys of color and has led to the recruitment of more male of color teachers. While not arguing against the merits of mentorship, this article critiques what the author deems ‘corrective representations.’ Corrective representations are the imagined embodiment of proper and productive masculinities that male of color educators are asked to perform. This discourse perpetuates confining representations of identity and locates the problem of boys of color within their own actions. Designed as an ethnographic case study, this article explores the life of one Latino male teacher as he navigates discourses of corrective representation as coordinator of his school’s Latino boys program. This project provides a detailed account of the cultural politics of Latino male mentorship and offers the notion of a critical borderlands approach to identity as an avenue to problematize essentialist and deficit approaches to Latino boys.     

Poverty and HIV/AIDS in Apartheid South Africa

This article constitutes an attempt to put forward some suggestions towards constructing a framework of understanding the processes of social construction of sexuality and gender identity within the context of the ethnic conflict, and of nationalist/ populist politics in former Yugoslavia. In particular, it focuses on the ways in which masculinist discourse is articulated to the politics of ethnicity in former Yugoslavia, by examining the definition and treatment of women as 'biological reproducers of the nation' through the discourses and policy proposals of moral majority nationalist and pro-life movements in Croatia and Slovenia, and of the nationalist movement and regime in Serbia, and the use of rape and sexual assault against women as 'weapons' in the ethnic conflict in Bosnia and other republics of former Yugoslavia.     

Gendered beings,gendered discourses: the gendering of race,colonialism and anti-colonial nationalism in three Zimbabwean novels

This article aims to explore the gendering of race, colonialism and anti colonial nationalism in selected novels from the Zimbabwean literary canon with the view of showing how this gendering affected different facets of colonial life and, by implication, post independence life. It relies on the Gramscian concept of hegemony in terms of how it refers to gender, particularly masculinities. The selected texts, A Son of the Soil by Wilson Katiyo, The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing and Bones by Chenjerai Hove, cover the colonial period from the moment of contact to the early post independence period. The article links the gendered nature of colonialism to the gendered aspects of anti colonial nationalism and shows how the two existed in an oppositional yet ambivalent relationship. This is also manifest in the schizophrenia of the post independence state in modeling itself after its predecessor, its anti colonial rhetoric notwithstanding.     

Reco(r)ding Reality: Representation and Paradigms in Nonfiction African Cinema

In a democratizing world, where increasing numbers of protracted conflicts are being addressed via negotiations, governments’ ability to construct ‘toleration policy’—a set of discursive relationships between collective identities, national interests and peacemaking—plays a crucial role in their capacity to elicit popular legitimacy and implement their peace policy. The paper traces the effects of changes in Israel's toleration policy on changes in its peace policy following Yitzhak Rabin's assassination. Focusing on the political struggles after the assassination and their effect on public opinion, the paper offers an alternative, socio-cultural, explanation to the breakdown in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.