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The significance of this construction is that Livingstone was able to represent the whole of the Scottish nation. As Neil Davidson points out, Scotland has a long history of internal division. To some degree, the Highlands and Lowlands can be considered distinct societies even after the Union of Parliaments in 1707. Lowland Scotland tended to think of the Highlands as a place of disorder and lawlessness, an
Although composed before 9/11, Nathaniel Hawthorne‘s My Kinsman, Major Molineux and Thomas Ligotti‘s The Shadow at the Bottom of the World are both prescient in their critique of the impulse of American communities following 9/11 to monumentalise and concretise the nation-state and in particular the remains at Ground Zero. In this essay I discuss Ground Zero as a suggestive trope for the illusiveness of the nation as an imagined community. These complementary Gothic short stories operate as allegory and offer a way of reading how patriotic communities cohered around what remained at Ground Zero and (re)produced it as a site of patriotic performance. A new Gothic trait in our age of terror(ism) is the anxiety over the absence of a stable centre that anchors national continuity. This article places these short stories in conversation with Benedict Anderson,,Étienne Balibar and other theorists who engage critiques of nation-building in order to draw out what is Gothic about the nation-state and to further substantiate how 9/11 revealed the nation-state as a principally Gothic phenomenon.
The powerful but elusive concept of the nation is investigated here. It is distinguished from the ‘state’ and the relationship between them is examined. Other elements which make the nation are considered, such as religion, language, government, cultural and historical ties, and finally the subjective but still important ‘sense of nationhood’. There is also an analysis of
4147 Inglis–Are the Irish different_BB_Layout 1 29/07/2014 09:27 Page 177 17 Irish language, Irish nation Iarfhlaith Watson Nearly half the country speaks Irish. Erroneous as this statement may appear, results from the 2011 Census indicate that 42 per cent of the population of the Republic of Ireland can speak Irish.1 The figure has been this high since the 1990s and had doubled since the 1970s.2 Most people in Ireland would suspect the accuracy of this figure and would believe that few people can speak Irish. Why then do so many people claim to be able to
This book examines the debates and processes that have shaped the modernisation of Ireland since the beginning of the twentieth century. There are compelling justifications for methodological nationalism using research and analysis focused on the jurisdiction of a nation-state. The nation-state remains a necessary unit of analysis not least because it is a unit of taxation and representation, a legal and political jurisdiction, a site of bounded loyalties and of identity politics. The book argues that nationalism in twenty-first-century Ireland is even more powerful and socially embedded than it was in de Valera's Ireland. It considers what kind of Ireland Pearse wanted to bring about. Pearse proposed a model that was very different from the already dominant Catholic model that did much to incubate modern Ireland. Beyond this, Catholicism offered a distinct response to modernity aimed at competing with the two main secular ideologies: liberalism and socialism. Women have been marginalised in most of the debates that shaped Ireland even where they were directly affected by them. One of the most picked-over episodes in twentieth-century Irish history has been the conflict surrounding the Mother and Child Scheme. The book examines this conflict as a starting point of an analysis of the place of women in post-independence Ireland. It further addresses the rise and fall of the Celtic Tiger, the name given to a period of rapid economic growth that was likened to the performance of East Asian 'tiger' economies.
1 Theorising the nation Few political terms loom as large as ‘the state’. In critical analysis, the state is everywhere identified as the agent of any number of modern sins. The multiple effects of the state’s existence provoke, in turn, agonised laments about modern power, its immanence, and its uniquely perpetual violence. It is, however, telling that the actual form in which the state has been concretised within modernity is often summarily neglected. This disregard has in fact become intellectual habit, as if the modern state is merely an abstraction that
3 Conservative nation revisited The constitution and the nation have been central ideas in Conservative politics. Yet, as the previous two chapters have argued, these ideas are unlikely to have remained unmodified. In what ways have these things, and academic interpretation of them, altered? In the years just after the end of the Second World War, George Kitson Clark (1950: 40) observed that the constitution had come to mean something very different for his generation from its meaning for previous generations. Today ‘the constitution which our forefathers so
2 Re-imagining the nation Some years before the ‘Warwick debate’, the journal Millennium held a symposium entitled ‘re-imagining the nation’.1 In his introduction to the volume, Adam Lerner suggested that ‘[t]he nation exists as much in people’s minds as it does in the world’.2 By this, he seemed to be suggesting that the nation could be viewed as real and constructed, primordial and modern. The contributors to this collection agreed that the ‘great divide’ offered unsatisfactory ways of understanding the formation of national identity and shared a desire to ‘re
This chapter explores the contention that Germany and Vietnam were both divided states and divided nations before their respective (re)unification in 1990 and 1976. International recognition of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) and the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) varied along the ideological lines of the Cold War, but the official
M1634 - HAYWARD TEXT.qxp:ANDY Q7 27/1/09 13:23 Page 116 6 Identity, nation and community This chapter examines the conceptualisation of identity in Irish official discourse in relation to the definition of the Irish ‘nation’ and the European ‘community’. As discussed in the first part of this book, ‘nation’ and ‘community’ constitute the broad conceptual frameworks for identity in nation-statehood and European Union respectively. These frameworks are legitimated and strengthened through the use of narratives, including story-lines regarding significant