Nationalism and Popular Culture

Tim Nieguth, Tim Nieguth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000033250
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

How do nations come to shape our collective imagination so profoundly? This book argues that the power of national identity and national belonging stems, in part, from the ways in which nationalism is embedded in popular culture.

Comprised of chapters covering a wide range of cases from both the Global North and Global South (including Argentina, Australia, Canada, Europe, Israel, Pakistan, and the United States), the text unpacks the connections between nationalism and film, television, music, and other facets of everyday culture. In doing so, it demonstrates that popular culture can help us understand why and how nationhood has become so deeply entrenched in modern society.

This book will be of interest to scholars of political science, nationalism, sociology, history, media studies, and cultural studies.

1
Popular culture and quotidian nationalism

Tim Nieguth

In most modern societies, the idea that everyone belongs to a nation has become so deeply entrenched as to be taken for granted. In many ways, this is a profoundly puzzling state of affairs: as Benedict Anderson (1991) points out, members of a nation do not (and cannot) know every fellow member; they nonetheless assume that they have something meaningful in common that allows them to think of each other as members of the same community. Similar to many other social categories that play a central role in the formation of individual and collective identity, then, nations are exceedingly abstract concepts. To imbue the nation with the aura of a natural “given” accordingly requires substantial, repeated, and ongoing effort on the part of groups and individuals.

The fact that nations require constant maintenance raises a number of crucial questions. Most importantly, why should nationalism resonate with individuals and social groups? Why should nations come to be regarded as natural building blocks of politics and society? Why do individuals buy into the idea of the nation? Why, for instance, should a resident of Buffalo feel more closely connected to someone from rural Alabama than to someone from Toronto? Why should someone born and raised in São Paulo think that they belong to the same community as someone from Manaus? Why would a German-speaking Catholic from rural Uri see a French-speaking, Protestant urbanite from Geneva as a fellow member of his or her nation?

The chapters collected in this volume suggest that part of the answer has to do with the ways in which nationalism is embedded in popular culture. Partly by virtue of its ubiquity, popular culture exercises a significant influence over the way individuals perceive themselves, their society, and the world at large. Sometimes, it does so in ways that are overt, direct, and quite deliberate; more often, its effects are subtle, indirect, and unintentional, but nonetheless powerful. While representations of national communities, boundaries, or values in popular culture may appear insignificant when considered as separate instances, their cumulative effect is anything but. Thus, it matters that the original Star Trek series closely reflected American values and political sensibilities; that superheroes such as Captain Canuck play on and into the construction of national identity; and that sporting events such as the Olympics offer an important venue for the dissemination of nationalism (Booker, 2008; Dittmer, 2012; Hargreaves, 2000).

Unpacking the connections between nationalism and everyday culture can therefore help us understand why national identities have become so deeply entrenched in modern society. However, with a few notable exceptions, the literature on nationalism has paid relatively little attention to popular culture. The chapters collected in the present volume seek to fill some of this gap. By way of contextualizing their arguments, the remainder of this chapter will discuss the place of culture in nationalism studies, followed by a discussion of the “quotidian turn” in the field. This turn holds considerable promise for the study of the relationship between nationalism and culture, and popular culture in particular. The introduction will conclude by discussing some of the ways in which popular culture produces, entrenches, or contests ideas of nationhood and national belonging.

Culture, nations, nationalism

Cultural conceptions of the nation have been crucial to the rhetoric, practice, and ideology of nationalism at least since Herder famously linked a nation’s “genius” to its language and cultural heritage (2002). This is most readily apparent in ethnic nationalist descriptions of the nation as an ancestral community possessing a common heritage, language, and ethos. However, cultural conceptions of the nation also underpin routine appeals to shared “national” values, beliefs, and characteristics in so-called civic nations. Regardless of the type of nationalism that dominates in a given society, the idea of a national culture has played an important role in fostering a sense of national identity, community, and belonging (Bouchard, 2013; Henderson & McEwen, 2005; Jusdanis, 1991). As the history of the last two centuries has repeatedly shown, the belief that one’s nation is a distinct, clearly bounded, and ancient cultural group can consequently serve as a powerful motivator for collective action.

