Intellectuals And The Articulation Of The Nation

An interdisciplinary look at the role of intellectuals in the making of nations

This study brings into focus the issue of reproduction and transformation of cultural authority in the so-called post-Soviet context. Being anchored to sociological theories on intellectual autonomy and empowerment through narrativization, it approaches daily practices, situations and popular narratives which bring insight into everyday concerns and motivations of the educated Western Ukrainians.

This book examines how democracy was rethought in Germany in the wake of National Socialism, the Second World War, and the Holocaust. Focusing on a loose network of public intellectuals in the immediate postwar years, Sean Forner traces their attempts to reckon with the experience of Nazism and scour Germany's ambivalent political and cultural traditions for materials with which to build a better future. In doing so, he reveals, they formulated an internally variegated but distinctly participatory vision of democratic renewal - a paradoxical counter-elitism of intellectual elites. Although their projects ran aground on internal tensions and on the Cold War, their commitments fueled critique and dissent in the two postwar Germanys during the 1950s and thereafter. The book uncovers a conception of political participation that went beyond the limited possibilities of the Cold War era and influenced the political struggles of later decades in both East and West.

This path-breaking book explains the processes through which the heterogeneous population of Roma in Europe constitutes itself into a transnational collective identity through the practices and discourses of everyday life, as well as through those of identity politics. It illustrates how the collective identity formation of the Roma in Europe is constituted simultaneously in the local, national, and European contexts, drawing attention to the mismatches and gaps between these levels, as well as the creative opportunities for achieving this political aim. Bunescu demonstrates that the differences and stereotypes between the Roma and the non-Roma, as well as those among different groups of Roma, fulfil a politically creative function for the constitution of a unified transnational collective identity for the Roma in Europe. The book is unique - comprising chapters ranging from local ethnographic accounts of inter-ethnic relations of rural Roma in a Transylvanian village, to interviews with international Roma political activists, controversial Roma kings, and an extensive chapter on their role of bridging the local and the higher levels of identity politics, visual depictions of a diversity of Roma living spaces and interpretations of the politics of space in private dwellings, as well as in public venues, such as at Roma international festivals.

The major socio-political changes of the last decades have led to changing ways of being national, changes in the content of national identity if not in the national categories themselves. This comparative social scientific volume takes examples of transitions to democracy (East Europe, Spain) to peace (South Africa, Israel, Northern Ireland) and to territorial decentralization (the United Kingdom, France, Spain), showing in each case how socio-political change and identity change have interlocked. It defines a typology of national identity shift, tracing the changing state forms which provoke national identity shift, and analyzing the process of identity change, its motivations and legitimations. Collecting together a wide range of examples, from South Africa to the Czech Republic from the Basque Country to the Mexican and Irish borders; the book brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars, from world figures in the study of globalization and social identity to young researchers, to provide a much needed theoretical clarification and empirical evidence of types of national identity shift.

Laura L. Adams offers unique insight into nation building in Central Asia during the post-Soviet era through an exploration of Uzbekistan’s production of national culture in the 1990s. As she explains, after independence the Uzbek government maintained a monopoly over ideology, exploiting the remaining Soviet institutional and cultural legacies. The state expressed national identity through tightly controlled mass spectacles, including theatrical and musical performances. Adams focuses on these events, particularly the massive outdoor concerts the government staged on the two biggest national holidays, Navro’z, the spring equinox celebration, and Independence Day. Her analysis of the content, form, and production of these ceremonies shows how Uzbekistan’s cultural and political elites engaged in a highly directed, largely successful program of nation building through culture. Adams draws on her observations and interviews conducted with artists, intellectuals, and bureaucrats involved in the production of Uzbekistan’s national culture. These elites used globalized cultural forms such as Olympics-style spectacle to showcase local, national, and international aspects of official culture. While these state-sponsored extravaganzas were intended to be displays of Uzbekistan’s ethnic and civic national identity, Adams found that cultural renewal in the decade after Uzbekistan’s independence was not so much a rejection of Soviet power as it was a re-appropriation of Soviet methods of control and ideas about culture. The public sphere became more restricted than it had been in Soviet times, even as Soviet-era ideas about ethnic and national identity paved the way for Uzbekistan to join a more open global community.

Nineteenth-century Armenia was a zone of competition between the Persian, Ottoman, and the Russian Empires. Yet over the course of the century a new generation of Armenian journalists, scholars, and writers worked to transform their geographically, socially, and linguistically fragmented communities threatened by regional isolation and dissent, into a patriotic and nationally conscious population. Lisa Khachaturian seeks to explain how this profoundly divided society managed to achieve a common cultural bond.The national project that captivated nineteenth-century Eastern Armenian intellectuals was a daunting task, especially since their efforts were directed in the Caucasus--a territory known for its volatile history, its ethnic heterogeneity, and its linguistic complexity. Although this cultural and social maelstrom was both aggravated and tempered by the new Russian arena of economic growth, urban development, and heightened technology and communication, diversity was hardly a recent phenomenon in the region; it had been an endemic part of Caucasian history for centuries. Armenians were no exception to this. While the Georgians, bound to their landed nobility, generally lived within kingdoms, the Armenians experienced centuries of forced resettlement, migration, and centuries of habitation among other peoples. Some Armenians had settled in faraway countries, but many remained in scattered colonies within the boundaries of historic Armenia.This is a study of the formation of modern Armenian national consciousness under Imperial Russian rule. The Tsarist acquisition of Armenian-populated territory and consequent efforts to integrate this territory into the empire imposed sufficient unity to provide a basis for a nascent national movement. The particular influences of Russian imperial rule met the Eastern Armenian communities to create a new environment for a modern national revival. This book reviews how nineteenth-century Armenian intellectuals discussed and conceived of the nation through the formation of the Armenian press. This is a rare blend of national culture and communication networking.

The book explores the nexus of intellectual activity and nation-building from a critical discourse-analytical perspective. By examining how public intellectuals from Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina commented on key national events in editorials and opinion pieces, it offers unique insights into contemporary nation-building discourses in an enlarging Europe. Through a detailed reconstruction of the debates concerning the selected events, the book also provides fresh empirical evidence of the implications and challenges of post-socialist transition, post-conflict reconciliation, democratisation and European integration in the post-Yugoslav region. Its versatile framework, which innovatively combines sociological and linguistic approaches to the discursive positioning of intellectuals, may be readily applied to the analysis of intellectual engagement with current affairs and public life in general.