Theories of nationalism

Week 17Ethnicity and ‘Race’

Recap

• Considered complexity of concepts

• Considered the contested nature of the idea of institutional racism.

• Looked at ‘whiteness’ to explore the relationship between ethnicity and identity

Outline

• What is nationalism?

• Explore Anderson’s theory of ‘imagined communities’

• Look at how nationalism is gendered and the consequences that this has for women in particular

• What is Britishness?

• Talk to the person sitting next to you about what you think it is?

Definitions of Nationalism

• Nationality is often taken as a given

– Most people have one

– Rarely questioned

– But what are they?

Definitions of Nationalism

• Nation, Nationalism, and Nationality can be difficult to define exactly

• Related to the rise of the Nation-State

• But not reducible to it (Kurdish, Basque)

Imagined Communities

Anderson suggests that nations are:

– ‘Imagined political communities’

– Imagined as limited and sovereign

– But they usually feel ‘natural’ not chosen

Why ‘imagined’

• Most members will not know all the other members

• Yet connections are imagined

• Ideas of common destiny are constructed

• Constructed ideas specific to each ‘nationality’

Why limited and sovereign

• Usually associated with an claim for political representation for the collective

• Bounded by other similar constructions and may be developed in opposition

• Often tied geographically

• Nationalists fight to maintain or develop borders rather than for mergence with other nationalities

Why community?

• Regardless of inequalities within nations, nation is imagined as ‘comradeship’

• People willing to die to protect this imagining

• But how is it created?

Imagined communities?

• Do you think Anderson’s notion of imagined communities is plausible?

Cultural Constructions

• For Anderson, the idea of nationalism is created and maintained through symbols and ceremonies of the nation

– Tomb of the Unknown Soldier symbolises unity and national sacrifice (yet nationality unknown)

– Museums, State Occasions, Traditions

Symbols of Britishness?

• Patterns of Celebrations?

– State Opening of Parliament– Trooping of the Colour– Remembrance Sunday– Guy Fawkes Night – FA Cup

• Operate both to bind the nation together and re/create image of national identity

(Be)Longing

• These imagined communities can be dispersed

• Migrants may ‘belong’ to a Mother Country

• Diaspora may take steps to communicate notions of nationalism

• Nationalism is related to ethnic origin but not reducible to it

• In what ways do you think nations control the ‘reproduction’ of themselves?

Reproducing the Nation

• Genetic Inheritance often a strong factor in imagined communities– Being born into it, may be the only way in

• Physical reproduction of the nation is through women’s bodies

• Sexuality and reproduction become crucial factors in the reproducing the nation

Reproducing the Nation

• Women are both part of the collective and subject to specialist rules

• These often relate to ‘risky’

physical reproduction of the nation

• Behaviour becomes a marker of cultural politics

Cultural Imaginings of Gender

• Notions of nations as female (Mother India)

• Women subject to direct controls over sexuality and reproduction

• Women become to symbolic bearers of ‘honour’– ‘Honour’ crimes linked to breaches in

behaviour (extra-marital sex, consulting with the ‘enemy’)

Population Agendas

• Women may be required to populate the nation– Bans on contraceptives, abortion– Incentives to bear more children

• Examples include– Awards for ‘heroic mothers’ (Nazi Germany)– Demographic races (Israel/Palestinians)– State demands (‘populate or perish’ Australia)

Eugenicist Agenda

• Fixations on the quality rather than quantity of nation’s ‘stock’– State programmes of sterilisation of ‘unfit’

women – Encouragement of contraception for welfare

mothers– Mass rape in war as a strategy of

miscegenation

• To what extent do you think that nationalism is gendered?

Inclusion/Exclusion

• Nationalist and racist ideologies may be interwoven – Nazi laws –based on how ‘pure blood’ was

contaminated by Jewish Ancestry – US was fixated by measuring extent of

Blackness– Bans on interrelated marriage in Apartheid

South Africa

Summary

• Nationalism is a constructed notion of community

• It is (re)produced through symbols and ceremonies of nationhood

• It is gendered and may have particular consequences for women

Next week

• Slavery and unfree labour

• Rise of the international slave trade and its ongoing effects

• Modern day forms of forced labour