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208 books match the query 'Nation' and 12 start with d

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DETECTING THE NATION

FICTIONS OF DETECTION AND THE IMPERIAL VENTURE

Caroline Reitz

The Ohio State University Press, 2004

In Detecting the Nation, Reitz argues that detective fiction was essential both to public acceptance of the newly organized police force in early Victorian Britain and to acclimating the population to the larger venture of the British Empire. In doing so, Reitz challenges literary-historical assumptions that detective fiction is a minor domestic genre that reinforces a distinction between metropolitan center and imperial periphery. Rather, Reitz argues, nineteenth-century detective fiction helped transform the concept of an island kingdom to that of a sprawling empire; detective fiction placed imperialism at the center of English identity by recasting what had been the suspiciously un-English figure of the turn-of-the-century detective as the very embodiment of both English principles and imperial authority. She supports this claim through reading such masters of the genre as Godwin, Dickens, Collins, and Doyle in relation to narratives of crime and empire such as James Mill's History of British India, narratives about Thuggee, and selected writings of Kipling and Buchan. Detective fiction and writings more specifically related to the imperial project, such as political tracts and adventure stories, were inextricably interrelated during this time.

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Dance and the Nation

Performance, Ritual, and Politics in Sri Lanka

Susan A. Reed

University of Wisconsin Press, 2010

Around the globe, dances that originate in village, temple, and court rituals have been adapted and transformed to carry secular meanings and serve new national purposes. In stage performances, dance competitions, and festivals worldwide, dance has become an emblem of ethnicity and an index of national identity. But what are the “backstage” stories of those dances chosen to bear such meanings, and what have been the consequences for their communities of origin? In Dance and the Nation, Susan A. Reed brings to light the complexities of aesthetic politics in a multi-faceted exploration and analysis of Kandyan dance in Sri Lanka.
As the national dance of Sri Lanka, Kandyan dance is identified with the majority Sinhala ethnic group and heavily supported by the state. Derived from the kohomba kankariya—an elaborate village ritual performed by men of the hereditary drummer caste—the dance was adopted by the state as a symbol of traditional Sinhala culture in the post-independence period. When state officials introduced the dance into the school curriculum, it was opened to individuals of all castes, and high-caste women have emerged as prominent teachers and performers. Reed’s evocative account traces the history and consequences of this transition from ritual to stage, situating the dance in relation to postcolonial nationalism and ethnic politics and emphasizing the voices and perspectives of the hereditary dancers and of women performers.
Although Kandyan dance is related to other south Asian dance forms, it is unique, distinguished by an elegant, energetic style, and lively displays of acrobatics and agility. The companion DVD includes unparalleled footage of this vibrant dance in ritual, stage, and training contexts, and features the most esteemed performers of the Kandyan region.

Special Citation book award, Society for Dance History Scholars

Winner, Outstanding Publication Award, Congress on Research in Dance

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Dancing from Past to Present

Nation, Culture, Identities

Edited by Theresa Jill Buckland

University of Wisconsin Press, 2007

This groundbreaking collection combines ethnographic and historic strategies to reveal how dance plays crucial cultural roles in various regions of the world, including Tonga, Java, Bosnia-Herzegovina, New Mexico, India, Korea, Macedonia, and England. The essays find a balance between past and present and examine how dance and bodily practices are core identity and cultural creators. Reaching beyond the typically Eurocentric view of dance, Dancing from Past to Present opens a world of debate over the role dance plays in forming and expressing cultural identities around the world.

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Dangerous Liaisons

Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives

Anne Mcclintock

University of Minnesota Press, 1997

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Dark Laughter

Spanish Film, Comedy, and the Nation

Juan F. Egea

University of Wisconsin Press, 2013

In Dark Laughter, Juan F. Egea provides a remarkable in-depth analysis of the dark comedy film genre in Spain, as well as a provocative critical engagement with the idea of national cinema, the visual dimension of cultural specificity, and the ethics of dark humor.