The centrality of culture to nationalist practice has influenced the study of nations and nationalism as well. Cultural conceptions of the nation have been widely accepted in the scholarly literature on nationalism, both within the field of nationalism studies and beyond. To mention but a few examples, Anthony D. Smith, one of the leading authorities on nationalism, defines the nation as “a named human population sharing an historic territory, common myths and historical memories, a mass, public culture, a common economy and common legal rights and duties for all members” (1991, p. 14). To philosopher Will Kymlicka, a nation is “a historical community, more or less institutionally complete, occupying a given territory or homeland, sharing a distinct language and culture” (1995, p. 11). Similarly, Christopher Wellman, one of the leading philosophers of secession, defines the nation as “a cultural group of people who identify with one another and either have or seek some degree of political self-determination” (2003, p. 267).

Cultural definitions of the nation need to be treated with some analytical caution. To begin with, they run the risk of treating cultures as givens, as clearly bounded, and as relatively stable. In fact, cultures are none of these things. Cultural definitions of nationhood also risk submerging the heterogeneity of values, customs, habits, and traditions that characterizes most national communities (putative or otherwise). For example, there are significant differences between the history, dialects, political cultures, or culinary traditions of Piedmont, Emilia-Romagna, and Calabria (see, for example, Capatti & Montanari, 2003; Maiden & Parry, 1997; Putnam, 1993). Yet, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, all of these regions are typically considered part of an overarching Italian nation. Similar observations apply to many, if not most, other national communities.

At the same time, cultural conceptions of the nation do have one significant analytical advantage, which is that they reflect – without necessarily accepting – nationalist rhetoric, ideology, and practice. Students of nationalism have deployed cultural ideas of nationhood in a variety of ways, since there is no disciplinary consensus on the precise nature of the relationship between culture and nationalism, nor on the nature of culture itself. Anderson’s influential study of nations as “imagined communities,” for example, examines the intersection of religious, linguistic, and socio-economic transformations in order to explain the rise of nationalism. More specifically, the analysis focuses on the emergence of print capitalism, the erosion of Latin as a sacred language linking literate elites across much of the European continent, and simultaneous changes in societal perceptions of time. According to Anderson, these interlocking developments undercut older forms of community, creating the necessary conditions for the emergence of new, national communities (Anderson, 1991).

Gellner’s approach similarly places the genesis of nationalism in the context of broad social transformations – specifically, industrialization. In Gellner’s view, industrial societies require cultural homogeneity. In consequence, they inevitably prompt concerted efforts on the part of social elites to promote common, “national” cultures. Typically, and contrary to the claims of nationalists, these “national” cultures are not simply a continuation of local folk cultures. In Gellner’s words,

nationalism is, essentially, the general imposition of a high culture on society, where previously low cultures had taken up the lives of the majority, and in some cases of the totality, of the population. It means that generalized diffusion of a school-mediated, academy-supervised idiom, codified for the requirements of reasonably precise bureaucratic and technological communication. It is the establishment of an anonymous, impersonal society, with mutually substitutable atomized individuals, held together above all by a shared culture of this kind

(1983, p. 57)

Gellner’s analysis thus focuses on the particular kind of culture associated with industrialization (a literate, highly specialized, and universal public culture), as well as the institutional underpinnings that facilitate its production, dissemination, and consumption.

Other students of nationalism have focused on culture in the sense of ethnicity, language, or religion. For example, the ethno-symbolic approach associated with the work of Anthony Smith, John Armstrong, and John Hutchison situates the emergence of nationalism in the context of older ethnies or ethnic groups. According to this approach, nations are not fabricated out of whole cloth, nor are national cultures constructed in a vacuum. Rather, nations emerge in a complicated transformative process from existing ethnic groups. Ethno-symbolists consequently insist that attempts to understand what is truly new in nationalism – and what is not – require us to expand our temporal horizon beyond modernity and to emphasize the longue durée (Armstrong, 1982; Hutchinson, 2005; Smith, 2009).

