Who Needs the Nation? Interrogating ‘British’ History

Abstract

This paper pursues the question 'who needs the nation?' which was first posed by Kobena Mercer, the Black British cultural critic, in Welcome to the Jungle (1994). It interrogates not just the proposition of who needs the nation as a fixed referent, but who can afford to be content to be contained by its disciplinary boundaries. These are questions of interest to practitioners committed to understanding what the ramifications are for national histories in the wake of postcolonial studies and work around diasporic communities and subjects. Who writes -who even sees -the histories of subjects exiled from the 'national body', those refugees (deliberate or otherwise) from national history and its disciplinary regimes -before the 20th century, in the European context? Who questions the apparent naturalness of the nation as an analytical framework in western histories? And, finally, what does this question mean for the sovereignty of Greater Britain, whose historiography has traditionally been one of the technologies of the national state and which is in the process of being challenged and refigured through the analytics of culture, postcolonialism and feminism?

The Archive, Disciplinarity, and Governing: Cultural Studies and the Writing of History

“…There is also the more violent and effective exclusion of the memories and pasts of communities and peoples from archival collections and insti-tutions, particularly from state-affiliated archives. As Burton (1997) points out, "clearly the politics of who or what is the subject of a 'national' history begs the question of how a subject becomes nationalized as well as what kind of disciplinary action such a process requires" (p. 238). This question can be partially answered through the historicization of state archives.…”

“…It is significant that Burton (1997Burton ( , 2003 is a Historian of colonial modernity. The question of the archive seems particularly fraught for Historians working in cross-cultural or postcolonial contexts, where questions about the status of History as an interpretative discipline and its relationship to the power of the colonial state are especially urgent.…”

England – Whose England? Narratives of Nostalgia, Emptiness and Evasion in Imaginations of National Identity

“…The interest in national identity is to explore the extent to which it is in crisis, and remains racialised as well as the ways in which it is experienced as gendered. However, this is not to say that the nation should be taken as the most important framework out of which identities are constructed (see Burton, 2000). Whilst Anderson may be right that everyone is required to have a nationality just as they have a gender, the extent to which this features in an individual consciousness will vary considerably both between individuals and in different contexts.…”

Political Discourse, Political Violence

“…While Andrew has written on the relationship between Edwardian spy novels and the emergence of the British secret service, the relationship between cultural representations and the categorization of the modern 'terrorist' in the British Empire is a topic that has not yet been comprehensively explored (Andrew 1985;Silvestri 2000Silvestri , 2009b. 6 For some examples of the theoretical and methodological basis of the new imperial history, see especially Burton (1997), Hall (2002, and Ballantyne (2006). 7 The implications of categorizing the British state as 'liberal' are a subject of great debate.…”