A Usable Past: History and the Politics of National Identity in Late Victorian England

For the past two decades, issues of English national identity have provided a fertile field for historical investigation. In the late Victorian era, the development of professional standards of scholarship within the academy gave a new dimension to historical debates. The bitter quarrels about appropriate research techniques from the 1860s to the 1890s, among James Anthony Froude, Edward Freeman and John Horace Round, acted as a proxy for the vision of national identity that each historian espoused. After 1870, the development of a national narrative focused on constitutional history as its primary vehicle. The battle over historical reconstruction represented a surrogate for divergent views about political values and national identity. What sometimes seemed frivolous scholarly skirmishes, therefore, had a much greater political importance. As a result, the long feud had greater importance than the eccentric personalities of the participants appeared to indicate. For Froude, the Tudor age of discovery and religious reformation represented the best of English character. For Freeman, a strong Gladstonian Liberal, consensus and continuity over many centuries defined English history best. John Horace Round, a Conservative stalwart, thought that Freeman had slanted his historical conclusions to validate his Liberal politics and reinterpreted the Norman conquest to express his own political beliefs. Thus the quibbles about shield walls and other issues provided a terrain for the real cause of antagonism: different views of national identity that history furnished. Each historian constructed a usable past in order to justify contemporary discussions of national identity.     

The Politics of Reconstructing National Identity: A Corporatist Approach

In both liberal democracies like Australia and Canada and autocracies like Singapore, the state has stepped in to try to manage ethnic claims that had hitherto been marginalised or suppressed. Once the concept of corporatism is rescued from its recent economic-focused excursion, it provides a framework within which to examine new state strategies for managing ethnicity, and the resultant politics of national identity. The states have sought to license or create ethnic institutions as channels for ethnic interest articulation, for ethnic elite cooptation, and for the funding and political control of ethnic assertions. The corporatist strategies for ethnic management imply also attempts by the states to unify the disaggregated polyethnic societies by seeking new myths of organic national unity. The attempts to manage ethnic politics within these new institutional and ideological parameters generate tensions which exacerbate rather than ameliorate the decline in state authority.     

Unmasking Britannia: The Rise and Fall of British National Identity

Abstract. British national identity is a supranational identity deriving from an imperial past. Warfare created Britain in the eighteenth century, and at first glance mass war in the twentieth century seemed to reinforce it. War, however, was a twoedged sword. On the one hand, it dominated the lives of Britons between 1900 and 1945, yet war and its social-political demands weakened the fabric of the British state which was designed to be a nation-state, rather a state-nation. The more it demanded loyalty to its national icons, the more it became clear that these were not ‘national’ at ail. In many ways war forged state and nation but in a way that has led to its possible break-up.     

History,Culture, and Politics: On Historical Formation and Identity Dilemmas of “China”

This lecture is concerned with some historical issues of “China,” “territory,” “culture” and “identity” that are placed against the background of politics, culture and scholarship in contemporary China. I want to draw attention to the question of how historians understand and interpret “China.” It addresses the following questions. First, where did the idea of “China” come from? and how did it become a topic of scholarly research? What kind of dilemmas does “China” confront in its current condition and historical interpretation? Second, how do various new historical theories and methods in international academic circles enrich our understanding of “China”? Third, how does China’s history and reality challenge the theories of “empire” and “nation-state”? Fourth, is it possible to write “East Asian history”? Does “national history” prove still effective in describing China or East Asia?     

The Politics of the Past: Constructing a National Identity through Heritage Conservation

Modern nation‐states use images of a chosen past to construct a national identity. In Vilnius, the remains of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania are used to construct an identity, and the aim of this exercise is to improve the economic performance of the city. Academics and professionals, alarmed of the loss of authentic values, and the living society, alarmed at the deteriorating container quality of the city, caused by this Politics of the Past, are coming forward to prevent this disinheritance. New agencies created to materialise the rejuvenation of historic urban space, together with unprecedented changes in values, and social disharmony have turned the Politics of the Past in Vilnius into an instructive heritage discourse, which is further diversified by the involvement of local experts who are now taking charge of heritage protection.     

Gender and Organisational Restructuring in the National Health Service: Performance, Identity and Politics

Over the past decade, debates within economic geography and organizational sociology have shown that gender is embedded within economic discourses, organisational relations and processes of restructuring. The argument has been widely illustrated through reference to "identity", with examples offered of the ways in which organizations and organisational change draw on specific performances of masculine and feminine identities. However, whilst we now know a great deal about organisational expectations of gendered performance at work, we actually know little of how these required performances impact individual constructions of identity. This paper aims to explore this gap between organisational discourses of gender, on the one hand, and the construction of individual identities, on the other. The paper uses narrative analysis of interviews with five nurses working in two hospitals in the British National Health Service (NHS) to trace the place and articulations of organisation, profession and gender in the construction and presentation of self. The paper reveals complex processes of negotiation and resistance and both stable and shifting identifications as individuals actively construct gendered identities inter alia through their interpretations of organisational and professional change. This emphasis on agency, resistance and personal politics has important implications for thinking about the nature and form of workplace politics and may offer a missing piece of the puzzle in recent bids to build new forms of labour organisation.     

Fashion,the Politics of Style and National Identity in Pre–Fascist and Fascist Italy

The essay offers an analysis of fashion and its bearing on the construction of national identity and politics of style during fascism in Italy. No recent work on fascism has analysed the role of fashion in the complex and contradictory phases of the cultural politics of Mussolini’s regime. The essay aims to illustrate the two sides of fashion and their relevance to the period in question. It shows, on the one hand, how the regime used fashion to discipline the social body, especially women’s, and to create a national style recognisable as such; and, on the other, how fashion is also an individual act through which was expressed the creativity both of the people working in the fashion industry and of ordinary people who used fashion and style to demonstrate their non–conformity with the diktats of the regime. Pointing out that it was as a result of the debate on nationalism of the pre–fascist liberal period that premises for fascist policy were set, the essay argues that the history of fascist fashion policy is one of continuities rather than ruptures.