The Mystifications Of A Nation

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The Mystifications of a Nation

Author : Vladimír Macura
Publisher : Univ of Wisconsin Press
Page : 332 pages
File Size : 48,9 Mb
Release : 2010-11-18
Category : History
ISBN : 9780299248932

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The Mystifications of a Nation by Vladimír Macura Pdf

A keen observer of culture, Czech writer Vladimír Macura (1945–99) devoted a lifetime to illuminating the myths that defined his nation. The Mystifications of a Nation, the first book-length translation of Macura’s work in English, offers essays deftly analyzing a variety of cultural phenomena that originate, Macura argues, in the “big bang” of the nineteenth-century Czech National Revival, with its celebration of a uniquely Czech identity. In reflections on two centuries of Czech history, he ponders the symbolism in daily life. Bridges, for example—once a force of civilization connecting diverse peoples—became a sign of destruction in World War I. Turning to the Soviet and post-Soviet eras, Macura probes a range of richly symbolic practices, from the naming of the Prague metro system, to the mass gymnastic displays of the Communist period, to post–Velvet Revolution preoccupations with the national anthem. In “The Potato Bug,” he muses on one of the stranger moments in the Cold War—the claim that the United States was deliberately dropping insects from airplanes to wreak havoc on the crops of Czechoslovakia. While attending to the distinctively Czech elements of such phenomena, Macura reveals the larger patterns of Soviet-brand socialism. “We were its cocreators,” he declares, “and its analysis touches us as a scalpel turned on its own body.” Writing with erudition, irony, and wit, Macura turns the scalpel on the authoritarian state around him, demythologizing its mythology.

Literary Canon Formation as Nation-Building in Central Europe and the Baltics

Author : Anonim
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 341 pages
File Size : 45,6 Mb
Release : 2021-02-15
Category : History
ISBN : 9789004457713

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Literary Canon Formation as Nation-Building in Central Europe and the Baltics by Anonim Pdf

This volume presents regional approaches on the formation and transformation of national literary canons as a practice of nation-building in various cultural traditions (Polish, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Estonian, etc.) from the 19th century to the present times.

Czechoslovakia Behind the Curtain

Author : Thomas K. Murphy
Publisher : McFarland
Page : 222 pages
File Size : 41,5 Mb
Release : 2018-08-23
Category : History
ISBN : 9781476631776

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Czechoslovakia Behind the Curtain by Thomas K. Murphy Pdf

During the Cold War, the West--especially in the popular media--tended to view communism as a monolithic phenomenon, with little variation throughout the Eastern Bloc. Yet culture and geography contributed to social diversity among and within communist systems. Drawing on interviews with approximately 100 Czechs and Slovaks, the author provides new perspectives on day-to-day life in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. Their recollections paint a more complex picture of the life on the other side of the Iron Curtain, from the Sputnik era reforms of the early 1960s, through the tumult of the 1968 Prague Spring and the subsequent Soviet invasion, to the Velvet Revolution, the collapse of the communist regime and the formation of democratic Czechoslovakia in 1989.

Central Europe and the Non-European World in the Long 19th Century

Author : Markéta Křížová,Jitka Malečková
Publisher : Frank & Timme GmbH
Page : 254 pages
File Size : 41,6 Mb
Release : 2022-08-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9783732908677

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Central Europe and the Non-European World in the Long 19th Century by Markéta Křížová,Jitka Malečková Pdf

Central Europe and the Non-European World in the Long 19th Century explores various ways in which inhabitants of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy perceived and depicted the outside world during the era of European imperialism. Focusing particularly on the Czech Lands, Hungary, and Slovakia, with other nations as comparative examples, this collection shows how Central Europeans viewed other regions and their populations, from the Balkans and the Middle East to Africa, China, and America. Although the societies under Habsburg rule found themselves (with rare exceptions) outside the realm of colonialism, their inhabitants also engaged in colonial projects and benefited from these interactions. Rather than taking one “Central European” approach, the volume draws upon accounts not only by writers and travelers, but by painters, missionaries, and other observers, reflecting the diversity that characterized both the region itself and its views of non-Western cultures.

