The ‘Coptic question’ in post-revolutionary Egypt: citizenship,democracy, religion

Relations between the Coptic minority and the Egyptian state have gone through different stages, with Copts experiencing greater or lesser degrees of integration into, or alienation from, the social and civil fabric of Egypt. This paper traces the long and ongoing path of the Coptic community from dhimmah to citizenship, a path that is not yet concluded, with a particular focus on the relations between the Copts and Al-Azhar, especially in the transition period opened by the 25 January Revolution. New discourses among both Islamic and Christian intellectuals are examined in order to search out the conceptions of citizenship emerging both in Al-Azhar and Islamist scholars’ thought and in Coptic circles.     

Emotions of the weak: violence and ethnic boundaries among Coptic Christians in Egypt

This article offers a theoretical framework to understand Muslim–Christian relations in contemporary Egypt. I argue that the interdependence of power relations, emotions, and symbolic boundaries are the key to understanding minority emotions as a political product and a boundary marker. Particular emotions of Christian minorities invoked during interactions and non-interactions with Muslim neighbours reveal the distance between the two groups, while cultivating cohesion among Christians. Data collected from participant observation in public spaces of a religiously tolerant neighbourhood in Cairo and in-depth interviews with 27 Coptic Christians show that indirect violence and daily microaggressions, triggered by the power disparity, unfold internalized fear and ‘righteous indignation’, negative feelings including anger and irritation against unjust treatment. Findings also discuss Coptic strategies to dismiss negative emotions. The interdependent framework, which has been largely understudied, expands our scope of understanding how power relates to minority emotions and symbolic boundaries between ethnic and religious groups.     

Belonging to the nation: generational change,identity and the Chinese diaspora

This study reviews developments in the ethnic and national identity of the descendants of migrants, taking ethnic Chinese as a case study. Our core question is why, in spite of debates worldwide about identity, exclusion and rights, do minority communities continue to suffer discrimination and attacks? This question is asked in view of the growing incidence in recent years of ‘racial’ conflicts between majority and minority communities and among minorities, in both developed and developing countries. The study examines national identity from the perspective of migrants' descendants, whose national identity may be more rooted than is often thought. Concepts such as ‘new ethnicities’, ‘cultural fluidity’, and ‘new’ and ‘multiple’ identities feature in this examination. These concepts highlight identity changes across generations and the need to challenge and reinterpret the meaning of ‘nation’ and to review problems with policy initiatives designed to promote nation-building in multi-ethnic societies.     

Ancient Egyptian verbal reduplication: typology, diachrony, and the morphology–syntax interface

We explore the diachronic development of verbal reduplication in Ancient Egyptian (Afro-Asiatic) by systematically comparing reduplicative stem formations in Old Egyptian (2500–2000 BC) and in Coptic Egyptian (3rd–12th c. AD). Old Egyptian is a language with a rich inventory of reduplication patterns, which have been reduced in the course of almost four thousand years of uninterrupted language history. Coptic retains only a limited number of reduplicative stem formations, frequently with concomitant loss of the simple stem. We show that the decreasing productivity of verbal reduplication in the language correlates with broad morphological and syntactic changes in the verbal domain.     

The emergence of political homophobia in Indonesia: masculinity and national belonging

This paper explores an unprecedented series of violent acts against ‘gay’ Indonesians beginning in September 1999. Indonesia is often characterized as ‘tolerant’ of homosexuality. This is a false belief, but one containing a grain of truth. To identify this grain of truth I distinguish between ‘heterosexism’ and ‘homophobia,’ noting that Indonesia has been marked by a predominance of heterosexism over homophobia. I examine the emergence of a political homophobia directed at public events where gay men stake a claim to Indonesia's troubled civil society. That such violence is seen as the properly masculine response to these events indicates how the nation may be gaining a new masculinist cast. In the new Indonesia, male–male desire can increasingly be construed as a threat to normative masculinity, and thus to the nation itself.     

