GS F242 Cultural Studies

BITS Pilani Dr. Muhammed Afzal P

Pilani Campus
 BITS Pilani
Pilani Campus

Nation and Nationalism

➢What is a nation? What is a nation-state?
➢Nation-state is a relatively recent
phenomenon
➢Nation-state, nationalism and national
identity are not naturally occurring
phenomenon
➢They are contingent historical-cultural
formations

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• The nation-state: a political concept that refers to
an administrative apparatus deemed to have
sovereignty over a specific space or territory within
the nation-state system
• National identity: a form of imaginative
identification with the symbols and discourses of
the nation-state
• “Representations of national culture are snapshots
of the symbols and practices that have been
foregrounded at specific historical conjunctures.”
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• Instead of thinking of national cultures as
unified, we should think of them as a discursive
device which represents difference as unity or
identity. They are cross-cut by deep internal
divisions and differences, and ‘unified’ only
through the exercise of different forms of
cultural power.

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• National unity is constructed through the
narrative of the nation by which stories, images,
symbols and rituals represent ‘shared’ meanings
of nationhood (Bhabha).
• National identity is a form of identification with
representations of shared experiences and
history. These are told through stories, literature,
popular culture and the media.
• “Tradition and continuity”
• “In the nature of things”-Nationalism as “natural”

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• Compile a list of the stories, symbols and icons
that construct the national identity of the country
that you live in.
➢ How are these signs and discourses manifested
in the contemporary media?
➢ Consider a major sporting event such as the
Olympics or the World Cup.
➢ How is national identity constructed at these
events?

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• the national cultures into which we are born are
one of the principal sources of cultural identity
• are our identities literal or metaphorical? What
do we mean when we say we are Indian or
American or British or Mexican?

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• national identities are not things we are born
with, but are formed and transformed within and
in relation to representation.
• How do we become Indian?
➢ Because of the Indianness that has come to be
represented, as a set of meanings, by the
national culture

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“What is a Nation?” Ernest
Renan (1882)
• A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Only two
things, actually, constitute this soul, this spiritual
principle. One is in the past, the other in the
present. One is the possession in common of
a rich legacy of remembrances; the other is
the actual consent, the desire to live together,
the will to continue to value the heritage which
all hold in common.

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Ernest Gellner on Nationalism

• The idea of a man [sic] without a nation seems to

impose a great strain on the modern imagination. A
man must have a nationality as he must have a
nose and two ears. All this seems obvious, though,
alas, it is not true. But that it should have come to
seem so very obviously true is indeed an aspect,
perhaps the very core of the problem of nationalism.
Having a nation is not an inherent attribute of
humanity, but it has now come to appear as such

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Nation and Narratives

• nation is not a political entity, but something

which produces meanings--a system of
cultural representation
• people are not only legal citizens of a nation;
they participate in the idea of the nation as
represented in its national culture
• a nation is a symbolic community which can
"generate a sense of identity and allegiance“
• The “political roof” (Gellner) of nation-state
subsumed ethnic and regional differences
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• National cultures construct identities by producing
meanings about “the nation” with which we can
identify, they are contained in the stories which are
told about it, memories which connect its present
with its past, and images which are constructed of
it
• National culture: cultural institutions; symbols;
representations
• A national culture is a discourse
• How is the narrative of national culture told?
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Benedict Anderson on Nation
as an Imagined Community
• Three paradoxes:
➢ objective modernity of nations to the historian’s eye’s vs
subjective antiquity
➢ The formal universality of nationality vs particularity
➢ Political power vs philosophical poverty

• Nationality/nation-ness/nationalism– cultural artefacts of a

particular kind
• How did they come into historical being?
• What ways their meanings changed over time?
• Why the command such profound emotional legitimacy today?

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• “Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to
self-consciousness: it invents nations where they
do not exist”-Ernst Gellner
• Anderson takes issues with Gellner for assuming
that only nationalism is a fiction
• He points out that all communities larger than
primordial village of face to face contact are
imagined

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Nation as an Imagined
Community
• Nation is an imagined political community – and
imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign
• It is imagined because the members of even the
smallest nation will never know most of their fellow
members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in
the minds of each lives the images of their
communion.
• The nation is imagined as limited because even the
largest of them encompassing perhaps a billion
living beings, has finite, if elastic boundaries,
beyond which lie other nations.

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• It is imagined as sovereign because the concept was
born in an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution
were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely ordered,
hierarchical dynastic realm.
• Finally, it is imagined as a community because,
regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that
may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as
a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately, it is this
fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two
centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much
to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings.

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The Origins of Nationalism

• The possibility of imagining the nation arose

historically with the decline of three fundamental
cultural conceptions
1) A particular language offered access to truth
(transcontinental universal association)
2) The belief that society was naturally organized
around and under high centres (monarchs with
divine sanction)
3) The conception of time in which the origin of human
beings and the origin of the universe is identical

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Print Capitalism

• Mechanical reproduction and commodification of

books, newspapers, etc. led to the
standardization of vernacular language
• Since language was seen as one of the basis for
national consciousness, this led to the
emergence of a national consciousness
• “Print language is what invents nationalism, not
a particular language per se”

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• The change in the character of Latin: Latin
became an esoteric language as a result of print
capitalism
• The impact of reformation:
• The slow, geographically uneven, spread of
particular vernaculars as instruments of
administrative centralization

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Print Languages as the bases
of national consciousness
1) Through the creation of unified fields of
exchange and communication below Latin and
above the spoken vernaculars
2) Gave a new fixity to language, which in the
long run helped to build the image of antiquity
(print as permanent)
3) Created languages of power

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