Prague

Author : Chad Bryant
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 353 pages
File Size : 54,9 Mb
Release : 2021-05-25
Category : History
ISBN : 9780674258839

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Prague by Chad Bryant Pdf

A poignant reflection on alienation and belonging, told through the lives of five remarkable people who struggled against nationalism and intolerance in one of Europe’s most stunning cities. What does it mean to belong somewhere? For many of Prague’s inhabitants, belonging has been linked to the nation, embodied in the capital city. Grandiose medieval buildings and monuments to national heroes boast of a glorious, shared history. Past governments, democratic and Communist, layered the city with architecture that melded politics and nationhood. Not all inhabitants, however, felt included in these efforts to nurture national belonging. Socialists, dissidents, Jews, Germans, and Vietnamese—all have been subject to hatred and political persecution in the city they called home. Chad Bryant tells the stories of five marginalized individuals who, over the last two centuries, forged their own notions of belonging in one of Europe’s great cities. An aspiring guidebook writer, a German-speaking newspaperman, a Bolshevik carpenter, an actress of mixed heritage who came of age during the Communist terror, and a Czech-speaking Vietnamese blogger: none of them is famous, but their lives are revealing. They speak to tensions between exclusionary nationalism and on-the-ground diversity. In their struggles against alienation and dislocation, they forged alternative communities in cafes, workplaces, and online. While strolling park paths, joining political marches, or writing about their lives, these outsiders came to embody a city that, on its surface, was built for others. A powerful and creative meditation on place and nation, the individual and community, Prague envisions how cohesion and difference might coexist as it acknowledges a need common to all.

Frontier Orientalism and the Turkish Image in Central European Literature

Author : Charles D. Sabatos
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 205 pages
File Size : 43,7 Mb
Release : 2020-01-02
Category : History
ISBN : 9781793614889

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Frontier Orientalism and the Turkish Image in Central European Literature by Charles D. Sabatos Pdf

This comparative study analyzes the ways that Central European writers used stereotypes of the Turks to develop their national identities from the early modern period to the present. Charles D. Sabatos uses Andre Gingrich’s concept of “frontier Orientalism” to foreground his analysis of Central European Orientalism, designating the nations of the former Habsburg Empire as the occident and the Turks as the oriental “Other.” This study applies theoretical approaches to literary history—as developed by scholars such as Stephen Greenblatt and Linda Hutcheon—to a range of texts from the early modern period, the nineteenth-century national revivals, interwar independence, and the communist and postsocialist regimes. By following these depictions across literatures and over an extensive historical period, this study illustrates how the Turkish stereotype evolved from a menace to a more abstract yet still powerful metaphor of resistance, and finally to a mythical figure that evoked humor as often as fear.

Scandal Nation

Author : Kathryn Temple
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 255 pages
File Size : 43,8 Mb
Release : 2018-05-31
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781501717628

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Scandal Nation by Kathryn Temple Pdf

Kathryn Temple argues that eighteenth-century Grub Street scandals involving print piracy, forgery, and copyright violation played a crucial role in the formation of British identity. Britain's expanding print culture demanded new ways of thinking about business and art. In this environment, print scandals functioned as sites where national identity could be contested even as it was being formed.Temple draws upon cases involving Samuel Richardson, Samuel Johnson, Catharine Macaulay, and Mary Prince. The public uproar around these controversies crossed class, gender, and regional boundaries, reaching the Celtic periphery and the colonies. Both print and spectacle, both high and low, these scandals raised important points of law, but also drew on images of criminality and sexuality made familiar in the theater, satirical prints, broadsides, even in wax museums. Like print culture itself, the "scandal" of print disputes constituted the nation—and resistance to its formation. Print transgression destabilized both the print industry and efforts to form national identity. Temple concludes that these scandals represent print's escape from Britain's strenuous efforts to enlist it in the service of nation.

