A Country of Words: Conceiving the Palestinian Nation From the Position of Exile‟ In Ernesto Laclau (Ed.) The Making of Political Identities (original) (raw)
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Critical Thoughts on National Identity
Sharif Kanaaned (Ed.): The Future of Palestinian Identity. Cambridge Scholar Bublishing, 2018
This paper is based on the argument that the Palestinian identity suffers from a serious terminological problem, in the sense that it is perceived by its carriers as one thing while it is depicted in scholarly work as something totally different. This problem is most clearly manifested in the fact that the vast majority of Palestinian researchers and scholars subscribe to the paradigm that makes identity equivalent to awareness when postulating that " identity is the awareness of self. " I strongly disagree with this notion of identity, simply because it is a tautology, and a tautology is a logical fallacy. For, when we say that " identity is the awareness of self " , we actually say that "self is the awareness of self". The true logical ramification of this postulation goes this way: Identity is the awareness of self. F 0 A E National identity is the awareness of the national self. F 0 A E
Nationalism and Otherness: Reading Nation in the Literature Classroom
The Global South, 2008
This essay examines the motives and fallout, both overt and tactical, that surround the materiality of postcolonial novels and critical texts in specific institutional and pedagogical contexts. At stake is both the ontology and materiality of the other-more specifically their representation at the hands of a self as center of political power that legitimates its own systems of knowledge and meaning. The specific institutional context and point of departure is the recent revision of the postgraduate English syllabus at Guahati University in northeast India. The essay examines this academic exercise for a larger ideological meaning by drawing to a logical conclusion the assumption that a so-called muffassil (provincial) Indian university that is implicated in the life of the people of its region stands committed to the human resource development of that region. The institutional assumption is that the university's students of English studies in the socioeconomically challenged state of Assam should be sensitized to the complex issues of the nation and its otherness; it is also assumed that they should be able to construct a politically engaged reading of such texts, one informed by the problems of discontent of being on the nation's margins literally and metaphorically. The texts, however, instead tend to generate anxieties and discomfiture as Assamese students-already the nation's other-encounter postcolonial celebrations of the borderless nation, dissemination, porous borders, liminality, etc., which fail to empathize with the miseries of the Assamese people and the deplorable conditions of the region-the product of years of neglect by the metropolitan center, heavy immigration from Bangladesh and the resultant strain on the land and regional economy, and subnationalist aspirations being perceived as secessionism and terrorism.
Recovering Discourses of National Identity
Building a National Identity Database, 2016
This chapter outlines the method of inductive discourse analysis employed in this volume. It argues that the inductive requirements of interpretivist methods can be combined with quantitative counting procedures in a reliable, replicable method for studying national identity. The method developed operationalizes discourses of national identity as a sample of political speeches, newspapers, high school textbooks, novels, and movies. It measures national identity as a collection of categories that define the nation. The chapter argues that the inductive recovery of identity categories from widely circulated texts increases validity over other methods for studying identity because it allows the texts to speak for themselves. Thus, an inductive, discursive coding procedure executed by trained analysts can recover the intersubjective meanings that constitute national identity better than existing statistical variables, surveys, and content analysis.
Canadian Literature, 2004
Reviews of: Winfried Siemerling and Katrin Schwenk, eds.Cultural Difference and the Literary Text: Pluralism and the Limits of Authenticity in North American Literatures. University of Iowa Press and Smadar Lavie and Ted Swedenburg, eds. Displacement,Diaspora,and Geographies of Identity. Duke University Press
Sociolinguistic Studies, 2016
London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic ISBN 9780567338167. Pp x + 233 Reviewed by Josep-Àngel Mas Castells The subject of the relationship between language and identity is as captivating as it is vast: one may find specialized approaches from different domains and with various goals. Therefore it is the perfect subject for interdisciplinarity. Within this vastness two main areas can be distinguished: on the one hand, works of a social or sociolinguistic kind, which focus on the conception and construction of social identities (either regional, national, ethnic or class-based) and the role played by language; on the other hand, psycholinguistic works which analyse the role of language in the construction of individual identity. Within these areas there are also countless subthemes that can be analysed: power relationships between different linguistic groups, the very varied intensity attached to language in collective identity or the individual one, linguistic attitudes, multilingualism, etc. All things considered the title Language and identity: Discourse in the world is by all means appealing, but fairly vague for any scholar, wherever he or she may come from. David Evans, who appears on the front cover as if he was the authoractually he is the editor of this volume-states in the introduction that the aim of the work is 'to show how self-concept is constituted by the meanings of language and how it is reflected by language, not just in small-scale social interactions but also in larger linguistic-political discourses' (p. 3). No doubt that it is an ambitious statement that initially situates the work in the frame of social literature. Yet a quick look at the index will not help to clarify the issue much.