Beyond Chinese groupism: Chinese Australians between assimilation,multiculturalism and diaspora

This essay argues that the tension between ‘ethnic’ and ‘national’ identity is not contingent, but structurally embedded in the workings of the contemporary nation state. Through an analysis of ‘the Chinese’ in ‘Australia’ it aims to demonstrate that seemingly unambiguous concepts such as assimilation (the ethnic is absorbed by the national), multiculturalism (the ethnic coexists with the national) and diaspora (the ethnic transcends the national) cannot capture the diverse difficulties, ambivalences and failures of identification, belonging and political agency experienced by Chinese Australians. A more satisfactory analysis requires a questioning of the groupness of ‘the Chinese’ (as well as ‘the Australians’) and overcoming conceptual groupism (Brubaker): the tendency to take discrete, sharply differentiated, internally homogeneous and externally bounded groups as basic constituents of social life. Instead a more processual and flexible understanding is proposed, where the relationship between ‘ethnic’ and ‘national’ identity is one of constant evolution and mutual entanglement.     

The Nation‐State,Public Education,and the Logic of Migration: Chinese Students in Hungary

Public education remains the nation‐state's foremost instrument of forging citizens. But the emergence of ‘international education’, a system explicitly based on the ideology of globality and outside the purview of national curricula, provides a way to circumvent the citizen‐making machine. This article, based on fieldwork among Chinese secondary school students in Hungary, considers the interaction between ‘international education’ and transnational migrants in a nation‐state whose public education, as the state itself, has little interest in the ‘integration’ of non‐natives.     

Nationalism and Belonging in India,Pakistan and South Central Asia: Some Comparative Observations

The criteria invoked in the definition of national identity are commonly derived from contexts other than those of the nation-state itself—most notably those of territoriality, language/culture, kinship/descent and religion. It therefore follows that in seeking to understand the kind of identity or belongingness invoked in a particular instance of national ideology it is necessary to explore not only the kind of nation-state envisaged, but also those non-national forms of belonging or community from which the national ideology may itself be historically derived. In this paper I seek to develop this argument by comparing some of the principal forms of nationalism found in India, Pakistan and Central Asia. I pay particular attention to the importance of the concept qawm, which in Pakistan, Afghanistan and elsewhere in Central Asia, is used to refer to a wide variety of groups to which people owe allegiance. Such usages alert us to the important fact that the nation, as ‘imagined community’, may have its origins as a political movement among sentiments and allegiances which draw on pre-modern social arrangements and are in tension with ‘nationalist’ exclusivism. Even when the nation (as nation-state) has been secured, so-called ‘nationalist’ revivalism, while taking the nation for granted, may in fact appeal to sentiments of a different kind.     

Radicalization and counter-radicalization at British universities: Muslim encounters and alternatives

Abstract

This paper explores the ‘spaces’ left over for Muslims to be ‘radical’ and the management of minority identities in light of their securitization in the UK. The paper considers a key site of this management of ‘radical’ identities: the university. The university works as prototypical case because of the ways in student activism and identity are a priori drawn together but also because of the prevalence of higher education among terrorists in the UK and USA. As a result, universities have been specifically targeted in counterterrorism and counter-radicalization measures. The paper reveals through student narratives how security discourses of ‘radicalization’ constrain their activism, university experience and identities. Yet, alternative identity constructions emerge that work against the moderate/radical binary. These narratives show how incomplete the process is of incorporating Muslims into the nation.     

‘After the break’: re-conceptualizing ethnicity,national identity and ‘Malaysian-Chinese’ identities

Focusing on ethnic Chinese as cultural citizens of the nation, this paper examines national identity in the context of generational change. In so doing, it connects to colonialist conceptions of identity the dominant framework of ethnicity that operates in Malaysia. It argues that this framework allows for the nationalist imagining of ‘Malaysian-Chinese’ as ‘outsiders’. In probing the complex conceptual relationship between ethnicity, national identity and cultural citizenship, this article asks: How does ‘ethnicity’ enter into negotiations over the ‘national’ in the cultural realm? What are the notions of cultural difference and national otherness that operate in the negative dualisms by which nation and ethnicity are defined? How are these dualisms tied to notions of authenticity and cultural citizenship? Using the novel The Harmony Silk Factory by Malaysian author Tash Aw to address these questions, this paper argues the need to rethink current policies and narratives of ethnic and national identity in Malaysia.     

