"The Malawi Broadcasting Corporation (MBC) was established as Malawi's first national radio station when the country gained independence from Britain in 1964, partly with an ideological function of mobilising Malawians for the task of nation building. Since its inception, the broadcaster has been ac
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cused of serving the ideological interests of the ruling elite at the expense of the public good. Content-based evidence supporting this assertion has, however, been lacking. Against this background, a content study of one of MBC's leading television public affairs programmes, Speak Out, was conducted to interrogate a widely-held perception that the broadcaster's staffers interact with dominant ideology passively at the expense of promoting public good. The study was situated in debates between the dominant ideology thesis and the pluralist paradigm of news. Its results show that, contrary to the widely-held claim, the pursuit of the ideological project of nation building at the broadcaster generally conforms to the pluralist paradigm, especially Shoemaker and Vos's gatekeeper thesis which conceptualises journalists who actively engage with programme content as they mediate it. Presenters and producers of the programme use strategies which, to a considerable extent, connote their effort to pursue impartially politically sensitive aspects of the ideological project of nation building." (Abstract)
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"Drawing on fieldwork among Kurdish broadcasters in Turkey and Europe, this article shows how ethnic media mediate nationhood in a conflict context. Despite rising interest in the media-nationhood nexus, and the expansion of studies on ethnic media, little is known about ethnic media in conflicts in
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volving state and non-state actors. This study investigates three Kurdish broadcasters, Roj-TV, Gün-TV, and TRT-6. The collected data include expert interviews and informal conversations with employees. Through a grounded theory approach, a model is developed that proposes four modes of mediated nationhood, in which the relation to the state and the role of ethnicity are key elements. Next, it is demonstrated how mediated nationhood in conflicts is characterized by multiple constraints, and how this affects the perceived roles and ethnic belongings among media professionals." (Abstract)
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"En 1943, con 40 años a cuestas, Carlos Montenegro escribió un ensayo que fue publicado con el sugestivo tÃtulo de Nacionalismo y coloniaje: Su expresión histórica en la prensa de Bolivia, una obra fundamental para la configuración del discurso del nacionalismo revolucionario que se forjó des
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pués de la Guerra del Chaco y proporcionó los elementos ideológicos al proceso polÃtico que desencadenó la Revolución de 1952. Esos elementos están presentes de manera explÃcita o aparecen como huellas en el discurso polÃtico de las últimas décadas. Una vigencia que se explica, también, por la calidad narrativa de una obra que no puede disociarse de la apasionante vida intelectual y polÃtica de su autor." (Estudio introductorio, página 13)
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"Commercial Nationalism intervenes in discussions of the fate of nationalism and national identity by exploring the relationship between state appropriation of marketing and branding strategies on the one hand, and, on the other, the commercial mobilization of nationalist discourses. The book's uniq
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ue contribution is to consider an emerging formation characterized by the following complementary (and related) developments: the ways in which states come increasingly to rely on commercial techniques for self-promotion, diplomacy, and internal national mobilization, and also the ways in which new and legacy forms of commercial media rely on the mobilization emerging configurations of nationalism for the purpose of selling, gaining ratings, and otherwise profiting. We see this formation as a unique reconfiguration of the formation of nationalism associated with the contemporary context. Often these processes are approached separately: what is the economic role of nationalism and how do media participate in the formation of national identity?" (Publisher description)
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"This article constitutes an examination on how citizen journalism has challenged Robert Mugabe’s authoritarian regime on issues pertaining to national heroes and usages of the Heroes’ Acre as central national identity markers. Under Mugabe’s ZANU-PF, Zimbabwe has seen the public being limited
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from directly participating in salient national debates. ZANU-PF’s control of the official public sphere has also constrained alternative views from ventilating the government-controlled communicative spaces. The party’s narrative on heroes, the Heroes’ Acre and national identity has gained a taken-for-granted status in the public media. This has obtained against the backdrop of what has become known as the Zimbabwe crisis, characterised by a declining economy, a constricted political space, a breakdown in the rule of law, and the subsequent flight of a number of Zimbabweans into the diaspora. The accompanying wave of technological advancements and the mushrooming of mostly diaspora-based online media have opened up new vistas of communication, enabling a hitherto ‘silenced’ community of ordinary people to participate in national conversations. The conclusion reached here, is that citizen journalism has not only enhanced the culture of conversation among people (as espoused under democratic conditions) but has also covered up the democratic deficit experienced in the public sphere, mediated by traditional media, parliament and pavement radio." (Abstract)
