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This article demonstrates how the use of affect in literature education invokes trajectories of nationalism and/or solidarity using the case of postcolonial Cyprus as example. For this, we analyse secondary school literature curricula and textbooks in both Greek-Cypriot and Turkish-Cypriot educational systems. We do so by making use of affect theory -- mainly 'affective nationalism' and 'affective solidarity' -- met with Henri Lefebvre's 'rhythms' and 'truth of space,' and Raymond Williams' dominant, emergence, residual positions. Our focus questions are: What social, cultural, political meanings about the ethnic self and 'Other' are produced by literature curricula and textbooks? How can affect be used to regulate students and meanings in literature education, and what kind of 'alternative' affective meanings emerge? Our analysis shows that literature can be used in educational settings to evoke simultaneously conflicting affective ideologies and feelings. Theoretical and policy implications are discussed for literature education in postcolonial settings.

In this article, we explore the ways language has been used in Cyprus during different historical periods as a means of a dividing power, with the use of Cypriot dialects as a form of resistance and reunification of the island. We situate these translanguaging themes within a context of affective biopolitics that impacts Cypriot generations in shaping their everyday life through borderscapes and nationalisms. More specifically, we first examine how the official languages of the island (Greek and Turkish) have been used in the dominant public sphere(s) of Cyprus to marginalise Cypriot dialects, which, in turn, have been used as an oral means of communication, but also to impose symbolic signifiers of the biopolitics of borders and nationalisms in dividing communities. Secondly, we explore ways in which Cypriot dialects have been used as forms of linguistic resistance to nationalism, offering an alternative collective identity for generations of both communities, even during periods when nationalism was dominant in both communities. The translanguaging exploration centres on a close discourse analysis of one particular radio programme—the 'Cypriot radio sketch'—that has been very popular among Cypriots since the appearance of radio in Cyprus in 1953. Finally, we analytically and discursively contextualise attempts of revival of the Cypriot dialects by younger generations as communicative forms of resistance to powers of partition, as well as translanguaging pathways to actualise their desire for the reunification of the island. We eclectically draw on a multi-method approach to combine datasets from interviews, media and social media while combining critical discourse analysis to theorise the affordances, borderscapes and affective biopolitics of generational language use within geographies of nationalism and resistance in the borderscapes of a divided Cyprus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This study offers an alternative perspective for examining the rise of Turkish nationalism in the Eastern Mediterranean in relation to cinema culture within the political and historical contexts of Cyprus. The cinema business and its practices had their golden age in the 1950s through the distribution of Turkish films from Turkey and the increasing number of movie theatres in Turkish Cypriot neighbourhoods. This period was also crucial in terms of political developments on the island due to the drastic rise in ethnic and national divisions. Drawing on archival research and oral history; this article aims to examine how Turkish nationalism was provided with the ideal conditions to grow rapidly at Cypriot cinemas and how multi-communal cinemagoing experiences of the early 1950s had transformed into nationally divided Cypriot audiences during the last years of British colonial rule in Cyprus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is an article on the history and historiography of Cypriot communism. It is inspired by two recent volumes on Cypriot communism: the first is about the 1931 October uprising, the Communist Party of Cyprus and the Third International based on the official documents of the Communist International (by Sakellaropoulos and Choumerianos), and the second by a volume that deals with the history of Cypriot communism until the formal disbanding of the Communist party in 1944 (by Alecou and Sakellaropoulos). The paper aims to contextualise and discuss how Cypriot communists themselves engage with their own history: Cypriot Communists saw their mission as historical, i.e., the resolution of the national question was seen as integral to their strategy of achieving a socialist transformation of the world. It critically examines the difficulties of the Cypriot Left to write and appraise its own early history of Cypriot Communism, despite repeated attempts and having commissioned historians to write an official history. Communism in Cyprus emerged in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution during the late period of British colonial rule in Cyprus and was active in the 1931 uprising. The hegemonic nationalist historiography has vilified the Left and its role in the national liberation struggle, because the Communists in the 1920s and 1930s opposed union with Greece (Enosis): they saw this as a reactionary slogan that diverted attention from the urgent resolution of the class/social question and would play in the hands of colonisers dividing the toilers along ethnic/national lines in their 'divide-and-rule' games. This paper critically reviews historical debates over anticolonialism and liberation struggles in Cyprus. In nationalist historiography, the 'social question' is subordinated to the 'national question', if not totally obscured. The Left in the 1920s and 1930s however, perceived the 'national question' as an aspect of the social-political question in the struggle for socialism: the principle of self-determination of Cypriots was to be realised as part of regional struggle with the goal of a Balkan Socialist Federation. By the 1940s, the Cypriot Communist line changed: as the prospects of revolution receded, the anticolonial struggle would resolve the national question by uniting with Greece. What followed is well-known: Cyprus and its people are de facto divided. Whilst there is fascinating scholarship demonstrating the processes of the different versions of a highly contested ideological struggle about the goals, strategy, tactics and means in national liberation, the nationalist historiography has imposed a straitjacket that prevents such insights from properly making inroads in public history, school textbooks, and official historiography. This has generated a national(ist) ideological frame that has made historical debates which question the dominant narrative almost impossible within public history. Nonetheless, the terrain has now opened widely, as younger scholars in academia and in social media are questioning such