Re: National Identity

[Susan Kocen]

Dear Franc,
Thanks so much for your reply - i like reading your insights a lot. You email also makes me think about this whole National Identity thing from the perspective of the one whose country is not likely to be altered or attacked . The difference in flag sales in the United States in Fall/Winter 2001 was huge, they had been attacked as it were, and the National Identity came roaring out of it's corner.

I was reading Amin Maalouf's book "In the Name of Identity" these days, and he writes about exactly that:
" People often see themselves in terms of whichever one of their allegiances is most under attack." p.26
he also writes:
"What determines a person's affiliation to a given group is essentially the influence of others: the influence of those around him who try to make him one of them; together with the influence of those on the other side who do their best to exclude him" p.25

My interest in this topic, and this Thesis that I am writing on it, really sprung from my moving to a country where the Nationalism and National identity was greater than anything that i had experienced before. I had never felt so 'other' so 'foreign' any other place in the world, and I can feel , in that country, that I will never be able to use the things that i have taken for granted before as far as my sense of belonging to places and amongst people's goes because this particular culture will never ( low dream ) embrace me as being 'one of them' no matter how long i live there. In feeling 'excluded' there, I am suddenly more British, more annoyed by difference, more stubborn in my style and ways of being.

Having grown up in one culture, then emigrated to two others as an adult, I had not known this sense of foreign-ness before both because of my privileges of being British and white and all the colonial Brownie points that gave me in AUstralia and to some degree in the White, middle class USA, but also because even the Britain I grew up in was becoming hugely multi-cultural in the 60's and 70's so things were dramatically changing, no matter how many people complained and longed for the "good old days" or whatever Gilbert and Sullivan lyric they dragged up for that!

Anyway, I hope to hear from anyone who might also have some insights of their own, I love this conversation with Franc that I am having also, we should be doing it over a cup of tea and cucumber sandwiches I suppose.

Love,
Susan

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