Nationalism

The chapter defines key terms before going on to examine various manifestations of nationalism, using Benedict Anderson’s (Imagined communities, 2nd edn. Verso, London, 1991) conception of “imagined communities” as a guiding thread. The first section, entitled National Space and Time, looks at how “using ‘nations’ as the building blocks of history” (Streets. Empire and the nation: institutional practice, pedagogy, and nation in the classroom. In: Burton, A. (ed) After the imperial turn. Duke University Press, Durham, 2003, 58) shapes perceptions of the past, present, and future that tend to privilege narratives of national cultural homogeneity over those of movement, intermixing, and exchange. The second section, Imagining the Community, discusses how local and national definitions of community can be mutually reinforcing and help to entrench ethnonational categories. The third section, Nation and Museum, goes on to look at how nations are represented, but also subverted, through the medium of museums, whereas the final section examines the mutually constitutive concepts of Nation and Migration in light of ongoing migration to Europe. The chapter concludes that a critical approach to nationalism studies is necessary in order to question and challenge an ideology so pervasive – in the form of patriotism, for example – that its underlying assumptions tend to be taken for granted