Browsing by Subject "National identity"
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Item The advertising construction of identity in Lebanese television(2010-08) Nasr, Assem; Wilkins, Karin Gwinn, 1962-; Straubhaar, Joseph D.; Kackman, Michael; Kraidy, Marwan M.; Kumar, ShantiThe Middle East saw much social change in recent tumultuous decades. On one hand, some communities embraced Westernness as part of the inevitable path to development and modernization. On the other hand, there were communities that resisted global trends that were mostly dominated by the West. The latter deemed these trends as a threat to native cultures, religious groups, and local traditions. This made the Arab world a ground for constant redefinition of the meaning of identity. Of the countries in the region undergoing a turbulent debate over what constitutes national identity, Lebanon serves as a good example. Ever since its independence, Lebanon was a nation-state with no sense of nationality to unite its people. As some communities saw themselves more francophone than Arab, others felt a close connection to a pan-Arab nation. Arguably, the Lebanese people found themselves amidst a tension between the two poles. Defining one’s identity required a negotiation between the two extremes. Not only did this negotiation demand a thorough investigation of one’s beliefs, social network, and history, but it also necessitated a diligent ‘performance’ of identity. An individual represented her identity by habits and expressions that she associated with that particular identity. The study at hand is an exploration of the relationship between identity and consumption in the Lebanese society. This project applies a unique approach in that it considers the producers’ agency in the construction of identity. Taking television advertising as a site for inquiry, the study explores how commercial advertisers utilize the tension between the local and the non-local to promote the consumption of the advertised products. Through exploring the values that educate advertising producers’ choices in creating text and meaning, this study applies theories of globalization, postcolonial studies, and consumer behavior through which advertisers manifest an ambivalence of identity. Therefore, by taking Lebanon as an example and focusing on advertising, this study contributes to the debates of globalization and the Arab world by invoking questions of producers’ agency in producing identity references through attitudes, behaviors, and social status associated with the featured products.Item Beautifully blonde or enchantingly ugly : re-imagining the Swedish nation through text and image in the illustrated fairy tale annual Bland tomtar och troll (Amongst gnomes and trolls)(2014-05) Anderson, Matthew Owen; Belgum, Kirsten, 1959-Much like oft-repeated quotes or catchy movie soundtrack tunes, famous illustrations often outweigh and outlast their original contexts and establish themselves as iconic cultural reference points for generations to come. Over the last 100 years in Sweden, John Bauer’s fairy tale illustrations have maintained a strong grip on that nation’s popular imaginary through over thirty reprint editions, museum exhibits, stamp collections, and, of course, stylistic imitations. While their century-old narrative contexts remain relatively unknown and uninteresting to contemporary audiences, his beautifully blonde children, enchantingly ugly trolls, and stark, Swedish landscapes continue to be bought, sold, and validated as embodying a typically Swedish relationship to nature. Why John Bauer’s work has remained so influential over time while the publication they appeared in has faded is a question that many of his biographers have attempted to answer. Harald Schiller, the most thorough of these, claims that “when one sees [his] images in black and white or color, they capture one’s interest to such a degree that there is none left for the text” (152). This essay uses Schiller’s comment as a starting point to pose one answer to this question. By exploring the dynamic potential of the relationship between Bauer’s images and their early twentieth-century contexts, it locates the artist’s appeal over against his narrative guidelines and the historical movements of his time. To this end, its comparative analysis of the textual and visual narratives in the illustrated Swedish fairy tale annual, Bland tomtar och troll (Amongst Gnomes and Trolls) explores how the interplay between the historical pregnancy of its fairy tale stories and the Swedophilic affects of John Bauer’s illustrations contributes to the project of imagining and proliferating a new Swedish national identity at the beginning of the twentieth century.Item Conceptions of Taiwanese identity : Lee Teng-hui and the understanding Taiwan textbooks(2010-05) Tran, Euhwa; Hsu, Madeline Yuan-yin; Li, HuaiyinAuthoritarian governments have long wielded education as political tools by which to transmit their conceptions of nationalistic identity, but does the same hold true of democratic