Representing The Nation

Representing the Nation gathers key writings from leading cultural thinkers to ask what role cultural institutions play in creating and shaping our sense of ourselves as a nation.

The 1970s saw the emergence and subsequent proliferation across the Arabian Peninsula of ‘national museums’, institutions aimed at creating social cohesion and affiliation to the state within a disparate population. Representing the Nation examines the wide-ranging use of exhibitionary forms of national identity projection via consideration of their motivations, implications (current and future), possible historical backgrounds, official and unofficial meanings, and meanings for both the user/visitor and the multiple creators. The book responds to, due to the importance placed on tradition, heritage and national identity across all the states of the Peninsula, and the growth of re-imagined and new museums, the need for far greater discussion and research in these areas.

Mexico City’s staging of the 1968 Olympic Games should have been a pinnacle in Mexico’s post-revolutionary development: a moment when a nation at ease with itself played proud host to a global celebration of youthful vigour. Representing the Nation argues, however, that from the moment that the city won the bid, the Mexican elite displayed an innate lack of trust in their countrymen. Beautification of the capital city went beyond that expected of a host. It included the removal of undesirables from sight and the sponsorship of public information campaigns designed to teach citizens basic standards of civility and decency. The book’s contention is that these and other measures exposed a chasm between what decades of post-revolutionary socio-cultural reforms had sought to produce, and what members of the elite believed their nation to be. While members of the Organising Committee deeply resented international scepticism of Mexico’s ability to stage the Games, they shared a fear that, with the eyes of the world upon them, their compatriots would reveal Mexico’s aspirations to first world status to be a fraud. Using a detailed analysis of Mexico City’s preparations for the Olympic Games, we show how these tensions manifested themselves in the actions of the Organizing Committee and government authorities. This book was published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport.

Histories of Public Diplomacy and Nation Branding in the Nordic and Baltic Countries provides an historical perspective on public diplomacy and nation branding in the Nordic-Baltic region during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It covers a range of attempts by these self-described peripheral states to represent the nation abroad.

Many non-Indian readers find the historical and cultural references in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children demanding. In his close reading of the novel, Neil ten Kortenaar offers post-colonial literary strategies for understanding Midnight's Children that also challenge some of the prevailing interpretations of the novel. Using hybridity, mimicry, national allegory, and cosmopolitanism, all key critical concepts of postcolonial theory, ten Kortenaar reads Midnight's Children as an allegory of history, as a Bildungsroman and psychological study of a burgeoning national consciousness, and as a representation of the nation. He shows that the hybridity of Rushdie's fictional India is not created by different elements forming a whole but by the relationship among them. Self, Nation, Text in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children also makes an original argument about how nation-states are imagined and how national consciousness is formed in the citizen. The protagonist, Saleem Sinai, heroically identifies himself with the state, but this identification is beaten out of him until, in the end, he sees himself as the Common Man at the mercy of the state. Ten Kortenaar reveals Rushdie's India to be more self-conscious than many communal identities based on language: it is an India haunted by a dark twin called Pakistan; a nation in the way England is a nation but imagined against England. Mistrusting the openness of Tagore's Hindu India, it is both cosmopolitan and a specific subjective location.

Mediating Nation: Late American Realism, Globalization, and the Progressive State

This book examines the shifting portrayal of the nation in school textbooks in 14 countries during periods of rapid political, social, and economic change. Drawing on a range of analytic strategies, the authors examine history and civics textbooks, and the teaching of such texts, along with other prominent curricular materials—children’s readers, a required text penned by the head of state, a holocaust curriculum, etc.. The authors analyze the uses of history and pedagogy in building, reinforcing and/or redefining the nation and state especially in the light of challenges to its legitimacy. The primary focus is on countries in developing or transitional contexts. Issues include the teaching of democratic civics in a multiethnic state with little history of democratic governance; shifts in teaching about the Khmer Rouge in post-conflict Cambodia; children’s readers used to define national space in former republics of the Soviet Union; the development of Holocaust education in a context where citizens were both victims and perpetuators of violence; the creation of a national past in Turkmenistan; and so forth. The case studies are supplemented by commentary, an introduction and conclusion.

Originally published in 1998, Dynamics of the Pictured Page provides a critical study of the world's first regularly illustrated newspaper, the Illustrated London News, founded by Herbert Ingram in 1842. Focusing on the first decade of this enormously influential weekly, this book situates the ILN within the publishing history of periodicals, arguing not only for a better understanding of those new modes of production engendered by an illustrated newspaper, but also for the need to theorize the relations between engraved images and printed text that constituted the ILN, which advertised itself as an unprecedented 'marriage' between art and literature. Through a series of interpretive interventions that focus on categories that would have had especially powerful reverberations for Victorian readers (for example, the home, the railway, the public funeral, and serialized literature), this book traces the newspaper's complex strategies of appeal to a middle-class English readership. This book will appeal to students of nineteenth-century literature and history (especially those with an interest in publishing history and the history of the press), as well as to Victorian studies scholars.