Reproducing the nation: reproduction,citizenship and ethno-demographic survival in post-communist Romania

The steady decline of fertility rates in Europe raises a number of important questions about the demographic and cultural reproduction of national societies. Apart from being confronted with population shrinkage and ageing, most European societies are also becoming more diverse. Demographic changes tend to exacerbate nationalist anxieties about the physical and cultural survival of the nation. This article develops the concept of national reproduction regime in order to analyse strategies and interventions at the biological, formal, and ethno-cultural levels of reproduction through which states seek to ensure the physical and cultural reproduction of the nation. It outlines the national reproduction regime of post-communist Romania by way of mapping and discussing key policies on biological and formal reproduction, as well as public discourses that frame these policies.     

Will to love,will to fear: the emotional politics of illegality and citizenship in the campaign against birthright citizenship in the US

Anti-immigration activists argue that the broad inclusivity of the birthright citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment is a national security concern that enables criminalized migrant mothers to give birth to citizens who can later harm the US through violence and resource consumption. Seeing this argument as representative of the problem of inclusivity inherent to citizenship in a liberal democracy, this essay asks how the children of undocumented and temporary migrants are constructed as what Mae Ngai calls ‘alien citizens.’ Drawing from Sara Ahmed's affective economy of emotion, I find that affect and emotion figure prominently in how citizens are made ‘alien.’ Specifically love and fear function as pivot points in the anti-birthright citizenship argument, wherein the ‘real citizen’ is ‘willed’ to love and be loved by the nation and to fear the nation's Others. Moreover, the emphasis on national feelings does not evacuate white supremacy or heteronormativity from its imagination of citizenship, but instead displaces these loci of power into feeling and affect. Thus, this essay claims that the birthright citizenship argument illustrates how national love and fear work in tandem to uphold, naturalize, and expand the racial and sexual exclusions inherent to citizenship in a nation-state.     

Bloodlust: a postcolonial sociology of childbirth

This paper examines intersections between ethnocentric and androcentric desire. To that end it employs a broadly postcolonial analysis of the medicalisation of birth and of women. The paper explores an ambivalence characterised by a simultaneous lust for and loathing of the other through engaging with postcolonial discourse analysis, and it ties those impulses to an imperative of control and to an administration of the other's affairs. That imperative and those impulses represent a point at which the logic of patriarchy and the logic of colonialism converge, and that point is one around which the social production of material disadvantage and negative outcomes can be explored. In the service of modern paradigms of progress and development, both colonial discourses and medical discourses underpin material relationships with the other. Whether that other is racialised or gendered, the manifest result of those relationships is the production of outcomes which are sub-optimal and pernicious in effect, and which result in a material insufficiency in the discursively produced other. The process of colonising childbirth reproduces the material effects of colonial subjectivity within a highly ambivalent and deeply imperialistic encounter. An exploration of that process demonstrates a link between power, paternalism and poor outcomes which highlights a space for self-determination in the optimisation of health and wellbeing amongst members of population groups which are vulnerable to the representations and interests of administrative power.     

Differential citizenship: questioning the dalit claim to equal citizenship through a projection of difference

Citizenship for dalits has been historically defined with relation to the demand for equality. However, this demand has witnessed a change in the last few decades where the agency of the dalits has manifested itself in the demand for a differential citizenship, where differentiation, and not homogeneity, has become the basis for the demand for equality. The study with the help of the textual analysis of Aravind Malagatti’s Government Brahmana and Omprakash Valmiki’s Joothan argues that the demand for equal citizenship through the recognition of difference has created a paradoxical situation where the recognition of difference has not led to an equal treatment, but has opened up newer avenues for discrimination instead. The study proposes to accomplish this by providing an insight into the manner in which differential citizenship has become the reason for denial of performative citizenship to the dalits in rural and urban public spaces. Some of the key questions that the study addresses are: How is the performativity of differential citizenship in the public spaces foregrounded by the dalits? Why does this foregrounding evoke violent retribution from the upper caste? And does the continued violation of the imposition of dalit citizenship point to the dysfunctionality of the differential citizenship status accorded to the dalits?     