governments? Transitioning from martial law to full democracy in the 1980s and 1990s, Taiwan serves as an ideal case study. As authoritarian rulers, Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang (KMT) imposed education curriculum that legitimized their claims to be the rulers of all China. After martial law was lifted in 1987, dissenters could freely vocalize a Taiwanese identity that advocated for a sovereign Taiwan separate from the Chinese nation. Contemporaneously, Lee Teng-hui rose to power as a loyal KMT member, but as president he shifted away from Chinese identity to promote a sense of Taiwanese identity. Preceded by nationalistically Chinese KMT stalwarts and succeeded by one who pushed Taiwan even closer to independence, Lee was a transitional leader whose own ideological evolution reflected Taiwan’s shift from a staunchly Chinese political entity to a possibly independent state separate from the mainland. During Lee’s presidency, controversy erupted over the content of textbooks for a junior high course entitled Understanding Taiwan [renshi taiwan] that focused for the first time on Taiwan in its own right instead of as only one small part of China. The textbooks instigated a debate on identity, for how one regarded the accuracy or appropriateness of the textbooks reflected one’s views of Taiwan in relation to China. The debates and the textbooks’ contents revealed clearly that despite the considerable democratization occurring in Taiwan over the decade, curriculum content continued to mirror the convictions espoused by the central government—led by the democratically elected president Lee Teng-hui (1988-2000)—in much the same way that it had done so under the authoritarian rule of Chiang Kai-shek (1949-1975).Item Confusion, conformity, and contradiction : the Salvadoran state's reluctant engagements with indigenous recognition(2007-08) Clark, Joshua P.; Hooker, JulietThis thesis explores the recent shift in one aspect of Salvadoran state discourses about the content of the Salvadoran "nation": that dealing with the existence and status of indigenous people. Having recently shown signs that it may abandon its longstanding position that El Salvador is a homogeneously mestizo country, the state’s tentative steps towards official recognition of an indigenous population are shown to lack clarity of both substance and purpose. The representations of and knowledge about Salvadoran Indians that are today being deployed by state actors are sporadic and promote incoherent visions of what "being indigenous" means (and can mean) in contemporary El Salvador. Two related claims about the nature of Salvadoran state recognition of indigeneity follow from this realization. First, "the state" should not be seen as a unitary actor with one set of consistent interests in the kind of indigenous subject it will authorize and the national image it will foment. Second, the representations of indigeneity that constitute semiofficial acts of recognition are the direct result of international influence directed at agencies of the Salvadoran state. Specific state actors are modeling the way they make Indians visible in conformity with ascendant norms of multicultural recognition that become operant in subtly, yet meaningfully, different ways. Both of these claims point to a "state" whose control over knowledge production and subject formation is limited, a fact that I end by suggesting that indigenous activists should take into account and, indeed, exploit in their struggle for greater political agency as indigenous people.Item Egypt is mother of the world : transnational television and national identity(2010-08) Elseewi, Tarik Ahmed; Kumar, Shanti; Kackman, Michael; Wilkins, Karin G.; Straubhaar, Joe; Kraidy, MarwanThis dissertation is about the production of national identity in the transnational age. Focusing on the specific example of Egyptian television, this dissertation argues that new production imperatives, mainly in satellite television and internet, have changed the way that television is produced in the Arabic speaking Middle East, most significantly away from direct state control. The changes in production accompany changes in distribution and consumption of electronic media and are significantly rewriting the ways that shared cultural identities in the Middle East, including nationalism, religious, and other significant identities, are produced, consumed and replicated. This dissertation approaches these topics by relating two specific televisual texts, the Ramadan serials Malek Farouq and Gamal Abdel Nasser, to larger changes in Arab and Egyptian television production.Item The influence of national identity activation on consumer responses to patriotic Ads : Caucasian vs. Asian Americans(2013-12) Yoo, Jin Young, 1977-; Lee, Wei-Na, 1957-This dissertation study examined how the activation of national identity influences consumer evaluations of ads using patriotic appeals. Specifically, this study proposed that (1) priming of national identity through the cues within media-context would activate consumers’ national