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National dimension of identification is one particular site of the subject’s identity, and not a transcendental determining factor of a community inherited from generation to generation. According to Stuart Hall national identity is similar to the translation of the traditional concept of identity to the stage of culture, suggesting the essentialising nature of the term and the belief that there is a “collective or true self hiding inside the many other, more superficial or artificially imposed ‘selves’ which a people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common” (3-4). If we accept its commonsense meaning, national identity seems to be an even more arbitrary category than the identity of a particular subject; that is if we imagine members of a national as a unified presence and categorise them according to collective history or collective habits; it is not likely that we shall get beyond commonsense generalisations. Thus national identity might be understood as a strategy of power discourse to define subjects as belonging to the same umbrella category, trying to hold them together by slogans of belonging and sameness. The presence of ideology is so evident in this notion that we might apply Fredric Jameson’s definition of ideology – an “imaginary relationship to transpersonal realities such as the social structure or the collective logic of history” (30), to define national identity as well.
However there is another way to understand national identity, and in this version, we may regard it as something different’ from what Hall calls a collective or true self. This is because it would be arbitrary to separate national identity from the identity of the subject, as these notions intersect and overlap with each other. It is difficult to think of national identity as something separate from other types of identifications, or to conceive the identity of a particular subject without being aware of its nationality. Hence, it could be said that national identity is a specific site of the subject’s identity that is constituted through its relation to the nation and other related notions such as culture and history. Thus while national identity in its commonsense meaning is an ideological construct that exists outside and above subjects, national identification is indeed part of the subject’s identity or blind spot.
In order to understand national identification it is necessary to analyse the concept of nation and its relation to the subject. The nation quite similarly to the subject, always chides on all-inclusive definition.1
Benedict Anderson defines the nation as “an imagined community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign” (Anderson 6). He calls the nation a community and argues that it is so because, “the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship” (Anderson 7). He argues that it can only be understood as an imagined community, “because members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet on the minds of each lives the image of their communion” (Anderson 6). He combines terms that are familiar to us from psychology (imagination) and aesthetics (he is talking about different styles of imagined communities) with political categories such as sovereign, suggesting an image that lives in the minds of the members of the nation. Anderson’s use of the term “imagined”, calls to mind Lacan’s imaginary end Althusser’s “imaginary relationship,” both of which are crucial in outlining the subject’s ambivalent relationship with the nation and for grasping the complex concept of national identity. ... His basic assumption is that during the mirror stage, the subject arrives at an apprehension of both its self and the other – of itself as the other. ... As he argues, the subject sees an image of itself in the mirror which is a unified whole and external. He takes a step further and claims that the logic of this identification cannot be restricted to the mirror stage, but it also characterises other types of identifications that the subject creates afterwards. In this sense the imaginary is something with which the subject lives together in the social sphere.
Also, Anderson’s use of the term “imagined” indicates that the nation belongs to the terrain of both ideology and psychoanalysis, similar to the notion of identity. It implies the bi-polarity of this phenomenon, suggesting on the one hand, that the nation can be understood as an ideological construct that imposes a national identity upon its subjects by creating imaginary relationships, which in reality do not exist. On the other hand, the nation can also be understood as the image in the mirror, total and desired with which the subject wishes to identify him/herself and create his or her national identification. According to Agnes Gyorke, therefore, national identity
is not necessarily something entirely external and something that should be regarded as a myth, but is an ambivalent phenomenon that both threatens and includes the subject who belongs to this category. In other words, the subject is aware of the fact that the mirror image of national identity is the projection of him/herself, but s/he knows that this image also threatens him/her as the Other which wants to locate and define him or her. ... doc)
Thus if the subject conceives of the nation as the image in the mirror, it is no wonder that s/he talks of in aesthetic terms. Thus we see that Anderson’s definition is an aesthetic category displacing the category of the nation with the metaphor of “imagined community. ... The construction of identity [. ... ] involves establishing opposites and ‘others’ whose actuality is always subject to the continuous interpretation and reinterpretation of their differences from us. (Said 332)
Said claims that ideologies adopted from nationalism et cetera create cultural hegemony with subject to Orientalism and hence he is too resolutely opposed to all forms of national identity polities. The placing of imaginative borders between nations is fundamental to their existence, not least because borders divide the nation’s people from others outside. ... They also contain ample basis for communication across national and group boundary lives. ...
Proposing a different approach to the concept of national identity and national boundaries, Homi K. ... Bhabha focuses on another kind of hybridity, or challenge to stable categories of national identity: the identity of the migrant, the homeless, the refugee, the displaced indigenous peoples.
Postcolonial literature, such as Salman Rushdie’s, addresses the question of national identity after Empire. Rushdie’s writing is passionately concerned with the fate of the new India, with what sort of nation she is to be for all of her citizens. Says Rushdie in Imaginative Homelands:
It’s when you start thinking about the political entity, the nation of India [. ... In his volume of essays, Imaginary Homelands, Rushdie clearly draws on Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, which argues that nations as nations are imaginary entities, thought into being by the corporate story telling of the people who inhabit them. ... Says Rushdie:
For a nation of seven hundred millions to make any kind of sense, it must base itself firmly in the concept of multiplicity, of plurality and tolerance, of devolution and decentralization wherever possible.
Approximate Word count = 5944
Approximate Pages = 23.8
(250 words per page double spaced)
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