Nationalism Books - Page 12

Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey (Publications on the Near East, University of Washington)

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Editorial Review:

In the first two decades after W.W.II, social scientist heralded Turkey as an exemplar of a 'modernizing' nation in the Western mold. Images of unveiled women working next to clean-shaven men, healthy children in school uniforms, and downtown Ankara's modern architecture all proclaimed the country's success. Although Turkey's modernization began in the late Ottoman era, the establishment of the secular nation-state by Kemal Ataturk in 1923 marked the crystallization of an explicit, elite-driven 'project of modernity' that took its inspiration exclusively from the West.The essays in this book are the first attempt to examine the Turkish experiment with modernity from a broad, interdisciplinary perspective, encompassing the fields of history, the social sciences, the humanities, architecture, and urban planning. As they examine both the Turkish project of modernity and its critics, the contributors offer a fresh, balanced understanding of dilemmas now facing not only Turkey but also many other parts of the Middle East and the world at large.

Black Awakening in Capitalist America: An Analytic History

Robert L. Allen

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Allen's "Black Awakening in Capitalist America" 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

How obtainable is the goal of black equality in America? In addressing this question, Robert Allen first analyzes the history of the social and political contexts of Black Power up to 1969, and then concludes with an interim plan for action until economic, social, and political conditions become conducive for positive revolutionary action. Allen sees the consistent disenfranchisement of black Americans not only socially via racism, but also with regard racism existing as an inherent part of the American political economy. As such, racism will never be alleviated, real equality for blackfolk will never be achieved, until capitalism as an economic system is dismantled.

The foundational premise of his study is that black America exists "as a semicolony, or what has been termed domestic colonialism," and is progressing toward "a program of domestic neocolonialism" (2, 8). He aligns the "general economic motivations" of the American capitalist system with that of colonial regimes internationally, to the extent that in both international and domestic contexts political control is established over a subordinate group for the purpose of extracting resources and labor for the economic benefit of the dominant group (11). Neocolonialism, again viewed analogously to international contexts, has been fostered by the establishment of programs funded and sponsored by the white corporate elite and the black bourgeoisie, to act as a co-opting buffer to stave off rebellions by urban, lower and working class black Americans.

Allen's second chapter works through the social context of Black Power. He views Malcolm X as "the ideological father of the black power movement" (30). In keeping with colonialist frame, Allen focuses on Malcolm's efforts to place the black liberation struggle within the international context. This connection is further by Malcolm's attempts to address the UN and King's stance against the war in Viet Nam. Stokely Carmichael's definition of Black Power is also introduced at this time. However, Allen notes that "black power initially emerged as an effort to reform the social system," an indication that black militants at the time though more in terms of correcting social "deficiencies" as opposed to advocating for a complete restructuring of the social order (49). While Carmichael's and SNCC's version of black power was essentially more reform-based, Allen notes that the ten-point platform and program of the Black Panther Party was "of great significance because it represented the first concrete attempt to spell out the meaning of black power" (87). Whether the Panthers' reform programs could be viewed as revolutionary, according to Allen, is ultimately subject to questioning the class-based control and purpose of those programs.

In a bit of a "long movement" mode, Allen next analyzes "black power as a variant form of black nationalism that has roots that reach deep into the history and social fabric of black America" (89). He traces the lineage of black nationalism through Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, and Marcus Garvey. The author also works into this chapter an interesting discussion of the historical ambivalence of the black middle class, which alternately shares the desire (as other "raced" middle classes) to separate itself from the black majority AND to ascribe to black nationalism at the failed attempt of shedding their blackness to enter fully into the white middle class.

It is this black bourgeoisie ambivalence that ultimately makes the group unreliable. This is part of the thread that runs through the fourth chapter, "Black Power and Bourgeois Nationalism." In the wake of the Newark riots, a manifestation of black urban dissent, the potential for real substantive change is lost due to establishment of a neocolonial order, where the black middle class is complicit with the establishment of white corporate elite control. This "bourgeoisie nationalism," while espousing some tenants of cultural nationalism, actually further served the entrenchment of American capitalism in the areas of rebellion (191).

