History, identity and ethnicity

Abstract

It is one of the cliches of historiographical discussion that individuals and societies use the past in order to sustain current identities. The founders of modern historiography took it for granted that the focus of identity was the nation-state, whether conceived in volkisch terms or as the construct of heroic founding fathers, as in the case of the USA or post-revolutionary France. In recent times many very different sorts of groups have demanded their own history and joined E. P. Thompson’s stockingers in search of emancipation from the ‘vast condescension of posterity’. The first challenges to the statist view came from those who argued on behalf of non-elite groups within the nation-state: the working class, women, immigrants. More recently some have sought to dismantle the entire paradigm and the grand narratives it sustained. Those developments are the product of the interplay between shifts in social and critical theory, often mediated through closely related disciplines, and changes in the wider political, social and cultural context. The increase since c.1970 in the attention paid by historians and others to questions to do with ethnicity and identity demonstrates the interaction of context and theory particularly neatly. The persistence, indeed resurgence, of communal and linguistic divisions in the postcolonial states, the emergence of new and remembered nationalisms in Eastern Europe after 1989, the reassertion of regional/national identities in Western Europe, the increased significance of religious identities as in the Balkans, the Islamic world and Ulster, the impact of immigration on Western Europe and North America, have all brought old certainties into question. In particular, they challenge the implicit prediction of earlier modernisation theory that older, traditional, customary identities and loyalties would fade away under the impact of an increasingly powerful and global modernity of which the nation-state was a major agent. From the early 1980s onwards, French social and critical theory, particularly that of Foucault, together with Edward Said’s Orientalism, had a major impact on a range of disciplines: on literary theory and anthropology, and especially on the emerging disciplines of cultural studies and postcolonial studies, but also on sociology, political science and history.1