Egea begins his analysis with General Franco's dictatorship in the 1960s—a regime that opened the country to new economic forces while maintaining its repressive nature—exploring key works by Luis García Berlanga, Marco Ferreri, Fernando Fernán-Gómez, and Luis Buñuel. Dark Laughter then moves to the first films of Pedro Almodóvar in the early 1980s during the Spanish political transition to democracy before examining Alex de la Iglesia and the new dark comedies of the 1990s. Analyzing this younger generation of filmmakers, Egea traces dark comedy to Spain's displays of ultramodernity such as the Universal Exposition in Seville and the Barcelona Olympic Games.

At its core, Dark Laughter is a substantial inquiry into the epistemology of comedy, the intricacies of visual modernity, and the relationship between cinema and a wider framework of representational practices.

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Death of a Nation

American Culture and the End of Exceptionalism

David W. Noble

University of Minnesota Press, 2002

A trenchant examination of epic shifts in American thought by a major scholar in the field.

In the 1940s, American thought experienced a cataclysmic paradigm shift. Before then, national ideology was shaped by American exceptionalism and bourgeois nationalism: elites saw themselves as the children of a homogeneous nation standing outside the history and culture of the Old World. This view repressed the cultures of those who did not fit the elite vision: people of color, Catholics, Jews, and immigrants. David W. Noble, a preeminent figure in American studies, inherited this ideology. However, like many who entered the field in the 1940s, he rejected the ideals of his intellectual predecessors and sought a new, multicultural, postnational scholarship. Throughout his career, Noble has examined this rupture in American intellectual life. In Death of a Nation, he presents the culmination of decades of thought in a sweeping treatise on the shaping of contemporary American studies and an eloquent summation of his distinguished career.

Exploring the roots of American exceptionalism, Noble demonstrates that it was a doomed ideology. Capitalists who believed in a bounded nationalism also depended on a boundless, international marketplace. This contradiction was inherently unstable, and the belief in a unified national landscape exploded in World War II. The rupture provided an opening for alternative narratives as class, ethnicity, race, and region were reclaimed as part of the nation’s history. Noble traces the effects of this shift among scholars and artists, and shows how even today they struggle to imagine an alternative postnational narrative and seek the meaning of local and national cultures in an increasingly transnational world. While Noble illustrates the challenges that the paradigm shift created, he also suggests solutions that will help scholars avoid romanticized and reductive approaches toward the study of American culture in the future.

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Decolonizing the Map

Cartography from Colony to Nation

Edited by James R. Akerman

University of Chicago Press, 2017

Almost universally, newly independent states seek to affirm their independence and identity by making the production of new maps and atlases a top priority. For formerly colonized peoples, however, this process neither begins nor ends with independence, and it is rarely straightforward. Mapping their own land is fraught with a fresh set of issues: how to define and administer their territories, develop their national identity, establish their role in the community of nations, and more. The contributors to Decolonizing the Map explore this complicated relationship between mapping and decolonization while engaging with recent theoretical debates about the nature of decolonization itself.

These essays, originally delivered as the 2010 Kenneth Nebenzahl, Jr., Lectures in the History of Cartography at the Newberry Library, encompass more than two centuries and three continents—Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Ranging from the late eighteenth century through the mid-twentieth, contributors study topics from mapping and national identity in late colonial Mexico to the enduring complications created by the partition of British India and the racialized organization of space in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa. A vital contribution to studies of both colonization and cartography, Decolonizing the Map is the first book to systematically and comprehensively examine the engagement of mapping in the long—and clearly unfinished—parallel processes of decolonization and nation building in the modern world.