identity, making it momentarily salient, and this increased national identity salience, in turn, would affect consumer responses to the ads using patriotic themes; and (2) the impact of national identity salience on evaluations of patriotic ads among ethnic minority consumers (i.e., Asian Americans) would be different from that among majority consumers (i.e., Caucasian Americans). As expected, findings from this study showed that activating consumers’ national identity through a national identity prime (i.e., a news story about a national event) led to favorable responses to the ads featuring patriotic themes. Further, results of this study indicated that the effect of national identity salience on increasing evaluations of ads using patriotic themes was significantly stronger for ethnic minority consumers than was for majority consumers.Item The language attitudes of second-generation North Africans in France : the effects of religiosity and national identity(2015-08) Oprea, Megan Grace; Bullock, Barbara E.; Blyth, Carl; Wettlaufer, Alexandra; Toribio, Almeida Jacqueline; Brower, BenjaminThis dissertation explores the language attitudes (LAs) of second-generation North African immigrants in France toward Arabic and French, focusing primarily on women. I explore how these attitudes are correlated with religiosity, national identity and proficiency. Although numerous LA studies have been done in the Maghreb, none have examined the attitudes of the highly marginalized North African community in France. Previous research in LAs and in sociolinguistics has also neglected religion as a variable, a gap in the literature that this dissertation addresses. French and Arabic have powerful language ideologies making them an ideal language pairing to study. Muslims believe Arabic is the only language through which the true message of the Qur’an can be transmitted (Suleiman, 2003). Previous LA studies in the Maghreb indicate that people there strongly associate Islam with Arabic (Benrabah 2007; Chakrani, 2010). It is also the national language of most Muslim majority countries and is linked with both national and pan-Arab identity (Dawisha, 2003). The French language is seen as the vehicle of French culture and is an important symbol of national identity that is used as a tool for the assimilation of immigrants (Weil, 2010). There is evidence to suggest that LAs are stronger in a diaspora context (Garrett, Bishop & Coupland, 2009). Language attitudes may be especially potent for the North African diaspora because of the colonial history between France and the Maghreb, and the strained relationship between France and its immigrant population. Given that language can act as a symbol of culture (Choi, 2003), participants who more closely identify with their North African cultural and religious heritage will express more positive attitudes toward Arabic. In order to explore these topics, I constructed an anonymous language attitudes survey that was distributed online to second-generation North Africans in France, ages 18 to 30. The survey included questions concerning attitudes toward religious and national identity. The results indicate positive attitudes toward Arabic, Islam and North Africa, while expressing relatively neutral attitudes toward French, and negative attitudes toward France. Correlations did emerge that suggest a relationship between religiosity, national identity, and language attitudes for this population.Item Practicing nationalism : culture, technology, and national identity in contemporary Korea(2011-08) Kim, Gwangseok; Kumar, Shanti; Strover, Sharon L.This thesis consists of three case studies on Korean nationalism: the ‘Korean Wave,’ the relationship between technology and nationalism marked by the ‘iPhone fever,’ and ‘Hines Ward syndrome.’ The three cases and the scant attention paid to them are symptoms of both the profound changes in and the ascendancy of nationalism in contemporary Korea. Taking Korean nationalism as a discursive formation, not as a pathology or a necessary manifestation of national sovereignty, this study challenges the dominant concept of the Korean nation as a real entity. To examine these pertinent cases is an indispensable element in this study’s attempt to avoid the essentialized and fossilized understanding of the Korean nation and nationalism. By analyzing a wide range of discourses on the cases, this thesis seeks to capture the multilayered appreciation of Korean nationalism. The Korean Wave has been one of the most predominant discourses in which a set of heterogeneous cultural commodities, the Korean Wave, is represented as a demonstration of the Korean nation’s cultural potential. One of the purposes of this thesis is to deconstruct this naturalized link between culture and place. This study also rejects the deep-rooted belief in the relationship between technology and national development. Technology and science in Korea do not inherently belong to the pure realm of Truth. Technology and science have been reproduced and constructed as a driving force for and/or