According to ethno-symbolists, cultural traditions and repertories are central features of ethnies. As Hutchinson puts it:

Ethnicity is […] meaning-directed, revealed in assemblages of myths, which define for populations unique origins […], location […], a golden age […], degeneration […] and regeneration […]. Memories are important, especially as portrayed in commemorative rituals of epochal events and heroes that provide role models and lessons for the present. Symbols, when encoded in the urban architecture of capital cities, sacred religious texts or sites, legal codes, languages and political charters and constitutions, persist over long expanses of time and space and thereby communicate a sense of group meaning.

(2005, p. 15)

Smith (1991, 2009) likewise regards symbols, myths, and memories as defining elements of ethnic groups. In consequence, these cultural artefacts play a crucial role in the genesis of national communities, not least because they filter the kind of national narratives that might successfully be employed in generating a sense of nationhood.

Smith’s emphasis on macro-levels of analysis and the longue durée have led some critics to detect a “shadowy presence of Durkheim” in his work (Malešević, 2006, p. 112), an assessment Smith himself strenuously opposed (Smith, 2009). In contrast, other nationalism scholars have explicitly embraced Durkheim’s legacy, formulating a neo-Durkheimian perspective on the relationship between culture and nationalism. Partly inspired by the Strong Program in Cultural Sociology, these scholars have paid especially close attention to matters of ritual and ritualization in the production, dissemination, and consumption of the nation. “Drawing on Durkheimian distinctions between the sacred, profane and mundane, the general thrust of this work is to uncover how particular meanings and cultural forms are contested, replaced and established in the national ‘collective consciousness’” (Woods & Tsang, 2013, p. 10). Much of the research in this tradition has focused on official ceremonies and public engagements with exceptional events; it has paid less attention to the linkages between rituals and national identity in quotidian settings. In this respect, neo-Durkheimian approaches to nationalism mirror the Strong Program’s tendency to foreground the analysis of disruptive and exceptional events, rather than routines and rituals embedded in everyday life (West, 2015, p. 11).

Culture has figured prominently in the nationalism literature in yet another form: there is a substantial body of research on the “art” of nationalism, that is, the link between nationalism and literature, music, architecture, statuary, and the visual arts. For example, the relationship between national identity and the modern novel has been explored in considerable depth (Lewis, 2007; Parrinder, 2006; Trumpener, 1997). Similarly, scholars have paid a great deal of attention to the role of visual arts in producing, disseminating, or contesting particular versions of national identity (Dawn, 2006; Etlin, 1991; Morrison, 2003). Relatedly, there is a burgeoning literature on the role of museums and galleries in nation building (Aronsson & Elgenius, 2015; Knell, 2016; Ostow, 2008). Commenting on the connection between nationalism and arts more generally, Smith offers the following observation:

Just as nationalism has become a global movement and the nation the accepted norm of political sovereignty, so a national culture has become entrenched as the raison d’être of each and every national community, its differentia specifica and distinguishing mark. The arts played a crucial role in this process of global nationalization by providing images and symbols of the unity, history, homeland, and regeneration of the nation which were peculiar to each national community

(2013, pp. 179–80)

Taken as a whole, competing theories of nationalism have devoted considerable attention to ethnicity, language, religion, art, and patterns of social organization. However, they have paid much less attention to another key facet of culture: popular culture. By way of illustration, the index to one of the standard overviews of theories of nationalism, Anthony Smith’s Nationalism and Modernism (1998), contains several entries on various aspects of culture, such as art, civic and ethnic nationalisms, high and low culture, custom, folk culture, ideology, language, literature, memory, minorities, multiculturalism, myths, print, religion, ritual, symbols, traditions, and Z...