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"This article explores ideas around nation building, as constructed through the ethos as well as practice of ubuntu journalism. We make the argument that by invoking ubuntu as an underlying ethos for a reporting ethic and practice, the news media contribute to a magical idea of nationhood and nation
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building in South Africa. While not denying that ubuntu is instrumental to nation building, the study contributes new understandings of both the general artifice, and the nation-building productivity, of what we label ‘magical ubuntu’. The intent here is to describe the postcolonial magic in which ubuntu is implicated, with special regard for the magical functions that relate to the construction of nationhood in contemporary South Africa." (Abstract)
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"This book focuses on eight films by some of the nation's best-known directors, including Man of Ashes (1986), Bezness (1992), and Making Of (2006) by Nouri Bouzid, Halfaouine (1990) by Férid Boughedir, The Silences of the Palace (1994) by Moufida Tlatli, Essaïda (1997) by Mohamed Zran, Bedwin Hac
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ker (2002) by Nadia El Fani, and The TV Is Coming (2006) by Moncef Dhouib. It explores the political economy and social, historical, and psychoanalytic dimensions of these works and the strategies filmmakers deployed to preserve cinema's ability to shape debates about national identity. These debates, the book argues, not only helped initiate the 2011 uprising that ousted Ben Ali's regime but also did much to inform and articulate the aspirations of the Tunisian people in the new millennium." (Publisher description)
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"Die Studie behandelt nationale Identität als eine mediale Konstruktion und verfolgt dabei drei Ziele. Es wird ein Identitätsbegriff gesucht, der die Mikro- und Makroebene der Identitätsbildung sinnvoll miteinander verbindet. Darauf aufbauend wird eine Methode entwickelt, um nationale Identität
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anhand der Medienberichterstattung zu untersuchen. Diese wird am Beispiel Bulgariens angewandt. Dabei interessiert, wie sich die bulgarische nationale Identität im Zuge des EU-Beitritts verändert." (Verlagsbeschreibung)
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"Electronic Iran introduces the concept of the Iranian Internet, a framework that captures interlinked, transnational networks of virtual and offline spaces. Taking her cues from early Internet ethnographies that stress the importance of treating the Internet as both a site and product of cultural p
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roduction, accounts in media studies that highlight the continuities between old and new media, and a range of works that have made critical interventions in the field of Iranian studies, Niki Akhavan traces key developments and confronts conventional wisdom about digital media in general, and contemporary Iranian culture and politics in particular. Akhavan focuses largely on the years between 1998 and 2012 to reveal a diverse and combative virtual landscape where both geographically and ideologically dispersed individuals and groups deployed Internet technologies to variously construct, defend, and challenge narratives of Iranian national identity, society, and politics." (Publisher website)
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"This dissertation examines the United States’s elite news media’s hegemony in a global media landscape, and how it can come to stand for the entire American nation in the imagination of outsiders. In this transnational, instantaneous digital media arena, what is created for an American audience
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can fairly easily be accessed, interpreted and relayed to another. How, then, is U.S. international news, which is traditionally ethnocentric and security-focused, absorbed in Afghanistan and Pakistan, two countries where the United States has acute foreign policy interests? [...] There is a widespread, long-standing perception in Afghanistan and Pakistan that American journalists stain the reputation of their nations as failed states. Just as the U.S. exercises global hegemony in a material sense, the U.S. media is powerful in shaping how American and international publics see the world. Yet, while American foreign correspondents are U.S.-centric in their reportage on the Afghan, American and Pakistani entanglement, so too are Afghan journalists Afghan-centric and Pakistani journalists Pakistani-centric. Nationalism is how journalists organize chaos and complexity. While their news stories can represent an entire nation, they are more likely to harden national identities than to broker understanding between nations." (Abstract)
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"This article discusses a popular Syrian television drama series, Bab al-Hara (The Neighborhood Gate), which ran for five seasons (2006-10). It is part of a genre of television series called the "Damascene milieu," which nostalgically dramatizes life in imagined Damascene neighborhoods in the late 1
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9th or early 20th centuries. The narrative of Bab al-Hara focuses on how a Syrian community lived under and resisted French colonial rule and its local collaborators. The article argues that the strategic imagination of the past in the series reflects the Syrian regime's project of national consolidation in Syria, a country sharply divided by class, sect, and local belonging and desperately seeking to bridge a gap between state authority and a national sense of belonging. However, within the context of the 2011 uprising, both regime and opposition discourses echoed themes and symbols from the series - demonstrating its political relevance. The article concludes that the series is a spectacular example of how popular culture, particularly in postcolonial and authoritarian contexts, contributes to the imagination of identity and memory in ways that are used by different national groups to bolster and contest political positions." (Abstract)