an indicator of national development, not only by the national elites but also by ordinary Koreans. Whereas Hines Ward as a marker of unstable boundaries of the Korean nation appears to pave the way for the elimination of long standing discrimination against mixed-blood (honhyeol) people, the unquestioned links between race and culture as well as place and identity are still prominent even in multiculturalism as an alternative to the label of honhyeol. Based on these findings, this thesis argues, despite the pronouncement of the popular globalization thesis envisioning the death of nations and nationalism, that Korean nationalism continues to exist as a center of everyday discursive practices.Item Rednecks, revivalists and roadkill : the construction of whiteness in an Appalachian town(2010-08) Baker, Hannah Rose Pilkington; Hartigan, John, 1964-; Stewart, Kathleen C.This report examines the construction of whiteness in Appalachia through a close study of two New Year’s Eve celebrations in a small community in Brasstown, North Carolina. By examining these two celebrations, I draw out questions of race and racialization that have been largely overlooked in the study of Appalachia and illustrate the connections between the construction of a whitewashed Appalachian identity and the construction of an equally pale national identity. This report challenges the idea that Appalachia as a region is “racially innocent” and therefore does not play a role in discussions of race in America. On the contrary, I show that Appalachia’s position as a site of production of a national culture and identity means that in the context of Appalachia, race and racialization demand scrutiny as a means for understanding what “whiteness” is.Item Religion, nation, art : Christianity and modern Japanese literature(2014-05) Megumi, Maeri; Fischer, Kirsten, 1963-My dissertation aims to uncover the complex relationship among religion, literature, and national identity by considering the case of Christianity in modern Japan. Although Christianity was never successful in propagating its religious messages to the masses in the history of Japan, the re-introduction of Christianity in the late nineteenth century left a surprisingly powerful impression because, for many Japanese writers, it presented the “Western spirituality” against which they defined their religious, national and even artistic identities. By examining the works of two non-Christian authors, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892-1927) and Yokomitsu Ri’ichi (1898-1947), and one Christian author Endō Shūsaku (1923-1996), I show how the encounter with Christianity was often crucial to sculpting perceptions of Japanese identity, religion, as well as art in the twentieth century. For the cosmopolitan Taishō author Akutagawa, Christianity was one of the motifs that stimulated his artistic production. Juxtaposing Christianity’s “power that destroys,” he celebrated Japanese religion’s “power that re-creates,” likening it to the process of artistic creation. A devotee to art throughout his life, Akutagawa maintained his unfaltering belief that the ultimate creator is art, and not God: he even re-created Christ into an artist in his final essay. Yokomitsu’s last novel, A Traveler’s Sadness demonstrates how Christianity acts as the catalyst for the establishment of Japanese national identity. Written mostly under Imperial Japan, the novel showcases the fear for the loss of Japanese identity in the face of overwhelming Western influence, as well as the urge to establish one, utilizing Ancient Shinto as the source. Ironically, however, it is discovered only when pitted against Christianity, the foreign religion. Endō began his career as an author because he wanted to reconcile his conflicting Christian and Japanese identities. Even though he initially scrutinized his native country of Japan and its religion with his internalized, critical Catholic gaze, his artistic endeavor gradually transformed Endō into what I call a “catholic” Catholic: he came to embrace Japanese religions and heritage without denouncing his Catholic faith. Even though these three authors had different motivations and issues to tackle, their negotiations illuminate how complex and interconnected are the relationships among their religious, national and artistic identities.Item Scotland and the making of British poetry in the age of revolution(2014-05) Christian, George Scott; Levack, Brian P.The present study examines a specific form of literary memorialization of Scottishness, stubborn and elusive as that term might be, under the concrete political, social, and economic conditions of the late eighteenth-century. It holds that literary history and criticism can make a significant contribution to understanding Scottish history, both in its own terms and in relation to British history writ large. It inserts into these histories a much wider range of late eighteenth-century Scottish poets than previous scholarship and deepens our understanding of the cultural and discursive manifestations of British