Navigations: Insularity versus Cosmopolitanism in the Bahamas: Formality and Informality in an Arichipelagic Nation

Bahamians have traditionally considered themselves as one people, despite the fragmentation of the territory they inhabit, and the porous nature of the islands' natural boundaries. Paradoxically, the inhabitants of the archipelago are far more cosmopolitan and globally integrated than their apparent isolation would suggest. This article looks at how variation throughout the archipelago makes the imagination of a single identity difficult. Issues of identity, for instance, are rendered fluid by the islands' separation from one another. Thus, the means by which identity is created and maintained, and the various symbols used to cognise, legitimise and incorporate this fragmentation into a consciousness of self, are both fluid. The following examples are used to show how Bahamians make sense of these paradoxes and so knit a common bond from the apparent fragmentation of their land: racial and ethnic identity, the manipulation of symbols such as 'family' and 'home', communication and discourse among the islands, and questions of national versus local politics.     

Historiography and National Identity among the Eastern Slavs: Towards a New Framework

The article surveys Tsarist, Soviet and Western historiography of Russia and how this affected the national identities and inter-ethnic relations among the three eastern Slavs. Western historiography of Russia largely utilised an imperialist and statist historiographical framework created within the Tsarist empire during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although this framework was imperialist it was gradually accepted as 'objective' by the Western scholarly community. Yet, this historiography was far from being 'objective'. After 1934 Soviet historiography also reverted to the majority of the tenets found in Tsarist historiography. Within Tsarist, Western and Soviet historiographies of 'Russia' eastern Slavic history was nationalised on behalf of the Russian nation which served to either ignore or deny a separate history and identity for Ukrainians and Belarusians. In the post-Soviet era all 15 Soviet successor states are undertaking nation and state building projects which utilise history and myths to inculcate new national identities. The continued utilisation of the Tsarist, Western and Soviet imperial and statist historiographical schema is no longer tenable and serves to undermine civic nation building in the Russian Federation. This article argues in favour of a new, non-imperial framework for histories of 'Russia' territorially based upon the Russian Federation and inclusive of all of its citizens.     

Arrivals and Arrivals: Royal Travel at Botany Bay

This article looks at how the sites of the beach and the airport have functioned as chronotopes of 'arrivalism' in Australian history. I suggest that narratives surrounding Queen Elizabeth's 1970 royal tour of Australia, initiated and terminated at Sydney Airport, drew on existing structures of primitivism and modernity at the site of the beach. A re-enactment of Cook's landing at Botany Bay on Australia Day 1970 thus re-inscribed the nation within global space: it showed aboriginal people bearing witness to the (re-)arrival of the colonists. This narrative of national progress linked the British colonial project and Australian economic development — just as Cook 'discovered' Australia, the Queen's flight 'discovered' anew the international space of air travel and trade. A second re-enactment by trade unions and environmental protestors nearby on Australia Day 1976 contested this narrative, and offered an alternative nationalist vision at the site of the beach.     

Discursive Strategies around 'Community' in Political Propaganda: The Case of Lega Nord

Michael Billig's book Banal Nationalism (1995) set out to expose the covert ways in which established nation-states reinforce their legitimacy by constantly 'flagging' the national identity to their citizens. He terms this kind of nationalism 'banal', in contrast with more obvious 'hot' nationalist movements. This article applies Billig's theory of 'banal nationalism' not to an established nation-state but to present-day Catalonia, an 'historic nation' which now enjoys a large measure of autonomy. The article argues that in Catalonia, forms of 'banal nationalism' are generated by Catalan institutions, exist in competition with the 'banal nationalism' of the Spanish State, and might be partly responsible for the 'cooling' of Catalanism which is currently worrying some Catalanists.     

Playing Away from Home: Identity in Northern Ireland and the Experience of Derry City Football Club

This article explores aspects of the history of Derry City Football Club in the period 1968-1985, and the effect that the Northern Irish troubles had on the soccer club. The whole question of identity within Northern Ireland has always been contested between those pursuing an Irish nationalist agenda, and those wishing to remain within the Union. This article locates Derry City within this struggle, and demonstrates how far reaching the effects of the contest between identities have been, even on something so 'normal' as a soccer club. Soccer clubs, it is argued, are an important location for the creation and sustaining of identities that are reflective of wider issues within society.     

