Nation, Identity, and Power in the Critical Cultural Studies Tradition

Abstract

The concepts of nation and identity are intimately linked to how power functions in society. At its core the nation is associated with some sort of “authentic” cultural location. Speaking of the nation often implies cultural homogeneity and a sense of national unity. Critical cultural studies contest this view of the nation and the consequent construction of a coherent identity. The nation and its identities are neither univocal nor culturally homogenous, nor do the people have a socially cohesive experience. The nation is the product of cultural practices of representation between “Us” and the “Other,” all contained in stored societal knowledge and disseminated in discourses. The knowledge contained in discourses about the nation and its people, critical cultural followers argue, produce and reproduce a very particular type of truth contained in social categories such as sex, gender, age, race, ability, and class. The nation and its identities following a cultural critical tradition have been studied by an array of interdisciplinary theoretical approaches but most notably by postmodernists, postcolonialists, critical feminists, and multiculturalists. At their core, they all share the belief that the nation and its identities are socially constructed and that obscured social relations of power contained in discourses of nationhood can be uncovered. They also share a commitment to denouncing discrimination and inequality and enhancing the voices of the margins, the subalterns, and the multicultural identities contained in and transcending the nation. Critical cultural scholarship examines the interarticulation of power and culture. Central to critical studies is the critical examination of discourses seeking to uncover the socially constructed machinery of power with the end goal of enacting social change. The terms nation and identity are political in nature and thus are highly interrelated with power.