Territorializing ethnicity: the imposition of a model of statehood on pastoralists in northern Kenya and southern Ethiopia

The idea of the nation state has penetrated Kenya and Ethiopia deeply at a level much below the ‘nation’ state. In the colonial period districts and grazing reserves were delineated according to perceived ‘tribal’ boundaries, which were often only created in the process. Ethnicity in that process was not invented (as has been claimed for other parts of Africa) but it has changed: it has acquired a territorial character of a new kind. Ethnic territoriality in the mind of policy makers combined with ideas of preservation of the range which modern range ecology would regard as misconceived. These ideas led to policies that restricted the range of movement of pastoral nomads. This paper draws a line from colonial policies to modern politics, in which territorial subdivision continues. This process seems to be guided the interests of self-styled elites, while the pastoralists are adversely affected by them.     

Did The Earth Move For You? The anti-Mabl Debate1

This paper engages with the arguments which circulated in the public domain in opposition to the recognition of native title, and sets out the ‘truths’ they constructed concerning the nature and position of Aborigines within the Australian nation. These ‘truths’ rely on a nescience in the public domain of Aboriginal cultural forms and of the actuality of contemporary race relations. It is argued that the assumptions about cultural and racial domains and boundaries which were being accorded a new legitimacy, comprised an attempt to re-legitimise racial inequality as the norm for Australian society.     

Hate groups targeting unauthorized immigrants in the US: discourses,narratives and subjectivation practices on their websites

The narratives and images on websites of US hate groups that oppose undocumented immigrants represent and reproduce discourses that contribute to the subject formation of group members, who feel ethically obliged to counter unauthorized immigration. Left alone by the government, which is seen as unreliable and uncaring of patriotic values, they position themselves as heroic saviours of the nation. We argue that these hate groups’ ‘games of truth’ develop in response to the perception that irregular immigration threatens specific social orders and values, for instance about citizenship, national identity and otherness. This article helps to understand the ways in which anti-immigrant narratives serve the functions of countering these threats and of asserting the group members’ ethical obligation as a form of care of the self. In other words, from a Foucaultian viewpoint, we interpret the problematizations of ‘illegal’ immigration as discursive practices for the subject formation of hate group members.     

Motherlands? Some Notes on Women and Nationalism in India and Africa

The relation of women to nationalism is problematic, both in political adjudications of nationalism and in women's status both as subjects and as objects of signification, in narrating the nation. This is nowhere more poignantly patent than in the relation of motherhood and nationalism. This paper compares some recent approaches to representations of ‘mothers of the nation’ in India and South Africa. Three aspects of the problem are highlighted. Firstly, how far images of the mothers of the nation are masculinist creations, rather than ones which women themselves author? Secondly, how does the glorification of the mother in nationalist representations relate to the corporeal experiences of real mothers? Thirdly, how far does such imagery unite or divide women in its rhetorical stress on their identity as mothers?     

Minority politics in the Middle East and North Africa: the prospects for transformative change

This special issue explores the prospects for what Jacob Mundy calls ‘transformative minority politics’ in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region – that is, a form of minority politics that strengthens democratic reform in the region, and that helps deepen a culture of human rights and democratic citizenship. The cases examined in the special issue include the Amazigh in North Africa, the Copts in Egypt, the Kurds in Iraq, the Palestinians in Israel, the ‘minoritarian’ regimes in Syria and Bahrain, and the various ethnic minorities in Iran. In this introduction, we try to situate this debate in a larger historical and international context, identifying some of the factors that might help support a new transformative minority politics in the region, while also emphasizing the factors that have inhibited it in the past, and why they remain powerful.     

