(‘sincerity’), the limitative criterion sets up a mobile, subjective norm that cannot be defined objectively. Instead, the manifest process of interpretation involved turns the normative criterion into an interplay of differential normalities as it effects a process of repetitive changes and adaptation. Based on specific politics of reading and interpretation, the various approaches to nationhood invoked
often made to appear itinerant, fleeting, new or unexpected as Canadian nationhood, belonging, geography and citizenship is coded as European and white (McKittrick, 2002 ). This coding may be responsible for pushing black people towards an elsewhere, but it does not tell the whole story. Co-existing with the discourses emphasising Canada as a white, French and British nation (Indigenous peoples are also
significant role in either defining Croatian national identity or as a vehicle for its preservation.139 He continued, ‘the ideologists of Croat nationhood, almost to the last practicing Catholics, resisted the equation of Catholicism and Croatdom’.140 Banac argued that the idea of the Croatian political nation led to considerable confusion. For example, in the previous chapter we noted that Ante Starïeviç argued that everybody who resided within the boundaries he drew for Croatia were Croats. Banac argues that this did not mean that Starïeviç denied the multinational
. 2 P. Maestri, Annuario economico e politico dell’Italia per l’anno 1852 (Turin 1852) and Id., Annuario economico-statistico dell’Italia per l’anno 1853 (Turin 1853). 3 Maestri, Annuario economico e statistico dell’Italia per l’anno 1853, v. 4 Cited in F. Sofia, Una scienza per l’amministrazione. Statistica ��������������������������������������� e pubblici apparati tra età rivoluzionaria e restaurazione (Rome 1988), p. 320. 5 M. Gioia, Filosofia della statistica (Milan 1826), iii. 6 Ibid., xi. 7 S. Patriarca, Numbers and Nationhood. Writing
distinctions are not merely superficial. On the contrary, as in the chapter on Ngugi, nationalism, whether as ideology or as political movement, configures and consolidates itself through a variety of deeply embedded gender-specific structures. The idea of nationhood bears a masculine identity although some national ideals may wear a feminine face. Such gender tags are clearly illustrated, for example, in the iconographies the nation cherishes. In the literature, rhetoric and pageantry of nations, as in nationalist politics and political structures, it is a male figure who is
contemporary experience and projection of British national identity and ideas of nationhood. These stories and characters are also of course endlessly recycled in the present period in other media as well as through the heritage industry. The monarchy, its history and its present manifestation, is clearly highly marketable, whether in terms of tourism, the trade in royal memorabilia or artefacts, or images of
. . . . McCabe suggests, however, that the ultimate source of abjection, and the ultimate monster, is the Irish nation itself’.33 The Dead School (1995), Breakfast on Pluto (1998) and Call Me the Breeze (2003) further extend this coruscating critique of toxic nationhood by anatomising the psychotic borderline identities produced by the interplay of multiple and competing ideologies, while Winterwood dramatises the lethal effects of repressed historical memory through the spectral persona of Redmond Hatch/Ned Strange/Dominic Tiernan. This mutating monster is at once abused
-nippled mother, a mother who gave plenty of herself and demanded loyalty of one, loyalty to an ideal, allegiance to an idea, the notion of a nationhood – no more, and no less. (Maps 96) Askar seeks fusion with the illiterate mother-as-body yet can do so only by objectifying it. In this predicament a central contradiction of postcolonial nationalist narrative is epitomised. Self-articulating narrative cannot deliver what it promises: a completely united and unifying history, an absolute identification with the national body. To conceptualise that fusion demands, in practice
for Modernity in Africa and Asia (New York: Free Press, 1963), pp. 109–11. 7 A. D. Smith, Nationalism and Modernism (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 147–50. 8 See J. Armstrong, Nations Before Nationalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982); J. Fishman, Language and Nationalism: Two Integrative Essays (Rowley MA: Newbury House, 1972); and A. Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 9 J. M. Hobson, ‘What’s at stake in bringing historical sociology back into international relations? Transcending
India, a discursive construction of national identity articulated the position of a community unevenly incorporated into an imperial economy. Economic ideas that offered a critique of prevailing socio-political conditions allowed anti-colonial activists to become the ‘authors of the political economy of nationhood’. 28 Some of the most effective authors of a national political economy in Ireland emerged from the co-operative movement. Irish co-operators differed from their counterparts in Britain in that they were more concerned with a culture of production over