state formation under the extreme stress of war and revolution. It also reveals the way the political crisis of the French Revolution converged with pre-existing concerns about the impact of union on the Scottish economy and society, as well as with shared Anglo-Scottish critiques of state power that feature so prominently in the political history of this period. Many of the poets studied here have never figured significantly in political, cultural, or literary histories of the period and, with a few notable exceptions, no analysis of their poetry, whether in political or literary terms, has yet occurred. Consequently, this study brings both historical and literary analysis to bear on a large and diverse group of Scottish poets with a range of political and aesthetic perspectives that reflect not only on the question of Scottish, English, and British "identities," but on the formation of British poetry more generally.Item Sculpting Turkish nationalism : Atatürk monuments in early republican Turkey(2006-12) Gur, Faik; Marcus, Abraham, 1948-Today every city and town in Turkey has at least one monument of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881-1938), the founding father of the Turkish Republic, located in one of its most important public spaces. All private and state primary, middle and high schools have at least one bust of him in front of which students have to line up every Monday morning and Friday evening to chant the national anthem. Apart from statues and busts, his portraits and pictures are hung in every office in state buildings and in most private offices. His name has been bestowed upon boulevards, parks, stadiums, concert halls, bridges, forests, and, more importantly, on educational institutions. Among these many public expressions, the monumental statues of Atatürk erected before he died exemplify one of the most effective instruments of the elite-driven modernization in early republican Turkey (1923-1938). These monuments reveal the ways in which Atatürk and his political elites attempted to establish a modern and secular sense of identity as well as a new official public culture and official history, mainly constructed through Atatürk’s Nutuk, the speech which he delivered in 1927. Nutuk was Atatürk’s public defense of his policies during the military and diplomatic struggle for independence in Anatolia between 1919 and 1923. It has not only become a remarkable and extremely influential text both in Turkish and foreign historiographies but also has been the source for visualizing the official interpretation of the struggle for independence in Turkey to the present day. Thus, all the monuments of the early Republic stand for such orthodox interpretations of history, emerging defensive Turkish nationalism and national identity while symbolizing the closure of the predating Ottoman Empire. Codified within this new national identity are the elements of secularization and racial homogenization of the society, a western cult of the “Orient” in the Orient, and an effort to control and limit the cultural and religious hegemony of Islam in the official public culture of early republican Turkey.Item Too foul and dishonoring to be overlooked : newspaper responses to controversial English stars in the Northeastern United States, 1820-1870(2010-05) Smith, Tamara Leanne; Canning, Charlotte, 1964-; Jones, Joni L.; Wolf, Stacy; Thompson, Shirley E.; Forgie, GeorgeIn the nineteenth century, theatre and newspapers were the dominant expressions of popular culture in the northeastern United States, and together formed a crucial discursive node in the ongoing negotiation of American national identity. Focusing on the five decades between 1820 and 1870, during which touring stars from Great Britain enjoyed their most lucrative years of popularity on United States stages, this dissertation examines three instances in which English performers entered into this nationalizing forum and became flashpoints for journalists seeking to define the nature and bounds of American citizenship and culture. In 1821, Edmund Kean’s refusal to perform in Boston caused a scandal that revealed a widespread fixation among social elites with delineating the ethnic and economic limits of citizenship in a republican nation. In 1849, an ongoing rivalry between the English tragedian William Charles Macready and his American competitor Edwin Forrest culminated in the deadly Astor Place riot. By configuring the actors as champions in a struggle between bourgeois authority and working-class populism, the New York press inserted these local events into international patterns of economic conflict and revolutionary violence. Nearly twenty years later, the arrival of the Lydia Thompson Burlesque Troupe in 1868 drew rhetoric that reflected the popular press’ growing preoccupation with gender, particularly the question of woman suffrage and the preservation of the United States’ international reputation as a powerfully masculine nation in the wake of the Civil War. Three distinct cultural currents pervade each of these case studies: the new nation’s anxieties about its former colonizer’s cultural influence, competing political and cultural ideologies within the United States, and the changing perspectives and agendas of the ascendant popular press. Exploring the points where these forces intersect, this dissertation aims to contribute to an understanding of how popular culture helped shape an emerging sense of American national identity. