No description available.

<p>Symbols in the hands of politicians can be a powerful tool of manipulation. The usage of symbols in speeches or texts can change a person’s will, without him or her ever knowing it.</p><p>We have compared the usage of symbols in the articles surrounding the ratification of the constitution in 18th century America with that of today’s European Union, to see if any similarities between these two cases exists, and what implications this could have for the future of the EU. We have divided the symbols in both cases into different categories so as to enable us to compare the cases to each other. With the help of Masters Theory and the writings of Benedict Anderson and Murray Edelman we have concluded that there indeed exist some similarities between 18th century America and the EU. There seem have been some manipulation on the part of the politicians in order to rebuild the respective unions on more solid foundations. Could the European Union, on the basis of these findings, be assumed to take a course comparable with that of 18th century America?</p>

This thesis uses the example of Yugoslavia-the land of the South Slavs (also known as the Balkans) - to study how the twists and turns of historical evolution have been reflected in communal understanding of that history.

This thesis uses the example of Yugoslavia-the land of the South Slavs (also known as the Balkans) - to study how the twists and turns of historical evolution have been reflected in communal understanding of that history.

After World War II, film audiences of American crime dramas, later termed film noirs, witnessed the relocation of several film narratives to settings outside of the traditional urban environment. These films began to defy the conventional notion that crime only exists in densely populated cities and began to incorporate alternative spaces, like suburban communities, small towns, and the open road, to tell their stories. This thesis examines how social and geographical spaces contribute to, rather than oppose, a noir sensibility by employing an intertextual analysis of three film noirs set in locations out of the city: Fallen Angel, The Stranger, and Gun Crazy. This project explores the possibility that noir cinema is not bound to a conventional urban environment, but that the ambiguous essence of film noir can also flourish in non-urban settings by preying on the fears and anxieties many Americans experienced after the end of the War.

This report examines the use of grandmother figures in the construction of imagined communities in Arab American literature. Through the lens of diaspora studies, it argues that grandmother figures become integral in the creation of an Arab American imagined community based on two main tropes: a theoretical collapse between notions of patriotism and the maternal figure (in which the homeland becomes the Motherland) and the tendency of second-generation Arab American authors to connect their immigrant grandmothers to ethnic homelands. In exploring this connection, the report argues that the creation of an Arab American imagined community is necessitated by anti-Arab racism in the United States and the need for the community’s authors to be seen in tandem with the literary traditions of other ethnic minorities in America. The report problematizes the imagined homeland by arguing that it is constructed on the basis of simplistic juxtapositions between different generations within the Arab American community, and ends by examining the anxiety that is generated when this juxtaposition and the imagined community are threatened. / text

Recent work has shown the importance of identity in language learning and how the desire to belong to an imagined community drives individuals to invest in their learning (Norton, 2000). This work has documented that a mismatch between students' imagined community and the community envisioned by the teacher can have negative outcomes on students' learning trajectories. Other research has explored how institutional policies and their linked educational practices reflect differences in the imagined communities each institution sees their students potentially joining in the future (Kanno, 2003) and how reading materials and the discourses reflected in them can affect learners' visions of themselves(Pavlenko, 2003). However few studies have tried to document how an `imagined community' might be collectively constructed for others through a complex interaction of social and cultural structures, circulating discourses, institutional discourses, educational practices, group dynamics and personal histories that produce visions of potential identities (I) and their respective imagined communities (IC's) in which newcomers get socialized. There is a gap in current research on how `imagined communities' and `identities' for second language learners get constructed, circulated and made available to learners within institutional contexts.Through this qualitative study involving questionnaires and autobiographical research I studied the construction of imagined communities in an English language major in Mexico. I explored how professional identities and their related imagined communities are collectively constructed and made available to students in order to understand how institutions, programs administrators and faculty members could enhance the spread of successful professional identities and inspire/stimulate L2 speakers in their educational and professional trajectories.

This study aims to explore how the imagined Chinese community, as the nation of Taiwan, was created and recreated between 1949 and 2011, to become the Taiwanese community. The theoretical concept of the ‘imagined community’, which is interconnected with the concepts of ‘invented tradition’ and ‘banal nationalism’, has been used to suggest a sociological interpretation of the transformation of people’s self-identification from ‘Chinese’ to ‘Taiwanese’, as a kind of reflection of the changing nation of post-war Taiwan. The social phenomenon of Taiwan residents’ changing self-identification raises a key concern, namely, has the nature of the nation in Taiwan changed? Junior and senior high school history textbooks (1949 to 2011), which can be regarded as representing the officially invented history, were used as resources, and analysed together with data gathered during interviews with twenty-five history teachers, who had not been screened for age or ethnic differences. The history textbooks provided content for a case study, comparable to that of the theoretical concept of the ‘invented tradition’. This could be regarded as ‘banal nationalism’, through which the life environment is subtly shaped and reshaped to become the ‘imagined community’, namely, the ‘national’ environment. The interviews with teachers were intended to help the researchers understand how the content in history textbooks had been taught, in order to explain how, or whether, the society undermined or reinforced the officially structured ‘imagined Taiwanese community’. The two approaches – one of which could be regarded as a top-down power, while the other could be considered as a social force – jointly provided the research framework and a perspective consistent with the changing social phenomenon of the increasing ‘Taiwanese’ identity among members of the population. This study concluded that ‘Taiwan’ has been produced and reproduced from the local identification to the national. The research results show that the meaning of ‘China’ and ‘Taiwan’ changed during three time periods: from the 1950s to the late 1980s, from the 1990s to the 2000s, and from the 2000s to 2010 and later. Through this process, mainland China and Taiwan were identified as one Chinese nation-state, beginning in the 1950s to the late 1980s, as one nation but two states, from the 1990s to the early 2000s, and finally, as two nation-states, from the early 2000s to 2010 and later. This research explored how ‘Taiwan’, an ‘imagined community’, has been shaped over time. Teachers further manifested ‘Taiwan’ as an explicit concept of national identity by providing other examples, in addition to the content in textbooks, and noting distinctions between ‘China’ and ‘Taiwan’. Theoretical logic is coherent with this empirical investigation, and this study provided the perspective to interpret how the state worked as a top-down force cooperating with society’s bottom-up perseverance, to invent ‘Taiwanese’ national history, through which the national identity of Taiwan was manifested.

