Nations are stories and stories can be retold
Introduction: narrating the nation “Nations, like narratives, lose their origins in the myths of time and only fully realize their horizons in the mind’s eye. Such an image of the nation — or narration — might seem impossibly romantic and excessively metaphorical, but it is from those traditions of political thought and literary language that the nation emerges as a powerful historical idea in the west.”
What is a nation? - Ernest Renan “At the time of the French Revolution, it was commonly believed that the institutions proper to small, independent cities, such as Sparta and Rome, might be applied to our large nations, which number some thirty or forty million souls. Nowadays, a far graver mistake is made: race is confused with nation and a sovereignty analogous to that of really existing peoples is attributed to ethnographic or, rather linguistic groups. (…) Gaul, Spain and Italy, prior to their absorption by the Roman Empire, were collections of clans, which were often allied among themselves but had no central institutions and no dynasties. (…) I would even go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation, which is why progress in historical studies often constitutes a danger for the principle of nationality. Indeed, historical enquiry brings to light deeds of violence which took place at the origin of all political formations, even of those whose consequences have been altogether beneficial.”
The National Longing for Form - Timothy Brennan “We live in a world obsessed with national pride, and rampant with boundary wars, with nationalism on the banner of countless parties, no matter how conflicting their place or destination. (…) “If one inclusive sense can be given, it is Malinowski’s, where: myth acts as a charter for the present-day social order; it supplies a retrospective pattern of moral values, sociological order, and magical belief, the function of which is to strengthen tradition and endow it with a greater value and prestige by tracing it back to a higher, better, more supernatural reality of initial events. (…) the claims of fiction on national thought, saying simply that ‘The nation … is an abstraction, an allegory, a myth that does not correspond to a reality that can be scientifically defined.‘17 Race, geography, tradition, language, size, or some combination of these seem finally insufficient for determining national essence, and yet people die for nations, fight wars for them, and write fictions on their behalf. (…) Read in isolation, the novel was nevertheless a mass ceremony; one could read alone with the conviction that millions of others were doing the same, at the same time. (…) The nation-state is not only the by-product of the conditions created by European exploration; it was, more or less from the start, forged in acts of separation from the European centers of Madrid and London. (…) European nationalism itself was motivated by what Europe was doing in its farflung dominions.” (…) The ‘national idea’, in other words, flourished in the soil of foreign conquest. (…) According to Kohn, modern nationalism took three concepts from Old Testament mythology: ‘the idea of a chosen people, the emphasis on a common stock of memory of the past and of hopes for the future, and finally national messianism’.48 If the concept of superiority (‘chosen people’) characterizes the outlook of the European adventurer, it is the Hebraic underdog, the sense of being an outcast people, that characterizes the other
DissemiNation