The nationalisation of the domestic sphere

Abstract

Banal forms of nationalism permeate our everyday life. However, it is not very clear when all kinds of banal objects and practices became nationalised. In this article, I focus on the domestic sphere by analysing how around 1900 a small group of activists began to propagate the nationalisation of domestic architecture, decorative arts and even gardening. Domestic practices such as cooking, cleaning and consuming were nationalised at about the same time, at least in Western Europe. Although in the beginning the nationalisation of the domestic sphere was perceived as something new, within a few decades the existence of national cuisines and architectural styles was taken for granted. As a consequence, it becomes clear that the nationalisation of the domestic sphere constituted a new and very successful phase in the nation‐building process, which now also began to affect quotidian practices and objects in the private realm.

Food and locality

“…A national reaction against French gastronomy set in during the late 19th century in many European countries from Germany to Spain. French infl uence was accused of preventing the deep spirit of national cookery from reviving (Storm 2016 ). Hence the appearance of national recipe books, such as Emilia Pardo Baz á n's La cocina espa ñ ola moderna , stemming from a careful ethnographic survey hymning the national spirit and exploring its regional gastronomic traditions (Pardo Baz á n 1913 ; Paz Moreno 2006 ).…”

National identity in historical video games: An analysis of how Civilization V represents the past

“…Studies of nationalism in the media have been quite commonplace ever since Billig's Banal Nationalism was published in 1995. Since then, scholars have scanned everything from milk commercials (Andersson, 2019) to 19th century cooking books (Storm, 2017) for nationalist messages. Their findings show that, in a world of nation states, nationalist connotations are immensely common and recurrent in popular culture.…”

Methodological nationalism and the politics of history‐writing: how imaginary scholarship perpetuates the nation

“…Second, official and popular understandings of history are themselves overwhelmingly methodologically nationalist, deriving from, but also inspiring, nationalism within the scholarly realm. Indeed, state sponsored narratives depicting regions, symbols, historical civilisations, empires, artwork, architecture and cuisine as irrefutably national property continue to be a daily intrusion on lives across the globe, so much so that the ubiquity and formative power of those narratives frequently escapes people's attention (Storm ).…”