Given that this book was first published in 1969, it is not that far off in terms of describing the effects of capitalism, white elite, and black bourgeois participation in the maintenance of disenfranchisement of ALL working and lower class Americans. Allen's conclusion, as a revision of a prescription given earlier by Dr. DuBois, is the most complete explication of "what next?" that we've encountered in our readings. Allen goes further than even Countryman (who for me has held the cup of pragmatism to this point) to explicitly indicate the role of capitalism in the maintenance of the status quo. He is also realistic in stating the need for a "transitional program" if revolution is still the goal. Allen's "in the moment" analysis holds, and awaits an update. Even though this study comes before The Black Power Movement edited collection, it is one step further down the path of a pragmatic application of Black Studies scholarship for which Peniel Joseph advocates. Certainly, cultural and political approaches to social reorganization are essential. Ultimately, though, capitalism is antithetical to the practice of democracy, and so long as it is the prevailing economic system will never willfully afford full participation for the most disenfranchised members of this society.

Understanding Ethnic Conflict: The International Dimension

Rajat Ganguly, Ray Taras

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Understanding Ethnic Conflict 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 2 people found this review helpful.

In "Understanding Ethnic Conflict", Taras and Ganguly talked about the cost of ethnic conflicts in the world. He emphasized on four major points: the cause of ethnic conflict, how does the international organizations react to it, why some ethnic conflicts become internationalized, and what can be done about the conflicts.

The authors tended to give different answers accordingly to different conflicts. They claimed that not all conflicts are similar and not all conflicts can be applied to just
single theory. In the book, they laid out different causes of each conflict. For example, the cause of conflict in Chechnya was from the history of suppression done by Russians
to the Chechnya people. The conflict in Quebec is due to the differences in language barriers and cultural differences. As for conflict in Sri Lanka, the Sinhalese, who are the rulers, feared of losing power so they organized the nationalism idea.

Taras and Ganguly also emphasized that one conflict drew international attention while others do not. For example, the conflict in Chechnya does not draw international attention because there are no interests for other states to risk being involved. But the Yugoslavia conflict drew attentions from international community because the two sides
involved different civilizations.

The writers also emphasized how important the third parties are to solving the ethnic conflict. The international organization such as the United Nations, major powers, regional powers, and international governmental organizations should be involved in
settling disputes. They also criticized each organization such as the weakness of the United Nations for not having its own military.

Editorial Review:

Taras, Ray and Ganguly, Rajat, Understanding Ethnic Conflict: The International Dimension*\ The completely updated new edition of this groundbreaking book provides readers with a clear analytical framework for understanding ethnic conflicts and how they affect international relations. This book surveys theories of nationalism and ethnic conflict and tests their applicability to a number of contemporary cases. Looks at the sources of nationalist conflict in a country, each case study then ask how the international system reacted. Taken as a whole, the book examines how successful the international system has been in managing the many ethnic conflicts that erupted after the Cold War. For those interested in international relations.

Cultural Politics in Greater Romania: Regionalism, Nation Building, & Ethnic Struggle, 1918-1930

Irina Livezeanu

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Title should have been "Education in Greater Romania" 5 out of 5 stars.
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After World War I, Romania acquired major portions of territory that had until then been part of other countries (Transylvania, Bessarabia, and Bucovina). Each of these territories had their own non-Romanian elite who resented the fact that they were suddenly subservient to the Romanians, who had previously been the underdogs even though they were the majority of the citizens.

Now Romania wanted to reverse the centuries old practices and somehow eject the old non-Romanian elite out of their cushy positions and replace them with Romanians. But since, in many cases, Romanians represented the rural class who lived primarily in villages they were often the uneducated masses. Most of the schools, however, were in the cities and Romanian "peasants" weren't welcome (sometimes extending to violent denial).

Romania felt that the only way to reverse the trend was to educate the masses of often illiterate Romanians. But at every turn, they met with resistance from the "old guard" ... teachers who refused to teach classes in the Romanian language. And so, Romania forced the issue, insisting that non-Romanian teachers either pledge their allegiance to the Romanian state or face being fired.

But even when Romanian students showed up at the schools, they were faced with schools overcrowded with existing non-Romanian students. The Bucharest politicians forced the issue ... but not without a great deal of strife between the former non-Romanian and the current Romanian students.

Universities were especially hard hit because they were seen as the pathway to better jobs for Romanians. But universities were only found in the larger cities ... and were already overcrowded with urban non-Romanians, including a large number of Jews. This constant conflict might have been one of the reasons, according to the book, that fascist nationalism recruited such great numbers of Romanian students, especially at the University of Iasi where Codreanu, the future leader of the fascist Iron Guard, was a law student who sat through lectures by A.C. Cuza, a vehement anti-Semitic.

The book does an excellent job of covering the many pressure-cooker conflicts that existed in each of the gained territories. Each territory had a different and unique set of problems that the book covers very well.

