In 1995, Banal Nationalism set a new way to study nationhood. Away from the traditional concern with its historical origins (‘when’) and its substantialist features (‘what’), Banal Nationalism ...offered a systematic analysis of its reproduction (‘how’). Informed by social and discursive psychology, Billig pointed to the role played by familiar, unremarkable ‘little words’ (deixis) to explain the persistence and pervasiveness of the idea of a world divided into nations. The present article aims to expand Billig’s seminal study on the reproduction of nationalism, by incorporating an ‘everyday nationhood’ perspective, which attends more closely to human agency and contextual interaction. To give empirical substance to this move, the article relies on photo-elicitation group discussions and written essays collected in a vocational school in Milan, Italy, among an ethno-culturally diverse sample. By bringing the voices of people in as active producers of national meanings, the article offers a more complex picture of a world banally divided into nations. Both a national ‘we’ and a national ‘here’ emerge in fact as socio-spatially differentiated, fragmented and articulated at a plurality of scales, thus defying the logical linearity of banal nationalism, which unwittingly reproduces nations as singular, internally homogenous discursive entities. The article concludes by arguing for the need to complement the banal with the everyday in order to more fully capture processes of national reproduction in contexts of increasing ethno-cultural diversity.
•Banal nationalism tends, unwittingly, to overlook human agency.•Everyday nationhood is proposed to complement banal nationalism.•An agency-centered model reveals how nation is a differentiated, fragmented and multiscalar space.
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, celebrities occupied a highly contested space within the popular and political imaginary. Whilst the mass suffering unleashed by the pandemic led some to herald the ...death of celebrity culture, many celebrities also took part in fundraising initiatives, public health campaigns and philanthropic ventures, with some taking on the status of ‘national treasure’. This article examines two such figures who gained particular luminosity as ‘Covid Heroes’ for their charitable and campaigning work during the pandemic: war veteran Sir Captain Tom Moore and footballer Marcus Rashford. Through a discourse analysis of UK national newspaper articles and television documentaries, we consider what ideological work these celebrities perform within times of heightened crisis. The article expands upon Chris Greer and Eugene McLaughlin’s theorisation of the ‘national treasure’ in a number of ways, considering how, in ushering forth particular ideas about the nation, these figures secure or contest contemporary welfare imaginaries. Identifying how Rashford and Moore play a crucial role in what Stuart Hall called ‘scripting a national story’ within the pandemic, the article highlights the significance of ‘crisis celebrity’ as a site of hegemonic struggle over national identity, welfare, deservingness and belonging.
This article seeks to explore the specificities of Scottish architecture in relation to English architecture. It focusses first on the orthodoxies presented within past literature, and how these have ...been sometimes unhelpful to scholars wishing to address this question. The article then seeks to identify, and then to analyse, what clearly is a national style of architecture which can be characterised, in summary, as castellated. The discussion that follows on Revivalism(s) is articulated relative to long-standing issues of nationhood; considering Scotland first as an independent European state, over many centuries until union with England in 1707; and secondly, thereafter, Scotland’s attempt to define its status within both the British union and the empire; an arrangement in which the paradigms were those of England; but an England which tolerated a degree of cultural individuality so long as political adherence to the “core” was assured. The article builds upon recent research in social and political history, as well as architecture and visual culture, and demonstrates that Scotland’s interest in its own past heritage, and its clear individuality (or “different-ness”) in architectural style, is closely connected to the nation’s recurring attempts to find a voice in a larger political entity.
This volume demonstrates how the Hundred Years War (1337–1453) provides a necessary context for late medieval literature. Many of the major writers of the period, in a variety of different languages, ...lived either all or most of their lives under the shadow of war, including Geoffrey Chaucer, Christine de Pizan, Giovanni Boccaccio and Bridget of Sweden. The essays collected here investigate how authors use strategies including translation, adaptation and allegory in order to respond to the war. Simultaneously, they make a case for reconsidering how literature like women's visionary writing or lyric poetry, not generally seen as war literature, form part of the broader context of European warfare. As it extends the boundaries of what counts as war literature, the volume also moves beyond the traditional Anglo-French framing of the conflict by considering authors enmeshed in the conflict through proxy battles, diplomatic ties and ideological disputes. While covering English and French writers explicitly writing to the war, like John Lydgate or Alain Chartier, it also explores the war writing of prominent Welsh, Scottish and Italian authors, like Dafydd ap Gwilym, Walter Bower and Catherine of Siena. The book models a synthetic and transnational literary history of conflict that will pave the way for future scholarship in earlier and later periods. The chapters in this volume show how literature did more than reflect the realities of the Hundred Years War; it was also a crucial site for contesting the claims of war as literary writers crafted ways to actively intervene in the conflict.
