Page 54 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

NATIONALISM AND CULTURE

cultural boundaries of Greater British nationalism have indeed been
prised open, then the Yookay has increasingly been exposed to the
foreignness within as well as to that without, to Wales as well as to
California.
But the second objection remains. If Wales were to become an
independent nation-state, limited and sovereign, then what would
there be to prevent its nationalism from becoming any the less
presumptuously exclusionary than those of other nation-states? In
any already independent nation-state in peacetime the nationalist
political imagination is normally directed not against possible external
enemies, but against various internal enemies, and in particular against
those non-national imaginations which most threaten to subvert the
seamless web of national unity. There might well be a necessary and
unavoidable conflict, then, between a nationalist imagination centred
on the category of nation and, for example, a feminist imagination
centred on that of gender; between nationalism and the kinds of socialist
imagination centred on class; between nationalism and the “multi-
cultural” imaginings of non-national or sub-national ethnic groups.
The latter case is especially complicated, given that the not-yet
independent nation is easily imaginable as itself a subordinate ethnicity.
There is a certain confusion in Williams’s own position here. While
Wales, Scotland and Ireland are in fact already imagined as nations
and as would-be nation-states, and although even the English regions
are in principle imaginable as such, the West Indian community in
Britain, by contrast, remains simply unimaginable as a nation-state,
though not, of course, as part of a wider non-British nation. Though
the Welsh or the Quebecois might well still choose between nationalism
and multiculturalism, only the latter remains at all available to the
Afro-Carribean and Bengali communities in Britain or to the Greek
and Italian communities in Canada or Australia. For these last,
multiculturalism seems likely to remain radically incompatible with
any but the most tentative of cultural nationalisms.
Meaghan Morris, the Australian feminist cultural critic, has argued
that cultural nationalisms and especially those which have a “strong
indigenous-Maoist streak…seem to impose a discourse on identity—
not just national or cultural identity…but also the call for a programme
in which speakers identify themselves, take a position in a struggle”. 81
Morris’s remarks seem pertinent not only to Australian radical
nationalism, but to all culturalisms. It is possible, however, to construe

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