Whiteness, multiculturalism and nationalist appropriation of Celtic culture: the case of the League of the South and the Lega Nord

The League of the South (USA) and Lega Nord (Italy), formed in 1994 and 1991 respectively, are nationalist organizations that have utilized claims to Celtic ethnicity to further their appeal. In this article we explore these claims, made in relation to the southern United States and northern Italy, and argue that they are used by these organizations to justify exclusionary politics. By claiming a privileged status for Celtic culture, heritage and genealogy, the League of the South and Lega Nord envision their putative nation-states as accommodating other ethnic groups in subordinate roles. We argue that claiming Celtic ethnicity is an implicit appeal to white privilege. In the proposed nation-states of the Confederate States of America and Padania, white authority would be sustained. Further, the way these groups use Celticness allows them to make links to specific historical and material geographies. Claiming Celtic origins enables northern Italians to distinguish themselves from southern Italians, and to make an associated historical-geographical connection between themselves and northern Europe, enabling disassociation from the Mediterranean. The League of the South claim to ‘Anglo-Celtic’ ethnicity enables their membership to distinguish themselves from other residents of the United States, be these non-white residents of the southern states or other white people within the USA. Finally, we suggest that some dominant political commitments to multiculturalism facilitate precisely such claims to Celtic origins, however tenuous, to be made in the name of recognizing and protecting cultural difference

\u27The Right to Enter Every Other State\u27 - The Supreme Court and African American Mobility in the United States

In 1857, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney stated in the DredScott case that if one African American was free to move unhindered throughout the UnitedStates, then all African Americans, enslaved or otherwise, would have ‘the right to enter everyother State’. Such a situation, he argued, was untenable. The Supreme Court thus suggestedthat if U.S. citizenship included a de facto right to mobility, then African Americans could notbe considered citizens. Although not formally written into the U.S. Constitution, numerousSupreme Court rulings since 1857 have underpinned the right to mobility in the United States.Yet the ability to be mobile in the United States has been fundamentally intertwined with theconstruction of racial identities. It was the white settlers that were free to move westward, themobile nomadic lifestyles of the peoples they encountered being understood as primitive andinferior. Native peoples subsequently became immobilized on reservations. Similarly, AfricanAmericans in the era of slavery were immobilized on plantations and movement away fromplantation space was illicit, codified as illegal, and required the hidden networks of the Under-ground Railroad. An African American moving through white American spaces faced oftendeadly consequences. African Americans should, in the parlance of the times, ‘know theirplace’ and not have the ambition, or the right, to move freely around the USA. To explore thesecontentions, I draw on four landmark U.S. Supreme Court decisions that elaborate on themobility, or curtailment thereof, of African Americans in the United States

Places of memories and memories of place: Scotlands and Scottishnesses in the 1990s

This dissertation investigates the relationship between memory and nation. Having previously lived in and studied Scotland, I selected this nation as a case study. Also, Scotland is the subject of much contemporary interest from geographers and other social scientists who understand Scotland as a stateless nation and raise questions about Scottish nationhood and national identity. The twentieth century has been dominated by claims and control over territory in the name of a nation, yet this socio-political spatial concept has proven simultaneously self-explanatory and theoretically problematic. Just what is a nation ? In this work, I move away from analysing political institutions, governmental bodies and the like to ask everyday people what they remember about Scotland. The analysis argues that memories form an important link between an individual and a place. People share common social memories of a place, yet they simultaneously construct and remember that place very differently in their autobiographical memories. Memory is a process that is simultaneously personal and societal and plays a central role in the construction of the relationship between self and nation. The research subjects I engaged with are divided by age--elementary school children and middle-aged adults--and by location, namely Edinburgh in Scotland and Central New York. The research design uses qualitative methods. Firstly, the children were asked to draw a picture about Scotland. I review these drawings and interpret their content and descriptions of this nation. Secondly, I conducted semi-structured interviews with the adult research subjects, asking them about their memories of Scotland and understandings of Scottishness. The dissertation concludes by arguing for a more rigorous assessment of memory as an analytical tool in geography and other social science, and that people\u27s memories construct a diverse range of understandings of Scotlands and Scottishnesses