Velvet Revolutions

Author : Miroslav Vanek,Pavel Mücke
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 264 pages
File Size : 42,6 Mb
Release : 2016-01-04
Category : History
ISBN : 9780199342747

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Velvet Revolutions by Miroslav Vanek,Pavel Mücke Pdf

The Velvet Revolution in November 1989 brought about the collapse of the authoritarian communist regime in what was then Czechoslovakia, marking the beginning of the country's journey towards democracy. Though members of the elite have spoken about the transition to democracy, the experiences of ordinary people have largely gone untold. In Velvet Revolutions, Miroslav Vanek and Pavel Mücke examine the values of everyday citizens who lived under so-called real socialism, as well as how their values changed after the 1989 collapse. Based on 300 interviews, Vanek and Mücke give voice to everyone from farmers to managers, service workers to marketing personnel, manual laborers to members of the armed forces. Compelling and diverse, the oral histories touch upon the experience - and absence - of freedom, the value of family and friends, the experience of free time, and perceptions of foreign nations. Data from opinion polls conducted between 1970 and 2013 factor into the book's analysis, creating a well-rounded view of the ways in which popular thoughts, trends, and attitudes changed as Czech society transitioned from communism to democracy. From this rich foundation, Velvet Revolutions builds a multi-layered view of Czech history before 1989 and during the subsequent period of democratic transformation.

The Cossack Myth

Author : Serhii Plokhy
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 403 pages
File Size : 45,9 Mb
Release : 2012-07-26
Category : History
ISBN : 9781107022102

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The Cossack Myth by Serhii Plokhy Pdf

The fascinating story of The History of the Rus', one of the most influential historical texts of the modern era.

Intellectuals and the Articulation of the Nation

Author : Ronald Grigor Suny,Michael D. Kennedy
Publisher : University of Michigan Press
Page : 444 pages
File Size : 54,5 Mb
Release : 2001
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0472088289

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Intellectuals and the Articulation of the Nation by Ronald Grigor Suny,Michael D. Kennedy Pdf

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

We, the People of Europe?

Author : Étienne Balibar
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 304 pages
File Size : 40,9 Mb
Release : 2009-01-10
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781400825783

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We, the People of Europe? by Étienne Balibar Pdf

étienne Balibar has been one of Europe's most important philosophical and political thinkers since the 1960s. His work has been vastly influential on both sides of the Atlantic throughout the humanities and the social sciences. In We, the People of Europe?, he expands on themes raised in his previous works to offer a trenchant and eloquently written analysis of "transnational citizenship" from the perspective of contemporary Europe. Balibar moves deftly from state theory, national sovereignty, and debates on multiculturalism and European racism, toward imagining a more democratic and less state-centered European citizenship. Although European unification has progressively divorced the concepts of citizenship and nationhood, this process has met with formidable obstacles. While Balibar seeks a deep understanding of this critical conjuncture, he goes beyond theoretical issues. For example, he examines the emergence, alongside the formal aspects of European citizenship, of a "European apartheid," or the reduplication of external borders in the form of "internal borders" nurtured by dubious notions of national and racial identity. He argues for the democratization of how immigrants and minorities in general are treated by the modern democratic state, and the need to reinvent what it means to be a citizen in an increasingly multicultural, diversified world. A major new work by a renowned theorist, We, the People of Europe? offers a far-reaching alternative to the usual framing of multicultural debates in the United States while also engaging with these debates.

