Identity politics

A cultural infrastructure of shared morality is necessary for the success of market economics. Traditional views maintain that religion is the nurturing source of the morality, which grows in the culture. The Progressive revolution aims to overturn Traditional morality and impose its social justice morality on culture. This article dissects and critiques the multifaceted Progressive revolution in the United States, while contrasting it with the Traditional view. It argues that the ultimate aim of the Progressive revolution is to redefine the human person through identity politics as a collective entity, which essentially liquidates the individual, conforms the person to social justice morality, and establishes socialistic economics.

El texto aborda el inicio de la conmemoración de la batalla del 5 de mayo de entre el Ejército de Oriente de México y las tropas de Napoleón III. La ritualidad en medio de una guerra de intervención tiene particularidades que catalizan el sentimiento nacional y que sientan las bases de un relato histórico nacional que triunfará definitivamente en 1867.

Dear Colleagues,
The impact of the past on present identities, a dominant subject in 21st-century global art, has become an especially prominent feature of the art created in Israel.  It is articulated in a plethora of artworks that renegotiate identity through new artistic strategies of reassessment, reenactment, and even reimagination of the past. While offering alternatives to hegemonic historicizations, these representations mark a shift from the critique of power relations to interventions in the processes through which history is remembered and narrated. As Jane Blocker suggests, instead of viewing art as the subject of inquiry on the part of art historians, contemporary art should be addressed and analyzed as a form of writing or rewriting history, even as history itself (2016).

Since its very inception, art created in Israel has exhibited a consistent preoccupation with issues of identity and self-determination. Beyond being a multicultural and multiethnic young immigrant state, Israel is further characterized by a significant social binary, fluctuating between Jewish and non-Jewish, Diaspora and Homeland, and Religious and Secular. The turbulent history of the country, saturated with wars and the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, renders the inquiry of the past within Israeli culture a fertile ground for the investigation of hybrid, complex, intersectional, and stratified local identities.

This special issue of Arts will focus on the renegotiation of histories and identities in contemporary art in Israel. Taking Blocker’s idea as our point of departure, we invite contributions that will explore art in the local arena as a form of writing [or rewriting] history in an attempt to reveal its unique manifestations and characteristics. Of special interest is the mediation of the subject through performative media – performance and video art, dance, and new media – which evoke an enhanced awareness of context and temporality through (live or documented) presence.

Resumo Neste artigo, discuto a tendência do sistema humanitário de fornecer serviços às pessoas necessitadas em áreas afetadas pela crise baseando-se na nacionalidade. Através de dados coletados em pesquisas de campo com refugiados sírios, iraquianos, sudaneses e palestinos realizadas entre os anos 2011 e 2019 no Líbano, mostrarei como a hospitalidade pode ser empregada tanto como prática quanto como discurso. Neste último caso, explicarei como isso pode se transformar, de maneira problemática, em uma força de “etnização” na prestação de ajuda humanitária. Como resultado, de um uso conservador do discurso da hospitalidade, apresentarei o conceito de “humanitarismo compensatório” que atende aos habitantes locais como uma consequência da presença de refugiados. Contra esse pano de fundo, finalmente mostrarei como o sistema humanitário atual está longe de ser intergrupal, apesar de seus esforços para tornar os programas nacionalmente mistos. Na verdade, o humanitarismo simplesmente pro...

This study interrogates how the Nigerian elites are recreating identity politics vis-a-vis the recurring Biafran Agitations. Despite fifty-one years after the civil war, the Biafran agitations have reappeared in an unprecedented magnitude amidst attempts by the federal government to suppress the wave of agitations. As it stands now the upsurge of renewed agitations appears to be implicated in the elite's activities in identity politics that have remained deeply rooted in the Nigerian polity and as such, contributed largely to pockets of violence in Nigeria. Thus, the study examines what accounts for the continued identity politics and the dialectics of Biafran agitations in Nigeria despite no victor no vanquished at the end of the civil war and the return of democratic governance in Nigeria. Anchored in Elites Theory, data for the study were generated through the documentary instrument and analyzed using the analytical inductive technique. The finding reveals that while the avow...

