Page 55 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

CULTURALISM

this peculiar “solidarity effect”, as I will term it, much more positively
than did Morris, at least insofar as the solidarity thus invoked is indeed
emancipatory in its practical political and cultural implications. And
this has very often been the case for those solidarities by which
subordinated communities of class, gender, race or ethnicity have
sought to organize their collective lives. Solidarity, community and
culture need not always prove bogus; they might very well render
social life meaningful, creative and, indeed, genuinely co-operative.
The imagined community of the nation-state remains a very special
case, however, precisely because it seems unimaginable except as
superordinate to and sovereign over all other imaginable communities:
the nation-state is not simply a community, but also a state, and states
are by definition sovereign.
Arguing in defence of Irish cultural nationalism, Terry Eagleton
has borrowed from Williams an analogy between class and nation 82
that points to the need to go, not so much around nationality as “all
the way through it and out the other side”. “To wish class or nation
away, to seek to live sheer irreducible difference now”, Eagleton
83
continues, “is to play straight into the hands of the oppressor”. In
this specific instance of a people constituted as Irish and Catholic by
centuries of Anglo-Scottish and Protestant oppression, and of a state
still not yet fully independent, a nation imaginable and imagined as
whole but not yet so, it becomes difficult to dissent from Eagleton’s
judgement. The whole process of nation-state building is here so
obviously already under way, and yet so obviously already stalled, as
to make of nationality an almost unavoidable politico-cultural referent.
Much the same could be said of Palestine. But in fully sovereign “post-
colonial” states such as Australia or Canada, the practical import of
such cultural nationalisms already appears both much less radical
and much less unavoidable. And even if the Irish or the Palestinians
are indeed doomed to go through nationalism and out the other side,
then this surely need not mean that all imaginable nations must follow
suit. Given the presence of a sufficiently persuasive and materially
interested local intelligentsia, almost any geographically defined social
group can be imagined as a nation, and any nation as a nation-state.
The practical political and cultural questions then become immediately
concrete: what real emancipatory potential would it yield were the
peoples of Yorkshire or Lancashire, for example, to begin to imagine
themselves in ways analogous to those of Serbia or Croatia? Very

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