"Central to the construction of a right wing nationalism is a project of defending national identity through an appeal to a common culture that displaces any notion of national identity based upon a pluralized notion of culture with its multiple literacies, identities, and histories and erases histories of oppression and struggle for the working class and minorities."

"The relationship between culture and nationalism always bears the traces of those historical, ethical, and political forces that constitute the often shifting and contradictory elements of national identity. To the degree that the culture of nationalism is rigidly exclusive and defines its membership in terms of narrowly based common culture, nationalism tends to be xenophobic, authoritarian, and expansionist."

"On the other hand, nationalism moves closer toward being liberal and democratic to the degree that national identity is inclusive and respectful of diversity and difference. And yet, a civic nationalism that makes a claim to respecting cultural differences does not guarantee that the state will not engage in coercive assimilationist policies. In other words, democratic forms of nationalism cannot be defended simply through a formal appeal to abstract, democratic principles. How nationalism and the nation state embrace democracy must be determined, in part, through the access diverse cultural groups have to shared structures of power that organize commanding legal, economic, and cultural institutions on the local, state, and national level (see Kymlicka)."

"Cultural differences and national identity stand in a complex relationship to each other and point to progressive as well as totalitarian elements of nationalism that provide testimony to its problematic character and effects."

"Representations of national identity constructed through anappeal to racial purity, militarism, anti-Semitism, and religious orthodoxy have once again surfaced aggressively in Western Europe and can be seen in the rise of neo-nazi youth movements in Germany, the neo-Fascist political parties that won the recent election in Italy, and the ethnic cleansing that has driven Serbian nationalism in the former Republic of Yugoslavia."

"The more positive face of nationalism has emerged in a number of countries through a legacy of democratic struggles and can be seen not only in various anti-colonialist struggles in Asia and Africa, but also in diverse attempts on the part of nation-states to mobilize popular sentiment in the interest of expanding human rights and fighting against the encroachments of undemocratic social forces."

"Invoking claims to the past in which the politics of remembering and forgetting work powerfully to legitimate a notion of national belonging that 'constructs the nation as an ethnically homogeneous objects' (Gilroy 3), national identity is rewritten and purged of its seamy side. Within this narrative, national identity is structured through a notion of citizenship and patriotism that subordinates ethnic, racial, and cultural differences to the assimilating logic of a common culture, or, more brutally, the 'melting pot.' Behind the social imaginary that informs this notion of national identity is a narrowly defined notion of history that provides a defense of the narratives of imperial power and dominant culture and legitimates an intensely narrow and bigoted notion of what it means to be an American."

"Of course, national identity, like nationalism itself, is a social construction that is built upon a series of inclusions and exclusions regarding history, citizenship, and national belonging. As the social historian Benedict Anderson has pointed out, the nation is an 'imagined political community' that can only be understood within the intersecting dynamics of history, language, ideology, and power. In other words, nationalism and national identity are neither necessarily reactionary nor necessarily progressive politically."

"What is somewhat new are the conditions, contexts, and content through which the discourse of national identity is being produced and linked to virulent forms of nationalism."

"Secondly, popular culture has become a powerful site for defining nationalism and national identity against diversity and cultural differences, the latter rendered synonymous with disruption, disunity, and separatism."

"All of these examples underscore how nationalism is currently being shaped to defend a beleaguered notion of national identity read as white, heterosexual, middle-class, and allegedly threatened by contamination from cultural, linguistic, racial, and sexual differences."

"Nationalism in this discourse becomes the marker of certainty; it both affirms monoculturalism and restores the reality coded image of 'Americanness' as a beleaguered national identity (Hall, 'Culture' 357). The new nationalism also posits national identity against the ability of different groups to articulate and affirm their histories, languages, cultural identities, and traditions through the shifting and complex relations in which people imagine and construct national and postnational social formations."

"National identity is always a shifting, unsettled complex of historical struggles and experiences that are cross-fertilized, produced, and translated through a variety of cultures."

"Pitting national identity against cultural difference not only appeals to an oppressive politics of common culture, but reinforces a political moralism that polices 'the boundaries of identity, encouraging uniformity and ensuring intellectual inertia' (Rutherford 17). National identity based on a unified cultural community suggests a dangerous relationship between the ideas of race, intolerance, and the cultural membership of nationhood. Not only does such a position downplay the politics of culture at work in nationalism, but it erases an oppressive history forged in an appeal to a common culture and a reactionary notion of national identity."