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Demography and Nation

Social Legislation and Population Policy in Bulgaria

Svetla Baloutzova

Central European University Press, 2011

The monograph investigates the origins of state policy toward population and the family in Bulgaria. Reconstructs the evolution of state legislation in the field of social policy toward the family between the two World Wars, colored by concerns about the national good and demographic considerations. It sets the laws regarding family welfare in their framework of a distinctively cultural, historical and political discourse to follow the motives behind the legislative initiatives.

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Disarming the Nation

Women's Writing and the American Civil War

Elizabeth Young

University of Chicago Press, 1999

In a study that will radically shift our understanding of Civil War literature, Elizabeth Young shows that American women writers have been profoundly influenced by the Civil War and that, in turn, their works have contributed powerfully to conceptions of the war and its aftermath. Offering fascinating reassessments of works by white writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, and Margaret Mitchell and African-American writers including Elizabeth Keckley, Frances Harper, and Margaret Walker, Young also highlights crucial but lesser-known texts such as the memoirs of women who masqueraded as soldiers. In each case she explores the interdependence of gender with issues of race, sexuality, region, and nation.

Combining literary analysis, cultural history, and feminist theory, Disarming the Nation argues that the Civil War functioned in women's writings to connect female bodies with the body politic. Women writers used the idea of "civil war" as a metaphor to represent struggles between and within women—including struggles against the cultural prescriptions of "civility." At the same time, these writers also reimagined the nation itself, foregrounding women in their visions of America at war and in peace. In a substantial afterword, Young shows how contemporary black and white women—including those who crossdress in Civil War reenactments—continue to reshape the meanings of the war in ways startlingly similar to their nineteenth-century counterparts.

Learned, witty, and accessible, Disarming the Nation provides fresh and compelling perspectives on the Civil War, women's writing, and the many unresolved "civil wars" within American culture today.

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Dismantling the Nation

Contemporary Art in Chile

Edited by Florencia San Martín, Carla Macchiavello Cornejo, and Paula Solimano

Amherst College Press, 2023

The first volume to theorize and historicize contemporary artistic practices from Chile in the English language, Dismantling the Nation begins from a position of radical criticism against the nation-state of Chile and its capitalist, heteronormative, and extractivist rule. At a truly pivotal moment in the country’s history, when it is redefining what it wants to be, the works here propose a way of forging a feminist and decolonial future for Chile. The authors attend to practices from distinct locations in Chile, reconceptualizing geographical borders from a transnational and transdisciplinary perspective while engaging with ecocriticism and Indigenous epistemologies. This is an essential volume for anyone looking to understand the current social, political, and artistic movements in Chile.

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Distinction and Denial

Race, Nation, and the Critical Construction of the African American Artist, 1920-40

Mary Ann Calo

University of Michigan Press, 2007

Distinctionand Denial challenges conventional theories of race and art by examining the role early twentieth-century art critics played in marginalizing African American artists. Mary Ann Calo dispels the myth of a unified African American artistic tradition through an engaging study of the germinal writing of Alain Locke and other significant critics of the era, who argued that African American artists were both a diverse group and a constituent element of America’s cultural center. By documenting the effects of the “Negro aesthetic” on African American artists working in the interwar years, Distinctionand Denial shows that black artistic production existed between the claims of a distinctly African American tradition and full inclusion into American modernist culture—never fully inside or outside the mainstream.

“A major contribution to the scholarship of African American artists in the inter-war period. With scrupulous research and probing analyses, Calo’s study enables scholars, students, and those interested in the Harlem Renaissance to grasp the intellectual debates, institutional support, and art world promotion that advanced an emerging cohort of African American artists.”

—Patricia Hills, Boston University

“A careful, thorough, historically grounded study that builds a new and significant argument challenging conventional histories of African American art. Sure to become indispensable to any scholarly discussion of American art or African American cultural studies.”

—Helen Langa, American University

Mary Ann Calo is Professor of Art History and Director of the Institute for the Creative and Performing Arts at Colgate University. She is author of Bernard Berenson and the Twentieth Century and editor of Critical Issues in American Art: A Book of Readings.

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