Containing Nationalism

Michael Hechter

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Editorial Review:

Nationalism has become the most prevalent source of political conflict and violence in the world today. Scholarship has provided scant guidance for containing the dark side of nationalism--its widely publicized excesses of violence, such as ethnic cleansing and genocide. Based on fundamental theoretical ideas about the formation and solidarity of groups, Containing Nationalism offers a groundbreaking unified explanation of the dynamics of nationalism across the broad sweep of history and geography. Michael Hechter argues that the impetus for the most common type of nationalism arises from the imposition of direct rule in culturally heterogeneous societies--stimulating national identity, reducing the resources of local elites, motivating the mobilization of nationalist opposition to central authorities, and ultimately heightening the demand for sovereignty. Hechter suggests that political institutions that reintroduce indirect rule offer the leaders of modern countries the best available means of containing nationalist violence within their borders.

Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town

Rogers Brubaker, Margit Feischmidt, Jon Fox, Liana Grancea

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Situated on the geographic margins of two nations, yet imagined as central to each, Transylvania has long been a site of nationalist struggles. Since the fall of communism, these struggles have been particularly intense in Cluj, Transylvania's cultural and political center. Yet heated nationalist rhetoric has evoked only muted popular response. The citizens of Cluj--the Romanian-speaking majority and the Hungarian-speaking minority--have been largely indifferent to the nationalist claims made in their names.

Based on seven years of field research, this book examines not only the sharply polarized fields of nationalist politics--in Cluj, Transylvania, and the wider region--but also the more fluid terrain on which ethnicity and nationhood are experienced, enacted, and understood in everyday life. In doing so the book addresses fundamental questions about ethnicity: where it is, when it matters, and how it works. Bridging conventional divisions of academic labor, Rogers Brubaker and his collaborators employ perspectives seldom found together: historical and ethnographic, institutional and interactional, political and experiential. Further developing the argument of Brubaker's groundbreaking Ethnicity without Groups, the book demonstrates that it is ultimately in and through everyday experience--as much as in political contestation or cultural articulation--that ethnicity and nationhood are produced and reproduced as basic categories of social and political life.

Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict in Indonesia (Cambridge Asia-Pacific Studies)

Jacques Bertrand

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Excellent scholarship 5 out of 5 stars.
6 of 6 people found this review helpful.

This is without a doubt the best book on contemporary Indonesia I have read. Unlike other, terrorism-obsessed authors, Bertrand has a strong grasp of fact and critical interpretation. Virtually all of the major issues facing Indonesia during the late- and immediate post-Suharto period are covered in detail and without tiresome attempts to link them into a familiar or currently fashionable narrative, where Indonesia is characterized as a "crucible of terror" or other inaccurate characterization along similar lines...

For students of nationalism as a phenomenon, this book also contains one of the most succinct and accurate definitions of what nationalism is you'll find anywhere...

Editorial Review:

Since the end of Suharto's long authoritarian rule in 1998, there has been a dramatic increase in the rise of ethnic and religious conflict in Indonesia. Jacques Bertrand argues that these conflicts were the result of the constraints imposed by Suharto's regime, which left the country unprepared for political and social change. Consequently, the very definition of the Indonesian nation and what it means to be Indonesian has come under scrutiny. The book is a major contribution to the understanding of religious and ethnic conflict in a complex and often misunderstood arena.

Colonial Modernity in Korea (Harvard East Asian Monographs)

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Very progressive approach on the subject 5 out of 5 stars.
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I really like to recommend this anthology to all history and Korean studies interested people. The authors address to a very contentious and emotional topic of modern Korean history: the period of Japanese colonialism from 1910-1945.
However, this book doesn't cover this old and long well-known history what you maybe could expect. Deeply understanding the master narrative about political and cultural suppression or suffering what Koreans still maintain and the path to modernity from the Japanese side authors like Gi-Wook Shin, Michael Robinson or Clark Sorensen or Kenneth Wells turn to issues of Korean modernity and colonialism that are usually not covered by historians.
Indeed they attempt to initiate another kind of historiography: topics of everyday life, peasants, media (newspaper), human rights movement (Paeckchong), literature and the reflection of modernity, telecommunications network, policy of assimilation, significance of the Korean Nation after liberation and so on.
These historians break new grounds in Korean history in that they examine a history from below (!) concerning movements, everyday life during colonization or the quest for modernization, i.e. usual people's participation (instead of the aristocratic Yangban) on modernity. Nevertheless, they aspire to maintain the holistic claim. These authors try to relate the mentioned issues with the big political ones and concrete policy and thus underscore how various kinds of history (like political, social, media or literature) could be interwoven.

