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This project examines the politics of knowledge production in Vietnam during the transition from socialist realism to post-socialist aesthetics and neoliberalism. I look at literary, filmic and visual culture productions that challenge and present alternatives to the construction of history in the discourses of Vietnamese nationalism, French colonialism and U.S. imperialism. I attend to the cultural violence that came out of the Vietnamese civil war and that continues to haunt the post-socialist society. I first focus on works produced by writers and filmmakers in the North to examine how they responded to the state vision of history-making. To recover the suppressed histories of those who fled Vietnam after 1975, I also examine diasporic Vietnamese films and visual culture that disrupt the unitary discourse of Vietnamese nationalism. Moving from the literary to the visual, I look at short stories, war novels, films, installation art and photography made from within the nation and from the diaspora. I examine how literature and films can be productive sites for the interrogation of nationalist historiography, and how they can be sites for the staging of a modern, heterosexual masculine subject through their elisions of women. I also look at visual culture that unsettle positivist trajectories by attending to the reversals, openings and closings, ruptures and fissures in history-making. This is a comparative, interdisciplinary, and multilingual study that brings together the fields of Asian Studies, U.S. Ethnic Studies, Feminist Studies, Cultural Studies, and Transnational Studies, and contributes to the body of research on postcolonial societies negotiating global capitalism

Bogspeak [or code] was a little known argot developed by a crimialised community of men who used public toilets for same sex encounters in New Zealand. The language form subsumed into itself elements of prison cant, pig Latin, back slang, Polari, gay slang and localised dialect. Using a chronological framework this paper discusses changes in bogspeak that ran parallel to changes in the architecture of public toilets, legislation relating to issues of privacy and homosexuality, and social attitudes prevalent in New Zealand society up until the close of the1960s.

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- INTRODUCTION -- APPENDIX: SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY OF ARABIC AND PERSIAN SOURCES -- INTRODUCTORY NOTE -- FOREWORD -- Contents -- 1. The Empire -- 2. The Caliphs -- 3. The Princes of the Empire -- 4. Christians and Jews -- 5. Shi'ah -- 6. The Administration -- 7. The Wazir -- 8. Finances -- 9. The Court -- 10. The Nobility -- 11. The Slaves -- 12. The Savant -- 13. Theology -- 14. The Schools of Jurisprudence -- 15. The Qadi -- 16. Philology -- 17. Literature -- 18. Geography -- 19. Religion -- 20. Manners and Morals -- 21. The Standard of Living -- 22. Municipal Organization -- 23. The Festivals -- 24. Land Products -- 25. Industry -- 26. Trade -- 27. Inland Navigation -- 28. Communication by Road -- 29. Marine Navigation.

More than thirty years ago, Eberhard Kolb commented that the vast wealth of research on the history of the Weimar Republic made it "difficult even for a specialist to give a full account of the relevant literature." Since then, the flood of studies on Weimar Germany has not waned, and by now it is hard even to keep track of all the review articles meant to cut a swath through this abundance. Yet the prevailing historical image of the era has remained surprisingly stable: most historians have accepted the master narrative of the Weimar Republic as the sharp juxtaposition of "bad" politics and "good" culture, epitomized in the often-used image of "a dance on the edge of a volcano." Kolb, for example, described "the sharp contrast between the gloomy political and economic conditions … and the unique wealth of artistic and intellectual achievement" as "typical of the Weimar era." Detlev Peukert, arguably the most innovative scholar of Weimar history, criticized this historical image but, at the same time, declared this dichotomy "an integral feature of the era." The latest example can be found in the work of Eric D. Weitz, who summarizes the fate of Weimar Germany as "the striving for something new and wonderful encountering absolute evil," juxtaposing the "sparkling brilliance" of modernist masters like Bertolt Brecht, Thomas Mann, and Bruno Taut with "the plain hatred of democracy" of Weimar's right-wing extremists. This contrasting of politics and culture is a narrative device that only makes sense, however, from our contemporary vantage point of Western liberal democracy and from our understanding of progressive art. This retrospective interpretation is not in itself the problem—after all, historians can never really escape their own historical contexts. It becomes problematic, however, when it is treated not as an interpretation but as historical fact. Weimar Germans certainly would not have shared this narrative wholeheartedly: many would not have subscribed to the depiction of their time as a never-ending parade of political breakdowns and economic disasters. Even more would have rejected the view of the Berlin-based avant-garde as a sign of progressive achievement—if they had ever had the chance to see its representative works in the first place. The sharp distinction between "bad" Weimar politics and "good" Weimar culture not only fails to do justice to the way many of these Germans perceived their time but also keeps us from understanding how closely intertwined these two spheres were in the Weimar Republic. Thus, rather than giving an overview of the latest additions to Weimar historiography, this review essay looks at how recent publications have questioned—or conformed to—this dominant narrative.

Various studies have indicated how notions and (mis)interpretations of national history, heritage, and culture are utilized by diverse populist and extremist political parties in Europe. However, scholars have less explored how the idea of a common European history, heritage, and culture are used by these parties to justify their xenophobic, anti-immigration, anti-globalization, and monoculturalist political attitudes and the defense of 'us'. This chapter focuses on this question by examining the political rhetoric of the Finns Party, the core populist party in Finland. The data consists of selected texts discussing broadly the topics of the EU, Europe, nation, identity, and/or culture, published in the party newspaper between 2004 and 2017. The data is examined using critical discourse analysis by focusing on the notions and interpretations of a common European history, heritage, and culture as political tools in the party rhetoric. The analysis brings out how the texts in the party newspaper picture Europe as a cultural and value-based community sharing a common Christian heritage, traditions, and moral norms, particularly when a threat towards 'us' is experienced as coming from outside Europe's imagined geographical or cultural borders. The notions and interpretations of a common European history, heritage, and culture form a powerful tool of exclusion when they are perceived as a sphere of meanings that cannot be identified with without having generational or ethnic ties to it. Appeals to a common European history, heritage, and culture function as rhetorical mechanisms through which others can be discussed with a vocabulary that veils the prejudiced or discriminative connotations. ; peerReviewed

A theory of the historical anchoring and mobilization of political attitudes is proposed, arguing that culture‐specific symbols, configured by historical charters, are an important resource in defining nationhood and legitimizing public opinion in a way that makes some political attitudes difficult to change. Five studies in New Zealand and Taiwan using diverse methods converged to show that historical events with "charter status" have an additive effect in explaining variance in political attitudes regarding biculturalism in New Zealand and independence in Taiwan even after controlling for the effects of Social Dominance Orientation, Right‐Wing Authoritarianism, relevant social identities, and collective guilt. Field and lab experiments showed that the impact of historical symbols did not depend on the mobilization of social identity (e.g., increasing mean scores and indirect effects), but the historical anchoring of political attitudes in representations was resistant to change. Manipulations of the salience of historical events changed levels of social identification, but did not change mean levels of support for New Zealand biculturalism or Taiwanese independence. Even an intense and immersive pretest/posttest design taking high school students on a national museum tour failed to change attitudes towards biculturalism in New Zealand.