"What is problematic about Rorty's position is not simply that he views multiculturalism as a threat to a totalizing notion of national identity. More important is his theoretical indifference to counter-narratives of difference, diaspora, and cultural identity that explore how diverse groups are constructed within an insurgent multiculturalism, which engage the issue both of what holds us together as a nation and of what constitutes our differences from each other. Viewing cultural differences only as a problem, Rorty reveals a disturbing lacuna in his notion of national identity. It is a view that offers little defense against the forces of ethnic absolutism and cultural racism that are so quick to seize upon national identity as a legitimating discourse for racial violence. There is an alarming defensiveness in Rorty's view, one that reinforces rather than challenges a discourse of national community rooted in claims to cultural and racist supremacy."

"In the first instance, national identity must be addressed as part of a broader consideration linking nationalism and postnational social formations to a theory of democracy. That is, the relationship between nationalism and democracy must address not only the crucial issue of whether legal rights are provided for all groups irrespective of their cultural identity, but also how structures of power work to ensure that diverse cultural communities have the economic, political, and social resources to exercise 'both the capacity for collective voice and the possibility of differentiated, directly interpersonal relations' (Calhoun, 'Nationalism' 311)."

"What educators need is a pedagogy the redefines national identity not through a primordial notion of ethnicity or a monolithic conception of culture, but as part of a postmodern politics of cultural difference in which identities are constantly being negotiated and reinvented within complex and contradictory notions of national belonging."

"The issue here is not merely the importance of moral pragmatism in developing a pedagogy that addresses national identity as a site of resistance and reinvention. Equally important is the political and pedagogical imperative of developing a postmodern notion of democracy in which students and others will be attentive to negotiating and constructing the social, political and cultural conditions for diverse cultural identities to flourish within an increasingly multicentric, international, and transnational world."


Giroux, Henry A. "National Identity and the Politics of Multiculturalism." 1995. http://www.sil.org/humanities/ politics/NatIdent.htm (4 June 1999)


Brief Bibliography of Identity Politics


Agger, Ben. 1992. Cultural Studies as Critical Theory. Praeger: London.Washington, DC.

Agger, Ben. 1993. Gender, Culture, and Power: Toward a Feminist Postmodern Critical Theory. Praeger: Westport, Connecticut. London.

Ang, Ien. "The Differential Politics of Chineseness." Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science, Vol 22, 1994.

Boxill, Bernard R. "Separation or Assimilation?'' Campus Wars: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Difference. Edited by John Arthur and Amy Shapiro. Westview Press: Boulder. San Fransisco. Oxford. 1995.

Chun, Allen. "From Nationalism to Nationalizing: Cultural Imagination and State Formation in Postwar Taiwan." The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, No. 31, January 1994.

Elliot, Patricia. "Politics, Identity, and Social Change: contested grounds in psychoanalytic feminism." Hypatia, Vol. 10, No. 2, Spring 1995. pp.41-55.

Flax, Jane. 1993. Disputed Subjects: Essays on Psychoanalysis, Politics and Philosophy. Routledge.

Giroux, Henry A. "National Identity and the Politics of Multiculturalism." College Literature, Vol. 22, No. 2, Jan 1995. pp.41-56.

Giroux, Henry A. "Curriculum, multiculturalism, and the politics of identity." NASSP Bulletin, Vol. 76, No. 548, Dec 1992.

Gold, Thomas B. "Civil Society and Taiwan's Quest Identity." Cultural Change in Postwar Taiwan. edited by Harrell, Stevan and Huang, Chun-chieh. Westview. 1994.

Goldstein, Jonah. & Rayner, Jeremy. "The Politics of Identity in Late Modern Society." Theory and Society, Vol. 23, No. 3, 1994.

Ku, Yenlin. "The Changing Status of Women in Taiwan: a Conscious and Collective Struggle Toward Equality.'' Women's Studies Int. Forum, Vol. 11, No.3, pp.179-186, 1988.

Lo, Ming-Cheng. "Crafting the Collective Identity: The Origin and Transformation of Taiwanese Nationalism." Journal of Historical Sociology, Vol. 7, No. 2 June 1994.

Lorde, Audre. "Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference.'' Campus Wars: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Difference. Edited by John Arthur and Amy Shapiro. Westview: Boulder. San Fracisco. Oxford. 1995.

Mercer, Kobena. "1968: Periodizing Postmodern Politics and Identity." Cultural Studies. 1992. Edited by Grossberg, Lawrence, Nelson, Paula. and Treichler, Paula. Routledge.

Phelan, Shane. "(Be)Coming Out: Lesbian Identity and Politics." Sign. Vol.18, No.4, pp.765-791. 1993 Summer.

Posnock, Ross. "Before and After Identity Politics''. Raritan. Vol. 15, No.1, pp.95-115, 1995.

Young, M. Iris. "Social Movement and the Politics of Difference." Campus Wrs: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Difference. Edited by John Arthur and Amy Shapiro. Westview: Boulder. San Francisco. Oxford. 1995.


"Bibliography of Identity Politics" Maint. LiChien Hung. 3 May 1996. http://www.sil.org/humanities/politics/biblio.htm