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2.7.1 Theories of national identity.
A definition of national identity provided by Giroux and contextualised within what he refers
to as a mythic national identity subsumed within “…the politics of remembering and
forgetting” (1998, pp. 181), is encapsulated in the following:
…national identity…is a social construction that is built upon a series of inclusions
and exclusions regarding history, citizenship and national belonging. As the social
historian Benedict Anderson has pointed out, the nation is an ‘imagined political
community’ that can only be understood within the intersecting dynamics of history,
language, ideology and power. In other words, nationalism and national identity are
neither necessarily reactionary nor necessarily progressive politically; thus, they give
rise to communities which, as Anderson points out, are ‘to be distinguished, not by
their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined. (1998, pp. 181-
182)
Furthermore, Giroux writes of the fluidity of national identity, that it “…is always a shifting,
unsettled complex of historical struggles and experiences that are cross-fertilised, produced
and translated through a variety of cultures” (1998, p. 188). How these shifts play out in
school curriculum documents, through the two exemplar topics, will be identified by
analyzing texts across three distinct historical eras.
‘National identity’ as a concept is complex and potentially covers the range of political and
philosophical perspectives. The complexity of the issue is one raised by Whitty and Power
(2002); Billig (1995); Wodak, de Cillia, Reisigl, and Liebhart (1999); and Giroux (1998). In
asserting that issues of national identity and nationalism is still relevant in a world that is
increasingly transnational and globalised (an issue also raised by Curthoys, 2002, 2003
further in this section), Giroux writes,
What I am resisting is the claim that nationalism can be associated only with ethnic
conflict, that nationalism is witnessing its death knell, or that the relationship
between nationalism and national identity can be framed only within a transnational
discourse…as important as the discourse of globalization might be, it cannot be used
to overlook how national identity reasserts itself within new discourses and sites of
learning…rather than dismissing the politics of identity as another essentialist
discourse, progressives need to address how the politics of difference and identity are
being constructed around new right-wing discourses and policies. (1998, p. 179)
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