In Week 5 of Unit III, we will incorporate what we have learned about constructed ideologies and personal identities into a study of national and familial identities. We begin the week with an excerpt from Ernest Renan's "What is a Nation?"- an important work written in 1882 that continues to influence scholarship on nationalism today. In the essay, Renan, a French historian and essayist, argues that national identity is contingent on memory "of sacrifices that one has made in the past" and on the desire "to continue a common life."

Following Renan's lead, Benedict Anderson, writing a century later, defines the nation as an "imagined political community" that is, paradoxically, both "inherently limited" and "sovereign." Also influenced by Renan, Ernest Gellner, author of Nations and Nationalism, argues that the Industrial Revolution spawned a kind of nationalism that was dependent on clear ethnic and political boundaries and on ever-changing divisions of labor.

After discussing these concepts of nation, we will then investigate how the ideology of the nation intersects with the ideology of the family. We look at these ideologies together because the words we use to talk about nations and nationalism often overlap with the words we use to talk about families and familial ties. As a result, relations and behaviors within and between nations are ideologically "naturalized," and relations and behavior within the family are ideologically weighted with significance for the health and well-being of the nation. In particular, we will look carefully at the ways in which the overlap of these ideologies affects who is included or excluded by our terms and definitions.

For example, when speaking of a nation, we frequently use terms that are associated with personal identities, such as "we are one people," or "we are like family." Such emotionally appealing statements of nationalism, however, may fuel intra- and intersociety conflict. For example, as we join hands across the chasms that separate people of different races, classes, and genders after September 11, are we also generating a spirit that incites hate crimes against those whom we exclude from the national "family"? Does the idea that "we (in the nation) are one" make political dissent against U.S. government policies seem not just disloyal, but somehow unnatural?

The interlocking vocabularies of nation and family also affect the way we view family life and structure. For example, Alexis de Tocqueville, a Frenchman writing in the mid-nineteenth century, analogizes the traditional European family to the old European political order, which gives absolute power to the patriarch. In the excerpt we will read from his American Democracy, he argues for a new "democratic" family based on love and trust, analogous to the spirit of consent and equality he saw in the young American democracy. This appealing and enlightened-sounding analogy, however, masks the pressures on the family structure caused by such "external" structural issues as gender inequality.

Friedrich Engels, for example, describes "pairing marriage" as the beginning of the "abduction and purchase of women." In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft skillfully uses woman's traditional role as mother of "good citizens for the nation" to argue for the right of women to education and to participation in the public arena. In "The Fact of Blackness," we will see how Franz Fanon, a psychiatrist born in Martinique and writing in the early 1950s, finds the effects of systematic racism permeating every aspect of black identity, down to the very sense of whether one possesses one's own body.

We also visit the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, where we will bear witness to the extremes of attitudes, behaviors and consequences that may follow when "the nation" and "the family" are ideologically linked. We also will explore new concepts of the family, such as the concept of a "family of choice" discussed by contemporary essayist E.J. Graff in "What Makes a Family."

To expand our understanding of nation and family beyond Euroamerican traditions, we will explore how these ideologies appear in African nationalist movements. Ben Carton from GMU's History department will be a guest lecturer. We will visit the National Museum of African Art, where we will see a presentation and view artifacts that focus on African nations and families. The final day will include a performance and presentation on "Mythic Modernism" by Unit 3 seminar leader Suzanne Scott and guest presenter Lynne Constantine from GMU's Cultural Studies Department and the College of Visual and Performing Arts.

Their presentation will focus on how the twentieth-century movements known as "modernism" in literature and in the visual arts produced powerful challenges to such romantic myths as those linking nation and family. Ironically, however, modernism's own ideologies were themselves easily co-opted by fascism, and some of the most illustrious modernists allied themselves with fascist ideology without realizing that they were, in effect, condoning genocide.

Online Sources

Web Sites
The Museum of African Art

The Holocaust Museum

HD: from Trilogy

Johann Gottfried von Herder: Materials for the Philosophy of the History of Mankind, 1784