Self Portrait: The Sense of Self in British Documentary Photography

This article investigates notions of 'Britishness' as articulated in British documentary photography from 1936 to 1989. It argues that documentary photography is richly revealing of not only its overt subject matter, but also, more interestingly, of the latent cultural attitudes encoded therein. Particular attention is paid to the work of Bill Brandt in comparison with British documentary photographers of the 1980s. This latter group provide both a contrasting and, it is contended, more dependable sense of 'Britishness' than their more celebrated predecessor.     

Physicians,Humour and Therapeutic Laughter in the Ancient World

This paper examines the ways 'mixed race' women in Canada contemplate their relationship to national identity. Through qualitative, open-ended interviews, the research demonstrates how some women of 'mixed race' contest ideas of the nation as constituted through the policy of multiculturalism in Canada. To challenge the tropes of the national narrative, some women of 'mixed race' develop nuanced models of cultural citizenship, illustrating that national identities are formed and transformed in relation to representation. Refusing to be positioned outside the nation, they effectively produce their own meanings of identity by working through their own personally identified 'mixed race' bodies to the national body politic, where some of them see their own bodies as intrinsically 'multicultural'. The paper ends by addressing the paradoxes of multiculturalism, emphasising through narratives that the policy produces hierarchical spaces against which some 'mixed race' women imaginatively negotiate, contest and challenge perceptions of their racialised and gendered selves.     

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.     

When Does Language Become Exclusivist? Linguistic Politics in Catalonia

This article traces the development of linguistic policy in Catalonia over the last few decades and argues that language and linguistic policy continue to be crucial elements in the Catalan nation-building project. In addition, the growing politicisation of language has increasingly become a divisive issue amongst Catalonia's political elite. The Catalan linguistic landscape has moved from one based on linguistic 'normalisation' to a situation where bilingualism is the norm, but the degree to which one language predominates or should predominate over the other continues to be subject to intense public debate. Finally, the article argues that the linguistic consensus which prevailed among Catalan political parties for nearly two decades has slowly begun to disintegrate, accompanied by a growing debate on the use of language as an exclusivist mark of identity in Catalan society.     

No Community is an Island,Every Intellectual is an Island: The Story of Bobby O'Malley

This article explores a number of anthropological themes -- specifically suburbanism, the island nature of socio-cultural milieux, and intellectualism -- by way of a novel, The Story of Bobby O'Malley , which narrates the tale of an intellectual boy growing up in a Newfoundland suburb. Intellectuality may be described as a condition of neither leadership nor followership, but of displaying a certain disengagement. It is in this way that Edward Said distinguishes 'the intellectual' from 'the expert', the latter being concerned with giving answers to questions out to him by others while the former exiles himself from the domain of conventional questions as such, in order to pose his own. The intellectual condition, Rapport argues, tells of an interactional-cum-cognitive displacement, an eschewing of the conventions, the habiti, of expression and exchange. To put it differently, the intellectual may be said to make for his vantage-point upon everyday life a certain 'island-ness', an 'elsewhere': intending, in Philip Larkin's words (1990, p. 104), that 'elsewhere underwrites my existence'.     

Shanghai Baby : Negotiating Youth Self-Identity in Urban China

Shanghai Baby has been dismissed as another example of the grunge and shock literature genre emerging from modern Chinese writers. Detractors have described it as 'decadent', 'debauched' and 'pornographic' with the author labelled as a 'slave to Western culture'. However, a closer examination of Zhou Wei Hui's controversial semi-autobiography reveals an adroit social commentary on youth's ongoing negotiation of self-identity in China's complex and rapidly changing social structure. Using the sexual licence found in Western and European literature, Wei's work confronts traditional views on sex, women, family, and youth development. As a result of claims by Wei to speak for the new generation, the book was banned in China, with authorities burning 40,000 copies and instructing the State-run media to never mention the author or the book again because of its sexually charged content. Shanghai Baby highlights a peculiar form of impotence associated with a 'one country two systems' policy with youth willingness to push the parameters of 'acceptable' behaviour and the accompanying guilt (and retribution) when they do. This type of duality affects youth the most because of their willingness to embrace functional individualistic values, which provide them with the basic survival skills in a materialistic world, and their underlying collectivist values, which defines how they should act. As a result, youth have no clear model to follow with the Government encouraging them to be individualistic in some aspects (entrepreneurial and competitive) but not others (self-expression and empowerment). Wei's book is a metaphor for this struggle, highlighting how Chinese youth live their lives somewhere in between, precariously at times and brashly at others, feeling their way towards a functional coexistence of individualistic and collectivist value systems.     

