Abstract
Abstract For the purposes of the nation state, genealogy is largely the art of self invention. Ancestry underwrites ascendancy and the claim to an heroic past validates the quest for an imperial future. In the second book of The Faerie Queene Spenser provides his countrymen with a myth of origin, in the third he provides them with a myth of destiny and the two are inextricably linked. There is nothing unique in this. The perceived telos of history frequently promotes the adoption, or fabrication, of myths of ethnic origin which exercise authority precisely (and paradoxically) because they are ‘myths’ in Roland Barthes’s sense of the term, pseudo-historical fictions that facilitate contemporary policies and are stubbornly defended as historical truths for that very reason.
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