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that in the mid-nineteenth century northeastern United States, popular theatre, newspapers, and audiences all contributed to a single media formation in which controversial English performers became a rhetorical antipode against which “American” identity could be defined.Item Visualizing race : neoliberal multiculturalism and the struggle for Koreanness in contemporary South Korean television(2013-08) Ahn, Ji-Hyun; Kumar, Shanti"Visualizing Race: Neoliberal Multiculturalism and the Struggle for Koreanness in Contemporary South Korean Television" investigates visual representations of multicultural subjects in both celebrity culture and the reality television genre to examine the struggle for Koreanness in contemporary Korean television. My aim is to explain the transformation from a modern monoracial Korea to a multicultural, global Korea as a national project of what I call "neoliberal multiculturalism" and to problematize the implicit tie between the two words, "neoliberal" and "multiculturalism." Using the category of mixed-race as an analytical window onto this cultural shift, I attempt to link the recent explosion of multiculturalism discourse in Korea to the much larger cultural, institutional, and ideological implications of racial globalization. To illustrate this shift, the dissertation analyzes both black and white mixed-race celebrities as well as ordinary multicultural subjects appearing on Korean reality programs. I examine historical archives, popular press sources, policy documents, and television programs in order to analyze them as an inter-textual network that is actively negotiating national identity. Utilizing the concept of neoliberal multiculturalism as an overarching framework, the dissertation explicates how concepts such as nationality, race, gender, class, and the television genre are intricately articulated; it also critically deconstructs the hegemonic notion of a multicultural, global Korea presented by the Korean media. I argue that Korean television deploys racial representations as a way to suture national anxiety over an increasing number of racial others and projects a multicultural fantasy towards Koreans. This interdisciplinary project contributes to several fields of study by explicating the changed cultural meaning of mixed-race in the age of globalization, defining the organic relation between the medium of television and racial representation, broadening our understanding of Asian multiculturalism and the racial politics in the region, and examining the particulars of ethnic nationalism appearing in the Korean media and popular culture.Item Western science and Japanese identity from the Meiji restoration to the Pacific War(2006-05) Marx, Shaun Patrick; Traphagan, John W.This thesis is in response to scholarly works on Japanese society and the ideal of the monoethnic race in relation to minorities and immigrants living in contemporary Japan. Race is as much a biological concept as it is a social one, and much of our modern understanding of race was borne out of the scientific and philosophic thought of nineteenth-century Europe and North American. Therefore, I posit that the adoption of western science by Japan effectively translated the Japanese body into a biological construct and blurred the line between science and culture, developing into a racially-based national identity by the time of the Pacific War. The construction of the Japanese body in this manner occurred in three successive translations: (1)the body as an object to be improved upon in order to compete with the West; (2) the body as a racialized object, distinct from all others and (3)the body as an object to be safeguarded from degradation. The discourse among social actors, including scholars, the government, religious leaders, and others, followed along western models of biological determinism and ultimately led to Japan's own indigenous form of eugenics. The catalyst for this process was the "scientizing" of the body. Just as Douglas has theorized that what is acted upon the body reflects larger societal issues, when western science was placed into the framework of the Japanese body it can be discerned that the translation from a traditional form to a scientific one, resulting in a "scientized" body. However, the translation was not wholesale and indigenous concepts of the body, like the family state, merged with biodeterminist conceptions to create a mono-ethnic race in line with Neo-Shintoist ideology. Implications for postwar Japan fall outside the confines of this thesis, but threads from the prewar period do carry over into the present.