This dissertation explores the construction of Filipino national identity by examining the Philippine national government’s appropriation of Filipino Martial Arts (FMA) between 1975 and 2010. FMA’s nationalization offers a window into the larger dynamics of nation-building in the Philippines. Having been colonized for nearly four centuries (1565-1946), the Philippine national government reified the Filipino nation by appropriating older symbols as national ones, and with the purpose of articulating a unique Filipino national identity. The nationalization of FMA is analyzed using Benedict Anderson’s constructivist interpretation of nations as ‘imagined communities’. The dissertation argues that in order to understand the logic behind the national government’s nation-building project using FMA, Filipino postcolonial anxieties over national identity (or their perceived lack of) must be taken into consideration. In this regard, FMA’s nationalization is engaged with Anthony Smith’s concept of the ethnie (ethnic community). Studying the history of how decentralized indigenous martial arts practice became institutionalized in FMA clubs, the dissertation finds that FMA as an ethnographic concept was formulated mainly since the 1970s in consonance with its commercialization, increasing popularity and nationalization. By looking at how national identity is represented in FMA films and in reconstructions of the national hero Lapulapu, the dissertation argues that FMA practitioners seek to highlight their localized identities by inserting their own symbols and interpretations into the national identity being articulated. This process, termed the ‘reverse appropriation’ of nationalism, was a way for FMA clubs to preserve their local institutions and identities from being totally consumed by the nationalization and nation-building project.

Esta tese investiga o estilo no futebol como fenômeno de significação, argumentando que o comentário ao jogo funciona como tradução do que se vê em campo. Entendemos que os estilos, em geral associados a nações, só existem pelo olhar subjetivo coletivo dos observadores (comentaristas e aficionados, mas também, por reverberação, da parcela não torcedora de uma comunidade), os quais traduzem o estilo a cada partida, a cada acontecimento futebolístico na história. Essas práticas discursivas, por sua vez, se concretizam no que chamamos narrativas do estilo produto da tradução do que Dominique Maingueneau classifica como o discurso primeiro do futebol no discurso segundo dos observadores, acumulado sistematicamente na língua literária que, segundo Benedict Anderson, reúne comunidades imaginadas nacionais em torno de jornais (mas este trabalho considera a hipótese de que outras mídias também sirvam como esse ponto de encontro) e romances, ou seja, no chão comum das narrativas impressas. Dois estudos de caso ilustram nossa argumentação teórica, ambos baseados na análise de textos de jornais: a partir de relatos sobre turnês de clubes britânicos a Buenos Aires nos anos 1920, investigamos a construção do que Richard Giulianotti conceitua como uma oposição sintática entre as comunidades nacionais de Inglaterra e Argentina; num segundo momento, buscamos as variações semânticas, ainda nos termos de Giulianotti, envolvendo comunidades locais/regionais em sua relação com a nação em foco, o Arsenal de Londres e, novamente, a comunidade imaginada inglesa. O futebol, concluímos, só ganha sentido pleno numa sequência narrativa midiática e enraizada historicamente. As narrativas do estilo constroem um enredo comum espécie de folhetim permanente e amálgama das identidades comunitárias. Por essa tendência à folhetinização, tanto na forma (simbiose com o veículo, a mídia) quanto no conteúdo (o acontecimento como matéria-prima fundamental), o futebol, sugerimos por fim, está para a cultura dos modernos esportes de competição como o romance também derivado do folhetim para a cultura literária, ambos como linguagens traduzíveis em narrativas e estilos / This thesis investigates the style in football as a signifying phenomenon, arguing that the language of the game translates into the commentary on what is seen on the pitch. We consider that the styles, generally associated with nations, only exist by the observers collective and subjective interpretations. These observers (commentators and fans, but also the non-fan part of a community) translate the style by the event match by match in football history. These discursive practices, in turn, take the form of what we call narratives of style, in a process that Dominique Maingueneau ranks as a translation of the primary discourse of football into the secondary discourse of the observers, systematically accumulated in the literary language which, according to Benedict Anderson, brings together national imagined communities around newspapers (but this thesis considers the hypothesis that other media might also play the same role) and novels, i.e., the common ground of printed narratives. Two case studies illustrate our theoretical arguments, both based on the analysis of press reports: firstly, from the tours British clubs took in Buenos Aires in the 1920s, investigating the construction of what Richard Giulianotti sees as a syntactic opposition between the national communities of England and Argentina; subsequently, we seek the semantic variations, still in Giulianottis terms, involving local/regional communities in their relationship with the nation and focusing on the Arsenal, from North London, and again the English imagined community. Football, we conclude, only reaches its full meaning as historically rooted media narratives. The narratives of style form this serialized and permanently renewed story that amalgamates community identities. Footballs form (in symbiosis with the media) and content (the event as a basic source of storytelling), we would like to argue at last, suggests that the game works for the culture of modern competitive sports as the novel also originally derived from serialized stories published in newspapers does for the literary culture at large, both of them languages translatable into narratives and styles