Editorial Review:

The twelve chapters in this volume seek to overcome the nationalist paradigm of Japanese repression and exploitation versus Korean resistance that has dominated the study of Korea's colonial period (1910-1945) by adopting a more inclusive, pluralistic approach that stresses the complex relations among colonialism, modernity, and nationalism. By addressing such diverse subjects as the colonial legal system, radio, telecommunications, the rural economy, and industrialization and the formation of industrial labor, one group of essays analyzes how various aspects of modernity emerged in the colonial context and how they were mobilized by the Japanese for colonial domination, with often unexpected results. A second group examines the development of various forms of identity from nation to gender to class, particularly how aspects of colonial modernity facilitated their formation through negotiation, contestation, and redefinition.

The Beast on the East River: The UN Threat to America's Sovereignty and Security

Nathan Tabor

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Awesome 5 out of 5 stars.
10 of 11 people found this review helpful.

With the risk being labeled a "raging right-wing paranoid with the intellect of a 9th grader", I want to publicly say this book is great. Shockingly honest and upfront, Nathan tells it how it is. You can take the facts and make your own opinion. I have found nothing in the book to be false or misleading. It is a very captivating read leaving you wondering what you can do to help keep the US a sovereign nation.

Read it, you won't regret it.

Find a better book 1 out of 5 stars.
8 of 19 people found this review helpful.

At risk of someone rating this comment "unhelpful" (the horror!) I will make one thing clear: I am familiar with the argument that Nathan Tabor presents in this book. I even considered buying it until I saw Mr. Tabor on C-SPAN. After watching him for half an hour, it immediately became clear that he really does have "the intellect of a 9th grader," as another review puts it.

Don't get me wrong, there is a case to be made against the United Nations--it is often a weak, feckless body that puts state sovereignty ahead of human rights. No organization that gives so much credence to serial abusers like Russia and China can be taken seriously all of the time. Nevertheless, Mr. Tabor's arguments are stale and superficial.

He spent most of his time on the program I was watching railing against World Heritage Sites, a program that declares certain cultural icons landmarks, and seeks to protect them from modification. (There are about a dozen such sites in the United States, including the Everglades.) Then he went down a war path about the UN campaign to control the trade of small arms to African dictators. He claims the UN wants to take away the firearms of American gun owners, essentially scrapping the second amendment. He does not present any evidence to support this view, and from what I've read in major newspapers, there's little evidence he could present anyway. (To those who disagree, I ask you this: If the UN wanted to take away our guns, how could they do so? They're too weak.)

There are better books for learning about the UN, regardless of your current opinion of the organization. Paranoid crap like this just gets in the way of real debate.

Editorial Review:

In his debut book, rising conservative voice Nathan Tabor offers a frightening expose of the United Nations' global power grab and its ruthless attempt to control U.S. education, law, gun ownership, taxation, and population control.

Conspiracy Nation: The Politics of Paranoia in Postwar America

Peter Knight

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Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> 20th Century -> 1945 - Present

Editorial Review:

Why are Americans today so fascinated by the X-Files? How did rumors emerge about the origins of the AIDS virus as a weapon of biowarfare? Why does the Kennedy assassination provoke heated debate nearly forty years after the fact, and what do we make of Hillary Clinton's accusation of a "vast right-wing conspiracy" against her husband? The origins of these ideas reveal important facets of American culture and politics.

Placing conspiracy thinking at the center of American history, and challenging the knee-jerk dismissal of conspiratorial thought as deluded and sometimes dangerous, Conspiracy Nation provides a wide-ranging survey of conspiracy theories in contemporary America. In the 19th century, inflammatory rhetoric about slave revolts, the well-publicized specter of the black rapist, and the formation of the Ku Klux Klan all worked as conspiracy theories to legitimate an emerging sense of national consciousness based on an ideology of white supremacy. Today, panicked responses to increasing multiculturalism and globalization yield new notions of victimhood and new theories about conspiratorial plans for global domination. Offering up a provocative array of examples, ranging from alien abduction to the novels of DeLillo and Pynchon to Tupac Shakur's "paranoid style," Conspiracy Nation documents and unearths the workings of conspiracy in the contemporary moment.

Their conclusions, sometimes startling and always compelling, have much to say about the nature of identity and anxiety, imagination and politics, and the state of the American psyche today.

Contributors: Clare Birchall, Jack Bratich, Bridget Brown, Jodi Dean, Ingrid Walker Fields, Douglas Kellner, Peter Knight, Fran Mason, John A. McClure, Timothy Melley, Eithne Quinn, and Skip Willman.