This book engages readers in thirteen conversations presented by authors from around the world regarding the role that textbooks play in helping readers imagine membership in the nation. Authors’ voices come from a variety of contexts – some historical, some contemporary, some providing analyses over time. But they all consider the changing portrayal of diversity, belonging and exclusion in multiethnic and diverse societies where silenced, invisible, marginalized members have struggled to make their voices heard and to have their identities incorporated into the national narrative. The authors discuss portrayals of past exclusions around religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, as they look at the shifting boundaries of insider and outsider. This book is thus about “who we are” not only demographically, but also in terms of the past, especially how and whether we teach discredited pasts through textbooks. The concluding chapters provides ways forward in thinking about what can be done to promote curricula that are more inclusive, critical and positively bonding, in increasingly larger and more inclusive contexts.

How do schools protect young people and call on the youngest citizens to respond to violent conflict and division operating outside, and sometimes within, school walls? What kinds of curricular representations of conflict contribute to the construction of national identity, and what kinds of encounters challenge presumed boundaries between us and them? Through contemporary and historical case studies—drawn from Cambodia, Egypt, Northern Ireland, Peru, and Rwanda, among others—this collection explores how societies experiencing armed conflict and its aftermath imagine education as a space for forging collective identity, peace and stability, and national citizenship. In some contexts, the erasure of conflict and the homogenization of difference are central to shaping national identities and attitudes. In other cases, collective memory of conflict functions as a central organizing frame through which citizenship and national identity are (re)constructed, with embedded messages about who belongs and how social belonging is achieved. The essays in this volume illuminate varied and complex inter-relationships between education, conflict, and national identity, while accounting for ways in which policymakers, teachers, youth, and community members replicate, resist, and transform conflict through everyday interactions in educational spaces.

This book examines the shifting portrayal of the nation in school textbooks in 14 countries during periods of rapid political, social, and economic change. Drawing on a range of analytic strategies, the authors examine history and civics textbooks, and the teaching of such texts, along with other prominent curricular materials—children’s readers, a required text penned by the head of state, a holocaust curriculum, etc.. The authors analyze the uses of history and pedagogy in building, reinforcing and/or redefining the nation and state especially in the light of challenges to its legitimacy. The primary focus is on countries in developing or transitional contexts. Issues include the teaching of democratic civics in a multiethnic state with little history of democratic governance; shifts in teaching about the Khmer Rouge in post-conflict Cambodia; children’s readers used to define national space in former republics of the Soviet Union; the development of Holocaust education in a context where citizens were both victims and perpetuators of violence; the creation of a national past in Turkmenistan; and so forth. The case studies are supplemented by commentary, an introduction and conclusion.

Academic studies of the Civil War and historical memory abound, ensuring a deeper understanding of how the war’s meaning has shifted over time and the implications of those changes for concepts of race, citizenship, and nationhood. The Reconstruction era, by contrast, has yet to receive similar attention from scholars. Remembering Reconstruction ably fills this void, assembling a prestigious lineup of Reconstruction historians to examine the competing social and historical memories of this pivotal and violent period in American history. Many consider the period from 1863 (beginning with slave emancipation) to 1877 (when the last federal troops were withdrawn from South Carolina and Louisiana) an “unfinished revolution” for civil rights, racial-identity formation, and social reform. Despite the cataclysmic aftermath of the war, the memory of Reconstruction in American consciousness and its impact on the country’s fraught history of identity, race, and reparation has been largely neglected. The essays in Remembering Reconstruction advance and broaden our perceptions of the complex revisions in the nation's collective memory. Notably, the authors uncover the impetus behind the creation of black counter-memories of Reconstruction and the narrative of the “tragic era” that dominated white memory of the period. Furthermore, by questioning how Americans have remembered Reconstruction and how those memories have shaped the nation's social and political history throughout the twentieth century, this volume places memory at the heart of historical inquiry.

Wang follows the Chinese Communist Party's ideological re-education of the public through the exploitation of China's humiliating modern history, tracking the CCP's use of history education to glorify the party, re-establish its legitimacy, consolidate national identity, and justify one-party rule in the post-Tiananmen and post-Cold War era.

A sustained and systematic study of the construction, erosion and reconstruction of national histories across a wide variety of states is highly topical and extremely relevant in the context of the accelerating processes of Europeanization and globalization. However, as demonstrated in this volume, histories have not, of course, only been written by professional historians. Drawing on studies from a number of different European nation states, the contributors to this volume present a systematic exploration, of the representation of the national paradigm. In doing so, they contextualize the European experience in a more global framework by providing comparative perspectives on the national histories in the Far East and North America. As such, they expose the complex variables and diverse actors that lie behind the narration of a nation.

WINNER OF: Frantz Fanon Outstanding Book from the Caribbean Philosophical Association Canadian Political Science Association’s C.B. MacPherson Prize Studies in Political Economy Book Prize Over the past forty years, recognition has become the dominant mode of negotiation and decolonization between the nation-state and Indigenous nations in North America. The term “recognition” shapes debates over Indigenous cultural distinctiveness, Indigenous rights to land and self-government, and Indigenous peoples’ right to benefit from the development of their lands and resources. In a work of critically engaged political theory, Glen Sean Coulthard challenges recognition as a method of organizing difference and identity in liberal politics, questioning the assumption that contemporary difference and past histories of destructive colonialism between the state and Indigenous peoples can be reconciled through a process of acknowledgment. Beyond this, Coulthard examines an alternative politics—one that seeks to revalue, reconstruct, and redeploy Indigenous cultural practices based on self-recognition rather than on seeking appreciation from the very agents of colonialism. Coulthard demonstrates how a “place-based” modification of Karl Marx’s theory of “primitive accumulation” throws light on Indigenous–state relations in settler-colonial contexts and how Frantz Fanon’s critique of colonial recognition shows that this relationship reproduces itself over time. This framework strengthens his exploration of the ways that the politics of recognition has come to serve the interests of settler-colonial power. In addressing the core tenets of Indigenous resistance movements, like Red Power and Idle No More, Coulthard offers fresh insights into the politics of active decolonization.