The Nation as a Political Stage

Abstract

This article offers a theoretical contribution to the question of how nations are `built' through the mass media and specifically in television fiction. The author criticizes the assumption that the nation is an anachronism in a globalized world, arguing instead that the concept of national culture should be revisited in terms of political negotiation. The article argues that television fiction is one of the most powerful mechanisms for reinventing national culture because of the banal and routine way in which this is portrayed. It is pointed out that, in television fiction, the process of national culture building is mainly grounded in four main elements: localization and territory; language issues and uses; cultural representation; and historical and institutional references. It is proposed that the `fictional nation' is a politically conceptualized stage on which stories can take place.