Mapping The Nation
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Mapping the Nation
Few political phenomena have proved as confusing or as difficult to comprehend as nationalism. There is no established consensus on its identity, genesis or future. Are we, for example, in the process of being thrust back into a nineteenth-century world of competitive and aggressive great powers and petty nationalisms? Or, rather, are we being flung headlong into a new, globalized and supra-national millennium? Has the nation-state outlived its usefulness and exhausted its progressive and emancipatory role, or has nationalism always been implicated in an exclusivist ethnic and militaristic logic? Mapping the Nation seeks to address these and other questions about the nature and destiny of the "national question" in the present epoch. A comprehensive and definitive reader on the subject, with contributions from some of the most significant and stimulating theorists of the nation-state, it presents a wide range of divergent ideas and controversies. Leading off with powerful statements of the classic liberal and socialist positions, by Lord Acton and Otto Bauer, there then follows an historical-sociological debate between the late Ernest Gellner and the Czech historian Miroslav Hroch, the one stressing the connections between nationalism and the transition away from agrarian society, the other emphasizing its variability and real anthropological basis. John Breuilly and Anthony D. Smith, two of the leading British specialists, provide a counterpoint to each other with considerations on the respective importance of political leadership and continuing ethnic communities in the construction of nationalist movements. Gopal Balakrishnan, in a carefully honed critique of Benedict Anderson's seminal Imagined Communities, and Partha Chatterjee, from the Subaltern Studies circle, offer crucial insights on the limitations of the Enlightenment approach to nationhood, as do Sylvia Walby and Katherine Verdery with their reflections on the entanglements of nation, gender and identity politics. Sociologist Michael Mann delivers an authoritative refutation of the chatter about the "death of the nation-state." Finally, relating the theoretical questions directly to the politics of our time, renowned historian Eric Hobsbawm, provocative theorist Tom Nairn, and the outstanding political philosopher Jürgen Habermas discuss, with varying degrees of optimism and pessimism, the future of the national project.
Mapping the Nation
Author: Susan Schulten
language: en
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Release Date: 2012-06-29
“A compelling read” that reveals how maps became informational tools charting everything from epidemics to slavery (Journal of American History). In the nineteenth century, Americans began to use maps in radically new ways. For the first time, medical men mapped diseases to understand and prevent epidemics, natural scientists mapped climate and rainfall to uncover weather patterns, educators mapped the past to foster national loyalty among students, and Northerners mapped slavery to assess the power of the South. After the Civil War, federal agencies embraced statistical and thematic mapping in order to profile the ethnic, racial, economic, moral, and physical attributes of a reunified nation. By the end of the century, Congress had authorized a national archive of maps, an explicit recognition that old maps were not relics to be discarded but unique records of the nation’s past. All of these experiments involved the realization that maps were not just illustrations of data, but visual tools that were uniquely equipped to convey complex ideas and information. In Mapping the Nation, Susan Schulten charts how maps of epidemic disease, slavery, census statistics, the environment, and the past demonstrated the analytical potential of cartography, and in the process transformed the very meaning of a map. Today, statistical and thematic maps are so ubiquitous that we take for granted that data will be arranged cartographically. Whether for urban planning, public health, marketing, or political strategy, maps have become everyday tools of social organization, governance, and economics. The world we inhabit—saturated with maps and graphic information—grew out of this sea change in spatial thought and representation in the nineteenth century, when Americans learned to see themselves and their nation in new dimensions.
The Goddess and the Nation
Author: Sumathi Ramaswamy
language: en
Publisher: Duke University Press
Release Date: 2010-04-09
Making the case for a new kind of visual history, The Goddess and the Nation charts the pictorial life and career of Bharat Mata, “Mother India,” the Indian nation imagined as mother/goddess, embodiment of national territory, and unifying symbol for the country’s diverse communities. Soon after Mother India’s emergence in the late nineteenth century, artists, both famous and amateur, began to picture her in various media, incorporating the map of India into her visual persona. The images they produced enabled patriotic men and women in a heterogeneous population to collectively visualize India, affectively identify with it, and even become willing to surrender their lives for it. Filled with illustrations, including 100 in color, The Goddess and the Nation draws on visual studies, gender studies, and the history of cartography to offer a rigorous analysis of Mother India’s appearance in painting, print, poster art, and pictures from the late nineteenth century to the present. By exploring the mutual entanglement of the scientifically mapped image of India and a (Hindu) mother/goddess, Sumathi Ramaswamy reveals Mother India as a figure who relies on the British colonial mapped image of her dominion to distinguish her from the other goddesses of India, and to guarantee her novel status as embodiment, sign, and symbol of national territory. Providing an exemplary critique of ideologies of gender and the science of cartography, Ramaswamy demonstrates that images do not merely reflect history; they actively make it. In The Goddess and the Nation, she teaches us about pictorial ways of learning the form of the nation, of how to live with it—and ultimately to die for it.