Race in translation: culture wars around the postcolonial Atlantic

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the processes of nationalisation in Catalonia and the Basque Country in the period 1980–2015. It focuses on the competing narratives that Spanish, Catalan and Basque nationalists disseminated and the different ‘spheres of nationalisation’ through which individuals acquired their identities. The study combines the historical analysis of national narratives with survey data to examine the production and reproduction of identities. The research shows the limits of both state-led and sub-state-led nationalisations and underscores the importance of changing historical contexts in determining the social impact of national narratives.     

对"族群"概念的再认识

本文论述了当前学术界对“族群” (ethnicgroup)概念的不同理解并概括了他们的共性认识 ,即族群认同的标志是文化特点 ,认为族群论者把族群当作文化承载单位 ,分享共同文化特质的看法并不能让我们真正了解族群的社会特性 ,不能准确地定义某一群体 ,从而造成其群体概念的模糊不清。作者主张 ,应通过准确描述和形容“民族”的办法 ,使国外学者清楚地理解中国的“民族” ,而不应强调与国际学术接轨而盲目使用“族群”概念 ,否定已经使用了 10 0年的约定俗成的“民族”概念     

Beyond the biopolitics of disposability: rethinking neoliberalism in the New Gilded Age

Under the current reign of neoliberalism, the US has entered a New Gilded Age, more savage and anti-democratic than its predecessor. The current form of market fundamentalism demands a new set of conceptual and analytical tools that engage neoliberalism not only through an economic optic but also as a mode of rationality, governmentality, and public pedagogy. The essay develops a biopolitics of neoliberalism, exploring how it uses market values as a template for realigning corporate power and the state, but also how it produces modes of consent vital to the construction of a neoliberal subject and a more ruthless politics of disposability. Within this new form of neoliberal rationality and biopolitics – a political system actively involved in the management of the politics of life and death – new modes of individual and collective suffering emerge around the modalities and intersection of race and class.     

Rethinking the nation: Apology,treaty and reconciliation in Australia

In February 2008, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologised to Indigenous Australians for past injustices. The apology was presented as a turning point in the history of the nation. According to Rudd, ‘there comes a time in the history of a nation when peoples must become fully reconciled to their past if they are to go forward with confidence to embrace their future’. The apology marked a new step in the reconciliation process in Australia, but as this article argues, the treaty issue – another controversial aspect of reconciliation – remains a major challenge to the Australian nation.     

Ethnic minorities in British politics: candidate selection and clan politics in the Labour Party

In increasingly diverse polities, the question of how minorities engage with national and local political processes is important. In the U.K., the Labour Party has traditionally benefited electorally from ethnic minority communities, often through ethnicity-based voting blocs. However, little attention has been paid to how the Party’s candidate selection process is influenced by strategic party membership and nomination. We argue that community clan or kinship (biraderi) networks found amongst British Pakistanis have been mobilised for this purpose. We examine the cases of Bradford and Birmingham with respect to the nominations for Prospective Candidates at both parliamentary and local council level. We show the continued importance of biraderi connections in spite of Labour Party attempts to ‘clean up’ selection contests through impositions of the National Executive Committee (NEC). Such practices favour the selection of candidates with strong biraderi links and, as such, often marginalise female candidates.     

Breaking with English: the nation as ethnoscape1

Broken English and the bone people, a New Zealand film and novel respectively, fall into the category of nation‐building texts. Many narratives in this ‘genre’ accomplish cultural reunification through the family. However, these two works are particularly intriguing because they use land and specific spaces in order to work through these transcultural shifts as they are played out within the main characters' relationships. ‘Breaking with English’ is therefore not only a linguistic concept, but also a metaphor for the transculturation of bodies and land undertaken throughout these two titles.     

