Preliminary Programme

Two indigenous peoples have had a conceptually similar but geographically distinct experience wiht nationalism: the Sami and the Ojibwe. In both, a people who consider themselves a nation – a people with a distinct history, language group, practices, and identity – have found themselves existing in a historical (and contemporary) zone of nation-state overlap. In the case of the Sami, their homelands and existing location overlays the states of Finland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia; in the case of the Ojibway Anishenaabe, their traditional and present-day lands include portions of the United States and Canada. These Indigenous Nations must exist both inside and beyond the international legal (e.g., United Nations reinforced) categories of states.

Drawing on the currently emergent fields of indigenous legal studies, biopolitics, and history, this essay traces the normalization of the nation state against indigenous inhabitants and compares the reactions, resistances, and refusals which have arisen in response. It examines the divergent strategies both peoples have taken to reclaim their regional autonomy, comparing for example The Saami Council with the dispersed centers of power for Ojibwe, and the language reclamation and education projects entailed by each. Most importantly, it examines how each Nation operates in conflict with the demands that the nation-state system makes on them, and how each builds unity in the face of these ostensible and imposed divisions. (Show less)

Latinity, especially if we use the French expression latinité, refers to Latin civilization as a whole.
Intellectuals, journalists and politician started to use Latinity in a political sense during the last decades of the nineteenth century, when they started to imagine a different kind of geo-political space: the pan-Latinism. WW1, often conceived as a war of civilizations, pushed Latinity to become a more aggressive concept, achieving resounding success with the right wings intellectuals both in Europe and South America.
This paper aims to discuss a political and cultural right wing intellectual association: the Association de la Presse Latine (APL). The APL was founded in 1923 and, until 1935, it organized 13 congresses both in Europe and in Central America, became a point of references for right wings intellectuals across the Atlantic. The APL, intended as a hotbed for political and cultural project and a place of ideas exchanges is an important case study that, until now was basically not taken into consideration by historiography.
Analyzing the congresses records and the association monthly magazine, this paper intend to shared a new light both on the study of the cultural and political project of pan-Latinism in a broader transnational perspective, and on the right wing intellectuals networks on the interwar period. A particular attention will be paid on the figure of the Écrivain-diplomate; conceived him as a s transnational agent, a disseminator of ideas, and a pivotal figure of networks that crossed national borders. Finally, with almost twenty years of activity the APL represents an important laboratory in which intellectuals both from South Europe and Latin America have formulated, exchanged and popularized ideas across Atlantic, paying particular attention on the construction of Latin bloc encompassing over 25 nations and 240 million people across Atlantic
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Since the last decade of the 20th century, there has been a growing and renovated literature on Spanish nationalism in the Spanish historiography. Previous works had sustained the thesis that Spain had undergone a weak process of nationalization in the 19th century and therefore many and conflicting national identities had come into existence in the 20th century. Most of those works tended to associate this weak nationalization to the failures of the liberal revolution, which was understood as the explanatory factor for the problems of the process of modernization in the Iberian Peninsula. This interpretation, that in the end defends a kind of Spanish Sonderweg, clashes with the results of the historiographical renovation of the recent years. The new studies make a reconsideration of the achievements and limitations of the process of nationalization in Spain, comparing its trends with those of other countries. In this context, the role of the synchronic and intertwined construction of regional and other subnational identities and the national identity has come to the fore. Where historian in the 1970s and 1980s saw a process of local or regional identification instead of a process of nationalization, historiography is now discovering the existence of a potential process of nationalization through the development of regional identities. In our suggested paper, we aim at analyzing the process of the construction of the Castilian regional identity at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century and its unambiguous contribution to the Spanish nation-building process, comparing it with other different experiences in Spain and other European countries. (Show less)

As Amin Hassanpour indicates, the Kurds are one of the largest non-state nations whose homeland lies within official frontiers of Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Armenia and Azerbaijan. It is possible to claim that from the second half of the 19th century, like other subject races of the Ottoman Empire, “Kurdish nationalism” began to appear in the modern sense. However, the so-called “Kurdish nationalist movement” was neither unified nor linear: it was non-nationalist provincial movements of the Kurds, which had troubled the central state, rather that any Kurdish nationalism developed by Kurdish intellectuals. Only after the foundation of Iraq, Turkey and Syria and with their national policies based on the assimilation and the denial of the Kurds, Kurdish nationalism became clearer. Because the Kurds have never enjoyed the political unity and they have never had a common literature, it is hard to determine what the Kurdish language is and where is Kurdistan.
Dersim, the province whose name was officially changed as Tunceli after the Dersim Massacre (1938) of the Turkish State, is considered as a part of Kurdistan by the Kurdish movement although its inhabitants speak a different language/dialect. Moreover, the majority of the province is Alevi unlike (other) Kurds. In this paper, I scrutinize how the Kurdish national movement was able to be organized in Dersim, in a city socially and culturally very different from pro-Kurdish cities. I will try to present the Kurdish identity as both a dissident identity with the rise of the Kurdish movement and a “hegemonic” identity seeking to absorb other belongings of the people of Dersim. In the construction of the Kurdish identity by Kurdish nationalists in Dersim, I will focus on the effect of five constituents: 1-language, 2-geography, 3-its relations with the state and other political rivals, 4-the narrative of 1938 (the Turkish state a a common "enemy") and 5-religion.
The Kurdish movement seeking to construct its national costume has tried to gather the people living in the same geography under a single, unified and standardized language. In this process, Kurdish nationalism (in spite of being “nationalism of an oppressed nation”) sought to include Dersim people into the national struggle by referring to several rhetorics. By following periodicals of the movement and scrutinizing historical and religious sources adopted by Kurdish nationalists, different arguments underpinning the “Kurdishness” of Dersim will be discussed in this paper. (Show less)