Nostalgia for the Empire

Nostalgia for the Empire PDF Author: M. Hakan Yavuz
Publisher:
ISBN: 0197512283
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
Nostalgia for the Empire examines the social and political origins of beleaguered and wistful expressions of nostalgia about the Ottoman Empire. Political memories of the Ottoman past have been transformed in Turkish society, along with reactions from the outside world. The Ottoman past, as remembered now, is grounded in contemporary conservative Islamic values. Thus, the connection between memories of the Ottoman past and these values defines Turkey's new identity. This new expression of national memory portrays Turkey as a victim of the major powers, justifying its position against its imagined internal and external enemies.

What Nostalgia Was

What Nostalgia Was PDF Author: Thomas Dodman
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022649294X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
In What Nostalgia Was, historian Thomas Dodman traces the history of clinical "nostalgia" from when it was first coined in 1688 to describe deadly homesickness until the late nineteenth century, when it morphed into the benign yearning for a lost past we are all familiar with today. Dodman explores how people, both doctors and sufferers, understood nostalgia in late seventeenth-century Swiss cantons (where the first cases were reported) to the Napoleonic wars and to the French colonization of North Africa in the latter 1800s. A work of transnational scope over the longue duree, the book is an intellectual biography of a "transient mental illness" that was successively reframed according to prevailing notions of medicine, romanticism, and climatic and racial determinism. At the same time, Dodman adopts an ethnographic sensitivity to understand the everyday experience of living with nostalgia. In so doing, he explains why nostalgia was such a compelling diagnosis for war neuroses and generalized socioemotional disembeddedness at the dawn of the capitalist era and how it can be understood as a powerful bellwether of the psychological effects of living in the modern age.

Nostalgia for the Empire

Nostalgia for the Empire PDF Author: M. Hakan Yavuz
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197512305
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
Making a country great again is a theme for nationalist authoritarians. Across countries with past experience as great powers, nationalist politicians typically harken back to a golden age. In Nostalgia for Empire, Hakan Yavuz focuses on how this trend is playing out in Turkey, a nation that lost its empire a century ago and which is now ruled by a nationalist authoritarian who invokes nostalgia for the Ottoman era to buttress his power. Yavuz delves into the social and political origins of expressions of nostalgia for the Ottoman Empire among various groups in Turkey. Exploring why and how certain segments of Turkish society has selectively brought the Ottoman Empire back into public consciousness, Yavuz traces how memory of the Ottoman period has changed. He draws from Turkish literature, mainstream history books, and other cultural products from the 1940s to the twenty-first century to illustrate the transformation. He finds that two key aspects of Turkish literature are, on the one hand, its criticism of the Jacobin modernization of Turkey under Ataturk, and on the other a desire to search the Ottoman past for an alternative political language. Yavuz goes onto to explain how major political actors, including President Erdogan, utilize the concept of empire to craft distinctive conceptualizations of nationalism, Islam, and Ottomanism that exploit national nostalgia. As remembered today, the Ottoman past seems to be grounded in contemporary conservative Islamic values. The combination of these memories and values generates a portrait of Turkey as a victim of major powers, besieged by imagined enemies both internal and external. In mapping out how nostalgia is crafted and spread, this book not only sheds light on Turkey's unique case but also deepens our understanding of nationalism, religion, and modernity.

Imperial Nostalgia

Imperial Nostalgia PDF Author: Peter Mitchell
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781526161314
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
A short, polemical study of the persistence of imperial nostalgia in modern British culture, politics, heritage and media.

Post-Soviet Nostalgia

Post-Soviet Nostalgia PDF Author: Otto Boele
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000507297
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
Bringing together scholars from Russia, the United States and Europe, this collection of essays is the first to explore the slippery phenomenon of post-Soviet nostalgia by studying it as a discursive practice serving a wide variety of ideological agendas. The authors demonstrate how feelings of loss and displacement in post-Soviet Russia are turned into effective tools of state building and national mobilization, as well as into weapons for local resistance and the assertion of individual autonomy. Drawing on novels, memoirs, documentaries, photographs and Soviet commodities, Post-Soviet Nostalgia is an invaluable resource for historians, literary scholars and anthropologists interested in how Russia comes to terms with its Soviet past.

France's Lost Empires

France's Lost Empires PDF Author: Kate Marsh
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0739148834
Category : Collective memory
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
This collection of essays investigates the fundamental role that the loss of colonial territories at the end of the Ancient Regime and post-World War II has played in shaping French memories and colonial discourses. In identifying loss and nostalgia as key tropes in cultural representations, these essays call for a re-evaluation of French colonialism as a discourse informed not just by narratives of conquest, but equally by its histories of defeat.

The Ministry of Nostalgia

The Ministry of Nostalgia PDF Author: Owen Hatherley
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1784780774
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
In this brilliant polemical rampage, Owen Hatherley shows how our past is being resold in order to defend the indefensible. From the marketing of a "make do and mend" aesthetic to the growing nostalgia for a utopian past that never existed, a cultural distraction scam prevents people grasping the truth of their condition. The Ministry of Nostalgia explodes the creation of a false history: a rewriting of the austerity of the 1940s and 1950s, which saw the development of a welfare state while the nation crawled out of the devastations of war. This period has been recast to explain and offer consolation for the violence of neoliberalism, an ideology dedicated to the privatisation of our common wealth. In coruscating prose-with subjects ranging from Ken Loach's documentaries, Turner Prize-shortlisted video art, London vernacular architecture, and Jamie Oliver's cooking-Hatherley issues a passionate challenge to the injunction to keep calm and carry on.

Empires of the Mind

Empires of the Mind PDF Author: Robert Gildea
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110715958X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
Prize-winning historian Robert Gildea dissects the legacy of empire for the former colonial powers and their subjects.

Nostalgia

Nostalgia PDF Author: Robert Klanten
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783899554397
Category : Asia, Central
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The Russia of Czar Nicholas II in laboriously restored historical color photographs by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii

Collapse of an Empire

Collapse of an Empire PDF Author: Yegor Gaidar
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0815731159
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
"My goal is to show the reader that the Soviet political and economic system was unstable by its very nature. It was just a question of when and how it would collapse...." —From the Introduction to Collapse of an Empire The Soviet Union was an empire in many senses of the word—a vast mix of far-flung regions and accidental citizens by way of conquest or annexation. Typical of such empires, it was built on shaky foundations. That instability made its demise inevitable, asserts Yegor Gaidar, former prime minister of Russia and architect of the "shock therapy" economic reforms of the 1990s. Yet a growing desire to return to the glory days of empire is pushing today's Russia backward into many of the same traps that made the Soviet Union untenable. In this important new book, Gaidar clearly illustrates why Russian nostalgia for empire is dangerous and ill-fated: "Dreams of returning to another era are illusory. Attempts to do so will lead to defeat." Gaidar uses world history, the Soviet experience, and economic analysis to demonstrate why swimming against this tide of history would be a huge mistake. The USSR sowed the seeds of its own economic destruction, and Gaidar worries that Russia is repeating some of those mistakes. Once again, for example, the nation is putting too many eggs into one basket, leaving the nation vulnerable to fluctuations in the energy market. The Soviets had used revenues from energy sales to prop up struggling sectors such as agriculture, which was so thoroughly ravaged by hyperindustrialization that the Soviet Union became a net importer of food. When oil prices dropped in the 1980s, that revenue stream diminished, and dependent sectors suffered heavily. Although strategies requiring austerity or sacrifice can be politically difficult, Russia needs to prepare for such downturns and restrain spending during prosperous times. Collapse of an Empire shows why it is imperative to fix the roof before it starts to rain, and why so