Empires, Nations, and Natives is a groundbreaking comparative analysis of the interplay between the practice of anthropology and the politics of empires and nation-states in the colonial and postcolonial worlds. It brings together essays that demonstrate how the production of social-science knowledge about the “other” has been inextricably linked to the crafting of government policies. Subverting established boundaries between national and imperial anthropologies, the contributors explore the role of anthropology in the shifting categorizations of race in southern Africa, the identification of Indians in Brazil, the implementation of development plans in Africa and Latin America, the construction of Mexican and Portuguese nationalism, the genesis of “national character” studies in the United States during World War II, the modernizing efforts of the French colonial administration in Africa, and postcolonial architecture. The contributors—social and cultural anthropologists from the Americas and Europe—report on both historical and contemporary processes. Moving beyond controversies that cast the relationship between scholarship and politics in binary terms of complicity or autonomy, they bring into focus a dynamic process in which states, anthropological knowledge, and population groups themselves are mutually constructed. Such a reflexive endeavor is an essential contribution to a critical anthropological understanding of a changing world. Contributors: Alban Bensa, Marcio Goldman, Adam Kuper, Benoît de L’Estoile, Claudio Lomnitz, David Mills, Federico Neiburg, João Pacheco de Oliveira, Jorge Pantaleón, Omar Ribeiro Thomaz, Lygia Sigaud, Antonio Carlos de Souza Lima, Florence Weber

This book brings together a series of papers presented at a University of Montreal interdisciplinary conference held in March 2014 and devoted to various little-known facets of the First World War’s cultural and social history. The commemorative activities of the war’s centennial triggered the conference, as this anniversary had precipitated a lively renewal of historical reflections on the causes and consequences of this global conflict. If the commemoration was an occasion to foster a more civic-minded pedagogical approach regarding the meaning of this major historical event, the conference itself strove to engage the rich and substantial body of research about the war that had evolved over the past few decades. While taking national and regional approaches into account, this book also aligns itself with the recent interest in a global history of the Great War that, by not excluding various national traditions, strives to re-examine the causes and consequences of the conflict from a perspective whose scope extends beyond Europe. By engaging in a broader temporal and spatial consideration of the war, this standpoint not only calls into question the relevance of using the nation-state as a singular political and cultural framework with which to understand the conflict, but also, and especially, strives to more clearly apprehend peripheral geopolitical spaces, particularly Africa and the Americas, in the conflict and to integrate them more effectively.

Encompassing five continents and twenty centuries, this book puts ruler personality cults on the crossroads of disciplines rarely, if ever, juxtaposed before: among its authors are historians, linguists, media scholars, political scientists and communication sociologists from Europe, the United States and New Zealand. However, this breadth and versatility are not goals in themselves. Rather, they are the means to work out an integrated approach to personality cults, capable of overcoming both the dominance of much-discussed 20th century poster examples (Bolshevism-Nazism-Fascism) and the lack of interest in the related practices of leader adoration in religious and cultural contexts. Instead of reiterating the understandable but unfruitful fixation on rulers as the cults’ focal points, the authors focus on communicative patterns and interactional chains linking rulers with their subjects: in this light, the adoration of political figures is seen as a collective enterprise impossible without active, if often tacit, collaboration between rulers and their constituencies.

Publisher Description

Weaving U.S. history into the larger fabric of world history, the contributors to Crossing Empires de-exceptionalize the American empire, placing it in a global transimperial context. They draw attention to the breadth of U.S. entanglements with other empires to illuminate the scope and nature of American global power as it reached from the Bering Sea to Australia and East Africa to the Caribbean. With case studies ranging from the 1830s to the late twentieth century, the contributors address topics including diplomacy, governance, anticolonialism, labor, immigration, medicine, religion, and race. Their transimperial approach—whether exemplified in examinations of U.S. steel corporations partnering with British imperialists to build the Ugandan railway or the U.S. reliance on other empires in its governance of the Philippines—transcends histories of interimperial rivalries and conflicts. In so doing, the contributors illuminate the power dynamics of seemingly transnational histories and the imperial origins of contemporary globality. Contributors. Ikuko Asaka, Oliver Charbonneau, Genevieve Clutario, Anne L. Foster, Julian Go, Michel Gobat, Julie Greene, Kristin L. Hoganson, Margaret D. Jacobs, Moon-Ho Jung, Marc-William Palen, Nicole M. Phelps, Jay Sexton, John Soluri, Stephen Tuffnell

Faced with dramatic social and political changes, Korean writers of the twentieth century--writing in the context of Japanese imperialism, World War II, the Korean War, and the Cold War era--explored many pressing questions about modern life: What is the relationship between literature and society? How can intellectual concepts be used politically, for good or ill? What are the differences between Eastern and Western cultures? The essays in this collection, originally published between 1933 and 1957, explore these and other questions through varying lenses, including liberal humanism, socialism, fascism, and an early form of North Korea's Juche thought. Featuring works by Paik Ch'ŏl, Sŏ Insik, Ŏm Hosŏk, and Ch'oe Chaesŏ, the volume highlights the diversity of twentieth-century Korean thought, its developments during periods of upheaval, and its engagement with ideas of modernity that were being shared around the world. This volume contains discussion of writers such as Matthew Arnold, T. S. Eliot, Maxim Gorky, G. W. F. Hegel, Martin Heidegger, James Joyce, Karl Marx, Walter Pater, Plato, Marcel Proust, Yi Kwangsu, and Yi Sang; movements, schools of thought, and literary styles such as English Romanticism, European modernism, German idealism, the Kyoto school of philosophy, Marxism, naturalism, the New Tendency Group, nihilism, socialist realism, and tendentious literature; traditions such as Hinduism, Mahayana Buddhism, Taoism, and Zen Buddhism; and the sociopolitical and economic formation known as East Asian Community.

The first exploration of how Mussolini employed population settlement inside the nation and across the empire to strengthen Italian sovereignty.

First Published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an Informa company.

This volume is the result of an international conference held at Sapienza University in Rome on June 20 and 21, 2013, as the final stage of the PRIN (Progetto di rilevante interesse nazionale) project “Empires and Nations from the 18th to the 20th century”, during which scholars from all over the world – academics, specialists, young researchers, PhD students and post-doctorates – confronted diverse, but connected, topics on the relations between multinational empires and the idea of the nation. In this way, the reality of the historical empires and national states was represented, and concepts such as identity, nationality, and sovereignty analyzed. The first part of this work is dedicated to the analysis of the origins of nation-states in the context of the multinational Habsburg, Ottoman and Tsarist empires, while the second pays particular attention to the issue of national minorities, which followed the dissolution of the great empires. The third part is related to national identity and focuses on art and culture by presenting artists, painters, writers and intellectuals who had played key roles in the formation of their national identities. Such pioneers include Hungarians, Romanians, Serbs, Georgians, Chinese, and Brazilians. Specific sections are dedicated to theoretical approaches and concepts such as imperialism, geopolitics, nationality, and regionalism, and to the analysis of religious and gender issues.