Thesis advisor: Gerald M. Easter / Thesis advisor: Margaret Thomas / Nationalism and national identity are abstract yet extremely powerful forces that can be at once a source of cohesion and faction. And a government’s ability to harness or rein-in these powers can be a crucial factor to its longevity, lest it be overcome by them on other fronts. These concepts—along with nation itself—are an amalgam of many elements that can include culture, economics, geography, history, language, politics, religion, etc., and the importance of a particular element can vary from group to group. In this dissertation, the focus is on the salience of language as an essential element of national identity, and the exploration of this topic has been done through an analysis of elementary language primers from 1941 through 1992 from the region known for a majority of that time as Yugoslavia. I argue that we can measure how important governments think language is as a component of a particular national identity by seeing how they treat and utilize—even instrumentalize—the language or languages spoken in their territory. This direct governmental use of language as a tool is particularly important in revealing how that government connects language to the national identity(-ies) in question. Certainly language policy and laws passed by a government to bolster or limit a particular language’s use can tell us a lot—in a very straightforward and overt way—about what that government sees as important; but, there is another more subtle—yet potentially more long-lasting—thing that can strengthen these efforts even further: teaching children. Looking at educational materials, in this case elementary language primers, can provide insight into what the government thinks is important with respect to its national identity. This analysis, done within a framework that focuses on three historical periods in the history and development of Yugoslavia, shows that governments do use language primers as a vehicle to promote and strengthen the nation, national identity, and national cohesion. We can be fairly confident that every book analyzed in this study was approved or published by the government where it was used; and, in each of the three historical periods that fall within the scope of this study, we see the goals of the state reflected in the language, content, and pedagogical methodology of the primers that were published during a given period. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2024. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Political Science.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (p. i-xi).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (p. i-xi). Also available in print.

The dissertation examines the foundations of modern Arab national thought in nineteenth-century works of Buṭrus al Bustānī (1819-1883) and Aḥmad Fāris al Shidyāq (1804-1887) in which occurred an intersection of language-making practices and a national pedagogic project. It interrogates the centrality of language for Arab identity formation by deconstructing the metaphor "language is the mirror of the nation," an overarching slogan of the nineteenth century, as well as engaging with twentieth-century discussions of the Arab nation and its Nahḍa. The study seeks to challenge the conventional historiography of Arab thought by proposing a re-theorisation of the Arab Nahḍa as an Enlightenment-Modernity construct that constitutes the problematic of the Arab nation. The study investigates through literature and literary tropes the makings and interstices of the historical Arab Nation: the topography of its making. It covers a series of primary understudied sources: Bustānī's enunciative Nafīr Sūriyya pamphlets that he wrote in the wake of the 1860 civil wars of Mount Lebanon and Damascus: his translation of Robinson Crusoe, dictionary, and encyclopaedia. As well as Shidyāq's fictional autobiography, linguistic essays and treatise, and travel writings on Europe. The dissertation engages with these works to show how the 'Nahḍa' is a constituted by inherently contradictory and supplementary projects. It forms a moment of fracture in history and temporality – as does the Enlightenment in Europe – from which emerges a seemingly coherent national narrative.