Imagining community and hoping for recognition: Bicentennial celebrations in 1976 and 1988

Abstract

Bicentennial celebrations were held in the United States in 1976 and in Australia in 1988. Here, I compare talk about national identity by organizers of bicentennials in each country. The commemorations were similarly designed to enact unity while attempting to avoid apathy and dissension. They show a common repertoire of cultural claims which help address the shared constraints of their cultural production. There were also differences in the way different sorts of claims were developed. For Australians, international recognition was much more important than for Americans; for the Americans, founding moment history was much more important than for the Australians. Americans treated political values as foundational in imagined community, and the land had low salience; the reverse was true for the Australians. But both sets of organizers stressed diversity and shared spectacle to recognize, coopt, and imaginatively transcend salient cultural and political difference. The analysis suggests that there is an internationally available repertoire of claims about national identity which includes themes of international recognition, history, abstractly inclusive characteristics like political values or the land, and claims about diversity and spectacle.