How does the subjective conceptual framing of conflict impact the warring parties' attitudes towards political compromise and negotiation? To assess strategies for conflict resolution, researchers frequently try to determine the defining dispute of a given conflict. However, involved parties often view the conflict through fundamentally distinct lenses. Currently, researchers do not possess a clear theoretical or methodological way to conceptualize the complexity of such competing frames and their effects on conflict resolution. This article addresses this gap. Using the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a case study, we run a series of focus groups and three surveys among Jewish citizens of Israel, Palestinian citizens of Israel (PCIs), and Palestinians in the West Bank. Results reveal that three conflict frames are prominent-material, nationalist, and religious. However, the parties to the conflict differ in their dominant interpretation of the conflict. Jewish Israelis mostly f...

... Sandra Lee Bartky, Ladelle McWhorter, Jana Sawicki, and Ed Royce read drafts of some of the chapters and provided much needed feedback, criticism and support. ... This research was supported by Jack B. Critchfield faculty research grants awarded by Rollins College. ...

The Macedonia naming dispute has been an important issue in Greek affairs. It constitutes both an irresolvable, decades-old international problem and a significant, yet undertheorised, analytical topic. In this context, our aim is to critically explore, highlight and discuss the deep-seated and pervasive patterns, representations, attitudes, beliefs, ideas and norms within the Greek social imaginary, as these emerged on Twitter in real-time, during the mass “Macedonia rally” on February 4, 2018. More specifically, drawing on the dialectical interaction between Twitter posts, sociopolitical behaviours and interpretative analytic frames linked to interdisciplinary theoretical discourses, we attempt to understand and interrogate the intellectual structures, value system and operational categories of a large number of Greek groups on the ‘Twittersphere’. Based on the assumption that, in the last instance, the rigid refusal of the majority of the Greek people to accept a ‘composite name’...

The history of colonial land alienation, the grievances fuelling the liberation war, and post-independence land reforms have all been grist to the mill of recent scholarship on Zimbabwe. Yet for all that the country’s white farmers have received considerable attention from academics and journalists, the fact that they have always played a dynamic role in cataloguing and representing their own affairs has gone unremarked. It is this crucial dimension that Rory Pilossof explores in The Unbearable Whiteness of Being. His examination of farmers’ voices – in The Farmer magazine, in memoirs, and in recent interviews – reveals continuities as well as breaks in their relationships with land, belonging and race. His focus on the Liberation War, Operation Gukurahundi and the post-2000 land invasions frames a nuanced understanding of how white farmers engaged with the land and its peoples, and the political changes of the past 40 years. The Unbearable Whiteness of Being helps to explain why ma...

In roughly 590 BCE, a “league of neighbors” developed in central Greece. The Amphictyony at Pylae joined together with Delphi to create the Delphic Amphictyonic League. The league gained political prowess throughout Greece through its protection of the sacred space of Delphi. Meanwhile in Macedonia, Macedonian kings sought Greek identity with the implementation of Greek culture in the Macedonian court. When the Thebans took Philip II of Macedon hostage as a teenager, they trained him in the central Greek military, political, and cultural tactics. This upbringing resulted in Philip’s understanding of the importance of the Delphic Amphictyony to not only the central Greeks, but to the Greeks as a whole. Philip used the Third Sacred War, fought at Delphi, and the Amphictyonic votes he was thereafter given to solidify Macedonia as a Greek state.

"Creolization" has often been terminologically equated with "hybridization," "syncretization," and other terms referring to processes of mixture. Normative assumptions concerning categories of race, origin, and culture as well as emic labeling have had a strong impact on who and ...

The Chinese in Indonesia suffered considerable discrimination particularly during Suharto's rule (1967–1998). They were considered a foreign threat that needed to be kept under state control. Since the end of Suharto's regime and as a result of liberalisasi, demokratisasi ...

""By analyzing the film Madame Freedom 자유부인 (1956), the paper examines how a dancing body becomes a site of freedom and female agency. How did “사교춤" or social dance become the site where the South Korean government regulation experimented its disciplinary practice? How do historically contextualize this? In what ways were female bodies in motion intertwined with a desirable representation of nation-ness? At the same time, what were the ways in which female bodies in motion during that period of time resisted and undid the scriptedness - the scriptedness which curates the public space and how female bodies should be placed in such a space, all the while shaped by the framework of a healthy nation? Based on these questions, this presentation considers the 1956 South Korean film, Madame Freedom, as an important case study to investigate how the undoing of the scriptedness reveals itself in the screen. It employs textual analysis of the film and offers a close reading of the body and dance movement of the protagonists and the film narrative. "