Search Results

Community Networking -- The Native American Telecommunications Continuum Computer mediated communications -- has evolved exponentially each decade since the mid-1980’s. Pre-Internet exploration in the era of FidoNet and supported by dial-up modem equipment running over x.25 exchange switching does not seem possible to have existed at all. With three decades of change to reflect upon, questions remain today about whether the impact of technology and telecommunications has advanced tribal nationhood.

This chapter analyzes several cases of disputed citizenship drawn from the German colonies before World War 1, suggesting that the cases of marriage between white German men and colonized women of color show how citizenship law worked in a political context of colonial empire which was organized by gender hierarchy and race. It also discusses the legal issues and cultural meanings of citizenship in the context of Rogers Brubaker's book Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany.

Increasing frequency and higher intensity of trans-regional contacts across the Indian Ocean in the course of the 19^th century also helped turning Islam into a tool of resistance. The account will begin with the challenge of local power structures in South Sumatra by returning Hajjis inspired by the Wahhabi capture of Mecca and Medina in the early 1800s, resulting in the Padri Wars. This foreshadowed a changing of the guards of the leadership of anti-colonial activities after the Java War of the 1830s, when aristocrats were replaced by religious figures as resistance leaders. Coincidental with the high imperialism of the industrial age, technological advances making traffic between Indonesia and the holy places easier, thus accelerating the arrival of ideas associated with Islamic reformism and modernism. The political translation of these ideas into Panislamist ideologies and the hybrid religious nationalism of ‘Islamic nationhood’ were met with fierce repression on the part of the Dutch Indies colonial authorities. The chapter ends by pointing out that in the same period we also find the roots of the separatism in Aceh which would continue into the independence era.

The introduction traces the changing patterns of American thought and culture in its transition into the early twenty-first century, looking particularly at two perceived turning points: the political swing back towards the right represented by the election of George W. Bush in November 2000 and the attacks of 11 September 2001. Considering whether the early events of the new century represented a rupture or continuity with the closing years of the twentieth century, the authors, Martin Halliwell and Catherine Morley, go on to discuss ideas of nationhood, the transnational, and the ideological and geographical reconfiguration of the United States with reference to historical figures like Randolph Bourne and contemporary commentators such as Janice Radway, Thomas Friedman and Samuel Huntington. All eighteen of the contributing chapters are introduced in overview in order to remap the United States in the early century and to reassess the nation’s place within world affairs.

Chapter 2 argues that the Dominican Republic’s separation from Haitian rule in 1844 reflected competing and conflicting notions about nationhood, belonging, and the legacies of Haitian rule over the island of Hispaniola.

The Tudors (2007-2010) is a new type of heritage product - the internationally produced and consumed television costume drama- that has recently become an established global alternative to those of the BBC. Drawing on historical fact and previous cinematic and television portrayals of Henry VIII, it also owes its existence to non-British influences such as American and Canadian production companies. It features an international cast and was filmed in Ireland with an Irish actor as the English king. Unlike traditional British historical and heritage cinema, The Tudors does not represent the greatness of a national past through location shooting of castles and cathedrals. Instead, the world its characters occupy is often conjured from computer generated images, suggesting less the past depicted than the technology used to depict it. And rather than dealing in national concerns, its hybridized form and content lead it away from specific characteristics to international notions of British masculinity and nationhood. Via these means, Henry VIII, like Spartacus and the Borgias, joins the historical superheroes of the new multi-channel universe.

Ndi Umunyarwanda is a relatively new concept, having surfaced in post-genocide political narrative in July 2013. There is little doubt however that this concept currently dominates Rwandan identity politics and is envisioned as the answer to almost all the historical ills that have befallen and divided Rwanda. In light of the currently predominant discourse on post-genocide Rwanda, Ndi Umunyarwanda could be perceived as a top-down process of social engineering if considered only from the perspective of the current stage of its political dissemination. However, approached from its inception stage as this essay does, It is a bottom-up phenomenon that originates from Youth Connekt Dialogues (YCD); a series of dialogues held between children of perpetrators, children (of) survivors and representatives of local and central governments. The essay offers a narrative analysis of this emergence of Ndi Umunyarwanda out of YCD. The argument proposed here is that change in post-genocide Rwanda happens in different stages and at different levels. A narrative examination of YCD and Ndi Umunyarwanda as sequentially related phenomena shows that individual and group-initiated changes at grassroots levels can and do shape the national metanarrative of post-genocide nation building.

The introduction establishes the critical and historical basis for the idea of a Black Scotland, beginning with a brief history of Black life in territorial Scotland and in the ‘Scottish Empire’, both crucial to a post-imperial national consciousness. The introduction also reads selected examples of Blackness in Scottish literature and criticism, including some of the ways Black history has been analysed in comparison to Scottish culture. It outlines critical definitions of racialisation and of Blackness specifically: its discursive character and its relationship to the literary imagination. Defining ‘devolutionary’ as a distinct phase in the political and cultural history of Scotland, the introduction also establishes the evolving critical field of Black literary studies as it has emerged in post-war Britain, up to the multicultural moment of New Labour, and situates Scotland within and against that historical trajectory.

This chapter examines the ‘communication circuit’ of the most influential book written on Haiti in the Victorian period, Spenser St John’s Hayti or the Black Republic (1884). During the ‘life-cycle’ of this book, from its research, writing, publishing, reading, and the re-writing (in its second edition), the meanings of Haiti varied. Through exploring the dynamics of this book’s communication circuit, I track the construction and rejection of certain ideas about Haiti. In the books’ text, some pre-existing ideas about the ‘Black Republic’, especially those concerning ‘Vaudoux’ and cannibalism, were consolidated whereas the more problematic notions of Haitian sovereignty were discarded. Yet, it is in the readings of the book performed by Haitians and certain political commentators across the Caribbean that counter-visions of Haiti emerge and are reinforced. In this moment, Haiti could be deployed equally as evidence in the case for expanding political agency to people of African descent in the British Caribbean.