National identity, popular culture and everyday life (2024)

Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy

"In his seminal study of Banal Nationalism (1995), Michael Billig posed an important question; why is it that people in Western nations such as Britain and the USA don’t forget their national identity outside of special commemorations when national flags are waved en masse. He suggested that such events are “not sufficient to sustain a continuingly remembered national identity” (ibid: 45) and pointed instead to the daily reproduction of nations through countless routine symbols and texts. This continues to be a powerful and highly influential thesis and Billig’s arguments have been utilised in a range of studies of both national (cf Reicher & Hopkins, 2001, Edensor, 2002) and other social identities (Cram, 2001, Aksoy & Robins, 2002, Szersknski & Urry, 2002, Beck, 2004, Gorringe, 2006). However, in largely dismissing national events as “conventional carnivals of surplus emotion” (1995: 45), Billig overlooks the important, and somewhat under-theorised, link between banal and, what I have previously labelled as, ecstatic forms of nationalism (Skey, 2006). In this chapter, I want to focus on this relationship as a means of examining the significance of, and response to, the upsurge in national, mass flag waving events in England over the past decade. It is my contention that we can use the wider debates surrounding these events as a form of “strategic lens” (Sassen, 2000: 143) with which to study the articulation of national identities at a time of significant social and political change within Britain as a whole . "

1995, 1995

Third International Cross-Cultural Communication Conference (“Cultural Identity and Diversity as Assets to Global Understanding”), 2019

There is a painting by the Renaissance master Pieter Bruegel (who became known as “The Old Man”) whose original name is “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus”, which Homi Bhabha (Rato, 2015) observes that should make us think. In the picture a small detail shows us Icarus, son of Daedalus, fallen from the sky to drown solitarily in the sea, after he tried to fly too high and burned the wings for having been near the sun, and no one noticing his drama. The picture is supposed to be from the dreadful perspective of Daedalus, watching impotently from above the misfortune of his own son. This leads to a question by Bhabha: “After all, who is the moral witness of human suffering, today?” According to the scholar, this is one of the questions that Culture can make the world. A self-reflexive question, as the role of witness is one of the places of Culture. Another question is to think if Culture is not the peripheral and secondary detail that makes us reconsider the whole system, just like the legs of Icarus, when we finally look at them, at Pieter Bruegel’s picture. The concept of “Culture” has several meanings, continuing to be problematized and reformulated constantly, making the word complex and impossible to be fixed in an unique way. The same happens with ‘identity’, that is a concept that must be declined in the plural. In the current paradigm crisis, the identity plan integrates a broader process of change that has shaken the frames of reference that previously seemed to give individuals some stability. Stuart Hall notes that identity theories have shattered, and identities are in the process of disintegration as a result of cultural hom*ogenization and ‘postmodern-global’ logic stemming from the globalization process. Thus, to talk about the existence of an eventual centrality of culture, it is necessary to leave behind the idea of absolute truth (Hall, 1997). Identity and difference are thus faces of the same coin (Martins, 2007), and memory must be preserved in a balanced way, in order to avoid amnesia and indifference from becoming dangerous ingredients of any barbarism, and so that resentment does not occupy the place of humanity. As Claude Dubar (2011) points out, the crisis is not only due to the passage from one economic cycle to another, but it has to do with the new ways of living together in the world, which highlight preconceived ideas about another, about himself and about the world itself. It is the acceptance of the ‘other’ which, moreover, there is, to determine the beginning of an ethical dimension, as stated Umberto Eco (1998). Or it shall be understood by an ‘other’ ubiquitous, in the design of Dominique Wolton (2003), who is no longer abstract or distant, but does not mean that it is more familiar or understandable. It is therefore an ‘other’ that will be understood as a sociological reality, integrating all elements resulting from cultural diversity, but also those that establish links, at the societies scale. With this communication, we propose a reflection on the relationship between identity and culture, observing how cultural identities are located in a globalized world.

Nations and Nationalism, 2016

The European Proceedings of Social and Behavioural Sciences, 2019

British Journal of Social …, 2012

The purpose of this contribution is to analyze the impact that the ongoing globalization process has on the cultural identities of peoples. However, to be able to carry out this analysis it is first necessary to locate the process of globalization within the realm of understanding culture, something which is usually not done. The commonly used definition of globalization comes from the economic realm, from the opening up to free trade and from the growing interdependence of world markets at their different levels. To this definition is usually added the political and institutional dimension, the responsibility of the organisms of the United Nations, multilateral pacts, and regional agreements. In both dimensions there exist, certainly, involved cultural aspects: the so-called ‘cultural industry’ and ‘show business’ on the one hand, and cultural institutions protected by law, such as schools, universities and the media, on the other. However, with an approach of this type we only tou...