Race,ethnicity and German identity: a media analysis of the 2010 world cup men's national soccer team

Enjoying a surge of national pride, the German media celebrated the 2010 German World Cup team's success in South Africa. A dominant theme in this coverage was the ‘immigration background’ of 11 of the 23 players on the team and their claim to German identity despite their ethnic diversity. Amid debate over the changing nature of German citizenship, the national team's ‘multicultural kickers’ became the focal point for those who wished to re-frame German identity. This article examines German newspaper and magazine coverage of the national soccer team emphasizing the role that media played in constructing competing definitions of the German citizen and nation.     

Nationalist Anxiety or the Fear of Losing Your Other

The nation of the nationalists is always conceived to be in crisis. There is always an other standing between them and ‘it’. ‘It’ is often the impossible goal of a ‘totally gratifying nation’. Within a psychoanalytic framework, gratifying this nation is perceived as a fantasy, an object-cause of desire (Lacan), that is, a practical impossibility that neverthless keeps the practitioner trying to reach it. Within such a framework the other standing between the nationalists and their goal becomes a necessary subjective construction which allows the conversion of the impossibility of the nationalist fantasy into deferred possibility. The crisis presented by nationalist thought as triggered by the presence of the other is in fact a mode of reproducing the nationalists' belief in themselves and their nation. The ‘real’ crisis is when nationalists ‘lose’ their other and are forced to face the impossibility of the desired nation. Such situations can be described as states of nationalist anxiety. This paper, based on research during the civil war in Lebanon, examines certain events where the Lebanese Christian Nationalists were faced with the threat of losing their Muslim other. The paper describes the states of anxiety generated by this ‘threat’ and the nature of the strategies the Christian militias deployed to bring their state of anxiety to an end.     

Fixity and Flux: Bidayuh (Dis)engagements with the Malaysian Ethnic System

This article explores conceptions of the Malaysian ethnic system from the perspective of certain Bidayuhs, an indigenous group of Sarawak, Borneo. Recent scholarship has highlighted the ‘fluid’ and ‘shifting’ nature of Malay identity; but less attention has been paid to how ethnic minorities in the region depict Malayness. I suggest that for many Bidayuhs, Malay-ness is marked by an inescapable flxity which stifies a fluidity that they value as intrinsic to Bidayuh-ness and other aspects of life. Moreover, this sense of flxity has been mapped onto their conceptions of the (Malay-dominated) Malaysian ethnic system, in which they are inescapably entangled. The article investigates some of the consequent tensions arising from Bidayuh (dis)engagements with Malaysia's ethnic ‘flxity’, while tracing certain trends and changes in this relationship.     

The making and representation of Muslim identity in Britain: conversations with British Muslim ‘elites’

The common nomenclature of ethnicity, race and colour has been found wanting in theorizing and dealing with the Muslim presence in Britain. This study of 24 prominent British Muslims – including political, policy and academic/intellectual ‘elite’ – explores the making and representation of Muslim identity in Britain. We explore this through three considerations: Muslimness as a ‘master status’; leadership and representation in relation to British Muslims; and the public performance of Muslimness during ‘key moments’.     

Eating Metropolitaneity: Hong Kong Identity in yumcha

In Hong Kong, yumcha as a pervasive form of eating in the public has become an institution which epitomises the diversity and inclusiveness that Hong Kong people think are quintessential to the civility and economic achievement of the metropolis. It stands out particularly as a practice that has come to represent both locally and overseas a Hong Kong culture which has previously been characterised as residual of ‘Chinese tradition’ and ‘Western customs’, and hence is virtually non-existent. This paper looks at the consumption of metropolitaneity and the culturalisation of the heunggongyan or Hong Kong personal identity in the form, content and social relations involved in yumcha. It points to the significance of yumcha as a key to understanding a collective identity which has become more and more apparent as Hong Kong people vehemently try to establish a city with its own culture, first against the colonial grip and then the return of sovereignty to China in 1997.