Marx After Marx

Author : Harry Harootunian
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 307 pages
File Size : 48,8 Mb
Release : 2015-10-27
Category : History
ISBN : 9780231540131

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Marx After Marx by Harry Harootunian Pdf

In Marx After Marx, Harry Harootunian questions the claims of Western Marxism and its presumption of the final completion of capitalism. If this shift in Marxism reflected the recognition that the expected revolutions were not forthcoming in the years before World War II, its Cold War afterlife helped to both unify the West in its struggle with the Soviet Union and bolster the belief that capitalism remained dominant in the contest over progress. This book deprovincializes Marx and the West's cultural turn by returning to the theorist's earlier explanations of capital's origins and development, which followed a trajectory beyond Euro-America to Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Marx's expansive view shows how local circumstances, time, and culture intervened to reshape capital's system of production in these regions. His outline of a diversified global capitalism was much more robust than was his sketch of the English experience in Capital and helps explain the disparate routes that evolved during the twentieth century. Engaging with the texts of Lenin, Luxemburg, Gramsci, and other pivotal theorists, Harootunian strips contemporary Marxism of its cultural preoccupation by reasserting the deep relevance of history.

On the Geopragmatics of Anthropological Identification

Author : Allen Chun
Publisher : Berghahn Books
Page : 297 pages
File Size : 49,5 Mb
Release : 2019-04-01
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781789202045

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On the Geopragmatics of Anthropological Identification by Allen Chun Pdf

On the Geopragmatics of Anthropological Identification explores the discursive spaces of our speaking position, or what has routinely been referred to in the literature as the poetics and politics of writing culture. At issue here are its problematic underlying notions of cultural identity, authorial subjectivity and postcolonial critique. Contrary to the widespread assumption that cultural studies and the social sciences share a common discourse of culture and society, Allen Chun argues that 'modern' disciplinary practices and axioms have in fact produced inherently incompatible theories. Anthropology's ethical relativism has also created obstacles for a critical theory of culture and society.

National Healing

Author : Claude Hurlbert
Publisher : University Press of Colorado
Page : 286 pages
File Size : 48,6 Mb
Release : 2013-02-01
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9780874218367

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National Healing by Claude Hurlbert Pdf

In National Healing, author Claude Hurlbert persuasively relates nationalism to institutional racism and contends that these are both symptoms of a national ill health afflicting American higher education and found even in the field of writing studies. Teachers and scholars, even in progressive fields like composition, are unwittingly at odds with their own most liberatory purposes, he says, and he advocates consciously broadening our understanding of rhetoric and writing instruction to include rhetorical traditions of non-Western cultures. Threading a personal narrative of his own experiences as a student, professor, and citizen through a wide ranging discussion of theory, pedagogy, and philosophy in the writing classroom, Hurlbert weaves a vision that moves beyond simple polemic and simplistic multiculturalism. National Healing offers a compelling new aesthetic, epistemological, and rhetorical configuration.

Frantz Fanon

Author : Nigel C. Gibson
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Page : 211 pages
File Size : 50,8 Mb
Release : 2024-04-15
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781509548774

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Frantz Fanon by Nigel C. Gibson Pdf

Revolutionary humanist and radical psychiatrist Frantz Fanon was one of the greatest Black thinkers of the twentieth century. Born in Martinique and known for his involvement in the Algerian liberation movement, his seminal books Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth are widely considered to be cornerstones of anti-colonial and anti-racist thought. In this essential introduction to Fanon’s remarkable life and philosophy, Nigel C. Gibson argues that Fanon’s oeuvre is essential to thinking about race today. Connecting Fanon’s writing, psychiatric practice, and lived experience in the Caribbean, France, and Africa, Gibson reveals (with startling clarity) his philosophical commitments and the vision of revolution that he stood for. Despite his untimely death, the revolutionary pulse of Fanon’s ideas has continued to beat ever more strongly in the consciousness of successive revolutionary generations, from the Black Panthers and the Black Power to Black Lives Matter. As Fanon’s thought comes alive to new activists thinking about their mission to “humanize the world,” Gibson reminds us that that Fanon’s revolutionary humanism is fundamental to all forms of anti-colonial struggle, including our own.