Ambiguous 'Culture': Contrasting Interpretations of the Basque Film Ama Lur and the Relationship Between Centre and Periphery in Franco's Spain

This article focuses on the last decades of the Franco dictatorship in Spain. Two apparently distinct issues are brought together here: the discussions of the National Council of the Movement, which was dependant on Spain's single political party, regarding the possibility of defining a cultural policy to counteract separatist tendencies; and discussions of the possible interpretations of the Basque film Ama Lur (1968). Both exemplify the ideas of the authorities about how to handle the cultural dimension of the challenges represented by peripheral nationalist movements. The aim of this study is to shed light on the questions of how and to what extent attempts by the Francoist authorities to use culture as a political tool worked.     

Clinical globalization: A case study of privately-sponsored HIV research in Mexico

This essay describes the struggle of an indigenous rights activist to obtain ethnic status and political representation for the Waata, former hunter-gatherers who belong to the Oromo-speaking people of East and Northeast Africa. It discusses how this leader is trying to positively redefine the label of 'caste' attributed to the Waata by scholars to explain the ambivalent position occupied by the group in traditional Oromo society. The essay examines how this social activist used a dance ritual which is performed annually by the Waata to commemorate their myth of origin as a way to gain political and moral legitimacy for his campaign. As Abner Cohen's studies suggest, there exists an intrinsic link between cultural performances and political processes in contexts of socio-economic change. The essay explores these interrelated themes of culture, politics and social change through the case of the Waata.     

Blacklisting as a modality of deportability: Mexico's response to circular migrant agricultural workers' pursuit of collective bargaining rights in British Columbia,Canada

ABSTRACT

This article illustrates how blacklisting can function as a modality of deportability among temporary migrant workers participating in a programme touted as a model of ordered migration internationally, with attention to sending state action. In 2010, Local 1518 of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union applied successfully to British Columbia's Labour Relations Board to represent a group of circular migrants engaged under Canada's Seasonal Agricultural Worker Programme. Yet less than a year later, the union complained of unfair labour practices on the part of not only the host state employer and certain employees but sending state officials who select and assign workers to Canadian employers, contending that they blocked the visa reapplications of union members eligible for recall and improperly interfered in a decertification application. On account of the unique empirics available through this case, its analysis offers a window into practices which are routinely obscured but nevertheless central to how deportability operates.     

Imagining Métissage : The Politics and Practice of Métissage in the French Colonial Exposition and Ousmane Socé's Mirages de Paris

Je demeure cependant persuadé, malgré les dangers d'une possible confusion, qu'il faut 'oser la métaphoreé … C'est-à-dire entreprendre de poser une question qui est und des fondements de l'interprétation, de la critique, un des modes de la connaissance: comment un homme, une société, choisissent-ils de 'se représenter par la meétaphore', comment trouvent-ils des formes, des objets particuliers devant lesquels ils se disent dans un élan d'imagination ou de conformisme: 'je suis ça'? [Nonetheless, I remain persuaded, in spite of the dangers of a possible confusion, that one must 'dare to take up the metaphor' … That is, to undertake asking a question which is one of the foundations of interpretation, of criticism, one of the modes of knowledge: how a man, how a society, chooses to represent itself through metaphor, how it finds forms, particular objects, before which it tells itself, in a burst of imagination or conformity, 'that is me'?] (de Baecque, 1993, p. 15) Aimer, c'est pouvoir s'imaginer. [To love, is to be able to imagine oneself.] (Socé, 1964 [1937], p. 91)     

Remapping American-ness: Heritage Production and the Staging of the Native American and the African American as Other in 'Historyland'

The American tourism industry in the 1950s helped to produce certain notions of America, or what it meant to be American, at a time when these identities were in flux. Visitors to 'Historyland', an attraction that reconstructed a nineteenth-century Wisconsin logging town, could experience a living lumberjack community, as well as an 'authentic' Indian Village and a dining car restaurant with black waiters. The Native Americans and African Americans, by performing their 'historic' roles, were staged as examples of 'the other' which European American tourists could encounter, and against which they could define their own sense of American-ness.     