The (racial) biases of communication: rethinking media and blackness

The media studies approach to race often examines blackness through depictions in music lyrics, movies, and videos. The vast majority of these studies posit that media may provide ‘fair’ or ‘unfair’ depictions of blackness. Less examined is the importance of media environments to the structuring of racial relations in the United States. This article extends the contemporary literature on black media studies by taking a ‘medium theory’ approach to analyzing blackness. I argue medium theory aids studies of blackness by showing the ways in which the technologies we use transform the environments we inhabit in ways that further racialization processes beyond depictions of music lyrics or reality TV. To examine the interrelations between media environments and blackness, I offer a critical rereading of the Underground Railroad. I argue the Underground Railroad's success was related to the necessity of brilliant planning and a complex understanding by slaves and conductors of the essential overlapping of space- and time-biased media cultures. In short, the different understandings of media ensured that the slaves and slave catchers inhabited radically different yet interconnected worlds or galaxies, increasing the effectiveness of the Underground Railroad for runaway slaves.     

Listening to Bloke Modisane: Considering acoustic regimes in colonial and postcolonial writing

This paper defends the relevance of materials pertaining to auditory perception in the analysis of colonial and postcolonial texts. It considers the orientation of the subject in an acoustic domain and, through the work of Jacques Attali in particular, theorises the relation between dissonance and political dissidence as this distinction circulates in the social imaginary. Having suggested what is to be gained in analytical terms by analysing the relation between sound, place and identity, the argument proceeds to consider a specific instance: the representation of music and the configuration of 'noise' in the highly influential South African autobiography, Bloke Modisane's Blame Me on History (1963). A close reading of sections of the text demonstrates some of the ways in which literary acoustics sound out power relations and enable significantly different modes of the social, political and literary imaginary. The argument concludes, though, on a somewhat pessimistic note, suggesting ways in which theories of dissonant dissent can be complicit in the systems of meaning they are taken to oppose.     

论中华民族多元文化教育

多元文化教育概念虽为西方杜会首倡,但中国自古以来就是多民族、多文化的社会,多元文化教育以自在和自为两种形态存在。80年代后中华民族多元文化教育的发展进入了自为阶段,成为世界多元文化教育模式中的一种有效模式。如何借鉴西方多元文化教育的成果?如何理解中华民族多元文化教育的内涵?如何构建中华民族多元文化教育课程的体系?等等,这些问题就显得尤为重要了。     

Narratives of race and nation: Everyday whiteness in Australia

Australia's history as a white nation has been riddled with not only mis-treatment of the ‘other’, but in more recent times of a type of invisibility of the ‘other’ that has disabled many within this nation from recognising the continuation of practices and policies of racial discrimination. This paper presents the findings from research conducted over 2001–03 during the ‘boat people’ crisis in Australia, when a number of everyday individuals volunteered time to assist refugees. It goes on to argue that while the policies of Multiculturalism of the 1970s had attempted to create a more inclusive society and had for the participants in this research transformed into nation-defining narrative, its failure to incorporate everyday people in its inception and continuation was productive of a blind spot in relation to racial treatment because most could believe all was well in this arena.     

Multicultural education: the state of play from an Australian perspective

This article reports on the first comprehensive survey of public school teachers in the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW) around issues of multicultural and English as Second Language (ESL) education. While there is substantial literature on multicultural education – what it should and shouldn’t be – there is much that is left unexplored in research in the area, not least of which is the characteristics of the teaching labour force. In this article, we ‘take stock’ of multicultural education, not by engaging with philosophical debates about multiculturalism as an ethical or policy practice, but as an auditing of what exists in the name of multicultural education. Drawing on a sample of over 5000 respondents, the article documents the changing cultural profile of the profession and highlights gaps in pre-service training and professional learning of teachers in terms of meeting the needs of Australia’s increasingly culturally and linguistically complex school populations.     

多元文化教育的批判与反思

多元文化教育是体现或内化了“多元主义”价值观的文化教育。它倡导平等、差异、合作的思想和理念。它启迪我国民族教育对外与国际教育接轨,并实施多元文化课程来反映多元文化教育的价值观。多元文化主义及其教育是一种新的种族主义,并把复杂的社会问题简单化为文化问题,进而否认文化的先进性和落后性之分,反映了它的僵死的文化观,因此对其必须进行批判,同时对一些观点和提法进行必要的反思。