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"Media interventions by international organizations and NGOs in conflict and post-conflict situations seek to develop and shape a media system to contribute to specific political and social ends. The analyses and assessments that inform these interventions are often based on an overview of the forma
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l media and governance structures, such as mass media and state institutions, and overlook informal structures that may be instrumental for political and development goals. This article proposes a framework that can incorporate both the formal and informal modes of communication and participation that characterize a society. This framework encourages a ‘diagnostic’ approach centred around three areas: power, flows, and participation, and enables researchers to take into consideration features that are often overlooked such as customary law; a range of public authorities from politicians to Imams and local elders; information flows that may vary from poetry to mobile phones; and the culture of communication. Examples from the Somali territories, which are characterized by a weak central government, are employed to highlight how informal structures and actors intervene in shaping information flows and the importance of accounting for them." (Abstract)
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"Der Fokus ist auf die angestrebte Umwandlung des Staatssenders Radio Television Afghanistan in einen öffentlichen Sender gerichtet. In Experteninterviews mit Vertretern dreier relevanter Akteursgruppen und einer schriftlichen Rezipientenbefragung wurde unter anderem herausgefunden, dass RTA eine h
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erausgehobene Rolle im Nationbuilding-Prozess zugesprochen wird." (Klappentext)
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"Cinema and Development in West Africa shows how the film industry in Francophone West African countries played an important role in executing strategies of nation building during the transition from French rule to the early postcolonial period. James E. Genova sees the construction of African ident
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ities and economic development as the major themes in the political literature and cultural production of the time. Focusing on film both as industry and aesthetic genre, he demonstrates its unique place in economic development and provides a comprehensive history of filmmaking in the region during the transition from colonies to sovereign states." (Publisher description)
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"This article examines debates about national identity in the media landscape of post-referendum and post-independence South Sudan. Having never existed as a sovereign state and with its citizens being a minority group in Sudan, collective action among South Sudanese has historically been shaped in
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response to external pressures: in particular, the aggressive nationbuilding pursued by successive Khartoum governments that sought to Arabize and Islamize the South. Today, in the absence of a clear-cut enemy, it is a major challenge for South Sudan to devise a common identity that unites the putative nation beyond competing loyalties to ethnicity, tribe and family. Analysing opinion pieces from South Sudanese online media and placing them in the context of contemporary African nationalism, this article gives an initial overview of the issues that dominate the public debate on national identity: fear of tribalism and regionalism, commemoration of the liberation struggle, language politics, and the role of Christianity." (Abstract)
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"Hindu nationalists defend the advent of a Hindu state in India, while projecting the universal appeal of their ideology. Their very territorialised yet universal claims have been finding particular resonance among migrant populations, particularly in North America. This study strives to go beyond c
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ontent analyses that foreground voices to focus on the network structure in order to highlight the new transnational practices of nationalism. Two main points emerge from this in-depth scrutiny. On the one hand, Hindu nationalist organisations have transferred their online activities mainly to the USA, where the Indian diaspora is 3.2 million strong and constitute therefore a prime example of long-distance transnationalist nationalism. On the other hand, the morphological discrepancies between the online and the offline networks point to new strategies of discretion developed to evade the gaze of authorities in countries of residence. The recourse to such cartographies thus becomes crucial not only in understanding what sectarian or illegal movements do but also what they seek to hide." (Abstract)
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"For Palestine's diaspora and exiled communities, the internet has become an important medium for the formation of Palestinian national and transnational identity. Miriyam Aouragh looks at the internet as both a space and an instrument for linking Palestinian diasporas in Palestine, Jordan and Leban
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on. She closely examines the uses and limits of internet technology under conditions of war, along with the ways in which virtual participation enables the generation of new ideals for political reconciliation and self-determination. Through the internet, participants reconstruct a virtual 'Palestinian homeland', gain a space for recovering the past, for overcoming issues of mobility, and for generating social change. This book provides a new angle on those affected by the Israeli-Palestine conflict, and furthers understanding about the connection between electronic media, politics and national identity more widely." (Publisher description)
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