Mad Max: The Car and Australian Governance

This article argues that the car is an intimate aspect of the governance of Australia. The term 'governance' is defined as the techniques used to know, order and manage individuals. The film Mad Max II: The Road Warrior is used as a prism to separate out the roles that the car performs in governance. Three roles are identified: the car as identity, the car as myth and the car as power. Applying this framework to Australia reveals the car's complex involvement in Australian governance, from the knowing and ordering of others, to collective myths of possession and future prosperity, to the knowing of place from space, to the removal of indigenous children. The significance of the car means Australia can be characterised as the petrochemical, chrome-plated cyborg republic of Oz.     

Citizens of Nowhere in Particular: Cosmopolitanism,Writing, and Political Engagement in Eighteenth-Century Europe

This article explores the connection in the late eighteenth century between the invention of citizenship and the obfuscation of local, corporate or national identity under the guise of cosmopolitanism. The common premise in much recent writing on nationalism is that the nation, even if it is an 'imagined' community, provided the critical framework in which political identity and, hence, political participation first became possible for ordinary people. However, it is clear that in absolutist Europe, private subjects were often best able to make themselves into political actors on either the national or the continental stage by de-situating themselves rhetorically, that is, claiming to speak from no place, no position, and no name except 'friend of humanity' or 'citizen of the world'. Moreover, this literary strategy of insisting on one's fungible individuality—the notion that one was no more than a generic 'simple citizen' and no less than 'the plenipotentate of my own ideas' in a culture obsessed with social position and family name—ultimately helped to bolster an alternative (and often historically overlooked) way of thinking about relations among states and the individuals within them that marked an early challenge to the hegemony of national interest.     

Approaching Cultural Change in the Era of Globalisation: An Interview with T.K. Oommen

An exercise in academic signature, 'Is Jew/Greek Greek/Jew : or does 'Hebrew' mean Cross'over?' tries to account for the differential claims on identity when one finds oneself, at the same time, a religious Jew and a university professor specializing in secular texts. What does such a one, in fact, profess? How to negotiate the (mostly figurative) translation of Greek into H ebrew, and H ebrew into Greek, in a m ore than m erely academ ic sense- indeed when 'the academic' offers but one of several competing possibilities for personal and social identities? Preferring a 'Mauriacois' style of narrating the self by reference to the books in one's library, to something more Rousseauistic and chez soi, the author appeals throughout to the w ork of Emmanuel Levinas in a programmatic move that shows how the task of mediation begins of necessity in the sphere of the already-mediated. The 'tightrope, window and text' of the article's subtitle, then represent three tropes around which the problematic of mediated identity is posed. The titular questions, finally, remain less answered than- in Kenneth Burke's signature form ulation- 'danced'.     

The unbearable proximity of the Orient: Political religion,multiculturalism and the retrieval of South Asian identities

The phenomenon of religion -- specifically its recent return as 'political religion', and its seeming incompatibility with the demands of multiculturalism -- continues to be a vexed issue in attempts to rethink retrievals of South Asian identity beyond a neo-colonial imaginary. This move 'beyond' has routinely followed a deconstruction of the 'religious effects' of Orientalism whose conceptual matrix, some argue, can be located in Hegel's writings on history and religion. Taking its cue from Derrida's enigmatic remark -- 'what if religio remained untranslatable?' -- this paper re-examines Hegel's writings on India, revealing the workings of an ontotheological matrix which underpins not only the recent resurgences of religious nationalism or political religion in South Asia and the South Asian diaspora, but also, paradoxically, the secular frameworks of contemporary multiculturalism and anti-imperialist critique. Despite sharing the same onto-theological matrix, these bastions of secular modernity still refuse to recognise that retrievals of religious identity might constitute a significant reorientation of the political, instead continuing to put into play a series of well rehearsed distancing techniques which serve merely to sanitize the 'religious effects' of the Orient.