Third Text, 2006

Discourse & Society, 1999

National Identities, Vol. 16 (1), 2014

Academicus International Scientific Journal, 2010

Conference website: http://kaa.ff.upjs.skScholarly debates increasingly revolve around the influence of global economic processes on cultural production. As Jeffrey Nealon (2012) argues, contemporary concerns with the ‘structuring mutations in the relations among cultural production and economic production’ have gained prominence as a reaction to intensified neoliberalism and globalization. Nealon has noted how capitalism has lately increased its control over social and cultural mechanisms—an increase he relates to the ‘intensification of the existing biopolitical sources’. The relationships between globalization, cultural production and identity construction are further complicated by the myriad processes that have fundamentally reconfigured the economic, political, social and cultural spheres. Representing both the ‘tendency towards hom*ogeneity, synchronization, integration, unity and universalism’ and the ‘propensity for localization, heterogeneity, differentiation, diversity and particularism’ (Bornman, 2003), globalization seems to give rise to structural tension in postmillennial societies.This tension is particularly apparent in the interactions between globalization and identity discourses. Since the former has affected all traditional processes of identity construction, there are many in postmillennial societies that are experiencing identity struggles, in a complex process that may include self-construction (Bauman, 2001; Bornman, 2003), the creolization of identities (Bourriaud, 2009), the rise of hyperindividualism (Lipovetsky, 2005) and pseudoautism (Kirby, 2009), the collapse of the sense of community (Bauman, 2001) and the rise of surrogate communities—interest groups, professional groups, virtual groups (Bornman, 2003); the appearance of new identities—not only a cosmopolitan identity marked by a sense of disembeddedness but also a global identity that implies ‘global self-reflection’ and ‘identification with the total of humankind’ (Bornman, 2003).On the other hand, the pressure of globalization has also revitalized ethnic, regional, and communal identities and encouraged the emergence of ‘glocalization’ (Robertson, 1995), which includes the ‘innovative hybrid practices that local cultures have invented to assert their identity’ (Tartaglia and Rossi, 2015). This has also provoked an increase in regionalism rooted in local identity; i.e. an identity which ‘harbours emotional and symbolic meanings that people ascribe to a sense of self and the attachment to place’ (Tartaglia and Rossi, 2015). The complex tension emanating from opposing forces like globalization and glocalization, global and local identities, the creolization of culture and the preservation of ethnic and regional cultural specifics lies at the centre of current phenomena affecting languages and cultures around the world—becoming especially visible in the sphere of literature and the media.Since mass production, consumption and communication have all produced a world in which it is increasingly difficult to identify a cultural centre, the previously dominant postmodernist and postcolonial theories no longer have the capacity to effectively address the changing character of the globalized world, as several scholars have noted (O’Brien and Szeman, 2001; Lipovetsky, 2005; Bourriaud, 2009; Kirby, 2009; Vermeulen and van den Akker, 2010; Nealon, 2012). An effective examination of the influence of globalization on literary, cultural and media production and its effects on contemporary identity struggles calls for the employment of novel research strategies.In light of the above, this conference will foster the analysis of contemporary cultural productions. It will do so by providing an interdisciplinary forum for the discussion of the intersections between theoretical approaches to globalization, identity and those recent formulations attempting to define a new cultural paradigm.The conference will prioritize (but will not be necessarily limited to) the following thematic strands:-The influence of globalization and the evidence of identity struggles across languages and cultures-Local vs global spaces in contemporary literature and media-The role of the so-called ‘transnational novel of globalization’ in contemporary literature-A new cultural paradigm? Theoretical approaches and case studies-Gender challenges in postmillennial societies-Sustainability and ecocriticism: new perspectives from the humanities and social sciences-The emergence of new fields of sociocultural inquiry: city and urban studies, cultural mapping, food studies, neuro-literary studies…The Organizing and Scientific Committee will also be happy to consider individual paper or whole panel proposals addressing the conference’s main topic from perspectives other than those specified in the above-mentioned thematic strands.

Paper on performativity on the scale of society and nation.

This arresting and original analysis shows how the British as a people are constantly defined and redefined through their interactions with several 'frontiers of identity', namely Celts, expatriates, Americans, Europeans, citizens of the Commonwealth and more crucially with aliens.