assumptions and reifications pertaining to anticolonial struggles for liberation. The current dissensus and polarisation has generated new spaces and has endowed new vigour in debates on the history of the Left in the country. Such debates however are not necessarily about the past; they are primarily about the present reading the past to illuminate the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trauma and ambivalence are common aspects of the post-colonial condition and themes in Cypriot poetry. Yaşın's (1998) poem acknowledges the present de facto political partition of Cyprus since the Greek coup and Turkish invasion of 1974, with Michanikos' (1975) poem providing a complementary question as to the lack of necessity of this partition with references to the intercommunal violence of 1963-1964. These questions are linked to both a shared, albeit segregated, trauma from political tragedies and upheaval and a shared nostalgia either for a nationalist past or a bicommunal garden of Eden, the main cleavages of the island's separation. The question of history and nostalgia in Cyprus, as well as its own identities have been entangled in the context of British colonialism as well as Greek and Turkish nationalism. This article investigates the relationship between archaeology, nationalism, and colonialism in Cyprus, producing segregated archaeological narratives and hidden bicommunal and minority experiences. It outlines a history of Cyprus, its nationalisms, and their effects on intercommunal imaginaries (Ioannou 2020). It will then discuss how ideology has shaped archaeological research in Cyprus (Karageorgis 1969). Lastly, the paper looks at how archaeology has moved towards a more nuanced discussion of ethnicity, the possibility of a common history, and reconciliation through the use of spatial, non-ethnic frameworks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the structure, content, and function of widely circulating prophetic narratives in contemporary Greece and Cyprus. Prophetologists play a key role in recycling and disseminating prophecies through traditional and modern means of communication in an attempt to explain conditions of crisis and to promote conservative moral values and nationalistic aspirations as salvific remedies in the public sphere. Their highly politicized prophetic discourse blurs the differentiation between religion and politics that characterizes secular modernity. But at the same time, the use of modern media and secular strategies for sacred purposes have unintended secularizing effects on the religious field. Finally, the article explores the reasons why prophecy belief finds fertile soil for proliferation in these countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cyprus has featured prominently on Turkey's foreign policy agenda in recent years. The ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has weaved this long-standing issue into a broader narrative of 'geographical imagination'. Cyprus policy has thus reflected the AKP's socio-political vision of a 'Yeni Türkiye' (New Turkey), first articulated nearly a decade ago, in which well-entrenched narratives about national identity and the Cyprus conflict are central. Against this backdrop, Cyprus has been leveraged in the twin interests of AKP survival (boosting incumbency through nationalist appeals) and Turkey's regional power aspirations. The present article offers a timely survey of Turkey's Cyprus policy over a 15-year period from 2002 (when the AKP rose to power) until the failure of the negotiation talks on Cyprus in Crans-Montana, Switzerland in July 2017. In so doing, the article charts the important continuities as well as the key markers of transition in Ankara's policy towards Cyprus under the AKP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the curious non-emergence of populism in contemporary Cyprus despite the deep financial crisis and profound political disillusionment – conditions that are treated as necessary and sufficient. Putting emphasis on Cyprus' key historical particularities, the article inquires into the ways Cyprus' political past, and the subsequent salient 'national question', produce ambiguous notions of 'the people' on the one hand, and impede the potentials for a 'populist moment' on the other hand. By assessing the performative dynamics of oppositional parties in Cyprus, the empirical analysis suggests that the absence of populism is rooted in the following factors: First, nationalist discourse prevails over, and significantly weakens, populist discourse. Second, self-proclaimed challenger parties served 'old wine in new bottles' further undermining their position and claims. The failure of populism to take root in Cyprus, brings to the fore important theoretical insights relevant to the non-emergence of populism even under favourable conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Christoforos Savva, one of the most significant Cypriot artists of the 1960s, was also a highly politicized individual whose leftist worldview paralleled his artistic development. Nevertheless, this side of Savva has not been thoroughly explored. Savva created two forms of art: cementografia and ifasmatografia. Ifasmatografies were based on the vernacular tradition of weaving, while cementografies used modern cement, which was coming to replace stone in building construction. Savva's art departed from contemporary nationalist art production, such as that of the painter Adamantios Diamantis, and it also diverged from the Western colonial/orientalist projections depicting a premodern Cyprus. Overall, Savva's oeuvre bore all the hallmarks of contesting both Cypriot nationalisms—the Greek and the Turkish—since it was inclusive and anti-nationalist in its essence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the change and continuity in the Turkish policy toward Cyprus since the de facto partition of the island in 1974. The exploration of the relationship between Turkish nationalism and foreign policy toward Cyprus suggests that the language of Turkish nationalism regarding the Cyprus question has been far from monotonous. It is shown that the period coinciding with the coming of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) in 2002 in particular was a critical juncture which opened up the discursive space for the re-articulation of the 'Cyprus problem', legitimising efforts in relation to reunification. Yet the partial nature of the discursive shift and the absence of a complete paradigmatic change—explained here with reference to structural and historical features of the Cyprus problem as well as the contingent nature of the European Union (EU) membership prospects—has meant the return of the well-entrenched narratives on the conflict and national identity. Also revealing the ways in which Turkish Cypriots have responded to such changes in policy and rhetoric from Ankara, the paper aims to complement existing accounts of trans-border nationalism in conflict and post-conflict settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]