Peter Ackroyd’s historiographic metafictional novel
(2006) entails a critical return to history – critical in the sense that it questions the essence of historical knowledge and revisits the past in ...order to comment on the politics of national identity. Beneath a façade of historicity, the novel explores the continuity of English cultural identity and narrates a fictional story that centres on the conflict of Catholicism and Protestantism in the context of post-Restoration emigration of Puritans from England to New England. The “old faith”, although marginalized, continued to exist in post-Reformation England. The novel ties the significance of Catholicism to a thorough sense of Englishness. Catholic faith is shown as an ancient anchor of English identity. Peter Ackroyd delves into the collective memory of his race in search of a sense of commonality, believing in the continuity of English national identity. Challenging humanist assumptions about historical authenticity, the novel calls into question the idea of religious homogeneity, offering a different narrative as equally valuable.
This article provides an introduction to the themed section “Linguistic Justice, Migration and the Nation‐State.” First, it illustrates the rationale for the themed section by examining the ...relationship between language, migration and the nation‐state. It argues that accounts of linguistic justice that fail to incorporate, discuss and understand the language interests of migrants, and the potential tensions that may emerge between migrants' linguistic rights and duties, and between their linguistic rights and those of autochthonous groups, are likely to become obsolete in an increasingly mobile world. Second, it provides an overview of the articles in the themed section. And, finally, it highlights four specific areas of inquiry that should deserve greater attention in future scholarship.
Geographically Spain consists of a complex mosaic of cultural identities and regional aspirations for varying degrees of autonomy and independence. Following the end of violent conflict in the Basque ...country, Catalonia has emerged as the most vocal region pursuing independence from the central Spanish state. Within the Catalan separatist movement, cultural heritage sites and objects have been appropriated to play an intrinsic role in supporting political aims, with a variety of cultural institutions and state-sponsored monumentality playing an active part in the formation and dissemination of particular identity-based narratives. These ae centred around the themes of a separate and culturally distinct Catalan nation which has been subject to extended periods of oppression by the varying manifestations of the central Spanish State. Recent developments have seen museums and other historic sites and places being appropriated and redesigned to play a more consciously active, overt and supportive role in the independence movement.
This paper investigates the relationship between citizenship and belonging through empirical analysis of citizens' narratives. Specifically, through analysis of interview narratives produced with ...twenty-six white British citizens, the paper explores whether/how citizenship is recognised as a basis for national membership by those for whom citizenship and national belonging are largely taken for granted. In doing so, the paper sheds new light on the meaning and significance of citizenship within informal economies of national belonging and draws critical attention to the role of discursive recognition in sustaining hierarchies of belonging. The paper finds that formal status has limited significance as a practical marker of belonging and that, even where citizenship is constructed as significant, its significance is often undermined. It concludes that citizenship on its own is insufficient to guarantee substantive national belonging in the sense of being recognised and included as belonging to a national community and does not necessarily legitimise more ambiguous claims to national belonging.
This article engages critically with the idea of state-centred nationhood, including its promises and limitations, as a foundation for state strategies of forging unity in (migration-related) ...diversity within nations. As states across Europe grapple with the management of migration-related diversity, in contexts of increasing polarization of public debate on nationhood, which conceptions of nationhood do they draw on? We build on data from Norway, including policy documents and parliamentary debates, and draw on ten interviews with eleven bureaucrats in senior positions. Our interviewees were tasked with different aspects of the state’s nation building work, such as immigration control, national minorities (including Sami populations), religious and life-stance communities, and the 200-year anniversary of the Constitution. When asking which conceptions of nationhood bureaucrats draw on, we acknowledge that someone is doing the state’s nation building work. We find that the bureaucrats draw on a range of conceptions of nationhood, where ethnic and civic, more open and more closed dimensions, are mobilized. However, we did not find a cohesive conception of a state-centred nationhood being promulgated. Instead, our interviewees expressed uncertainty about how and to what extent nationhood could or should be mobilized to forge unity among Norwegian citizens. We argue that future research should move beyond dichotomies such as ethnic/civic or elite/everyday nationhood to theorize the composite articulations of nationhood which emerge empirically. Who bureaucrats effectively see as the imagined community, we argue, remains central to understanding states nation-building efforts.
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