Narrating the Nation: Nationalist Populism, Silences, Elisions, and the (Im)Possibilities of Relationality

• In Event: Millennium Hotel Roundtable Session 4
  In Roundtable Session: Nation State, the Rise of Popul(ar)ism, and Curricula of Global Citizenship

Abstract

Through a critical examination of Scottish curricular policies and practices, this paper addresses the ways in which nationalist popul(ar)ism assembles a range of identities, discourses and representations of the Scottish nation. It examines examples of literary texts which the Scottish Government has prescribed for Scottish secondary school. It argues that while Scottish curricular discourses and practices ostensibly advocate cultural diversity and acknowledge multiple attachments, an examination of some of the prescribed texts suggests that the notion of Scottishness constructed is marked by an inherent denial of relationality and produces a set of elisions and silences that generate an “exclusionary imaginary” (Sayegh, 2008). This imaginary, as Sayegh (2008) avers, “allows for the reproduction of nationalism” and “also promotes forms of exclusion, which foster introverted assertions of identities” (p.1). Working heuristically from Arnott and Ozga’s (2016) view that in its attempt to mobilise some of the resources of nationalist sentiment, some official rhetoric emitted by the Scottish Government deploys two interrelated discourses: The first one is an economy-driven, outward referencing discourse that aims to position Scotland as a key player in the global economy; the second master discourse, is inwardly referencing and promotes the nation to itself. An examination of this inwardly referencing discourse, through the lenses of cultural studies and post/decolonial theorising reveals the cultural postering, narratives and tropes that undergird the political project of Scottish nationhood. The paper reflects on the adoption of critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2010) as a methodological approach applied in the process of identifying and critically examining linguistic repertoires, tropes, metaphors and historiographies. These linguistic devices are mobilised in these texts, producing tensions and bringing these into sharp relief. Taken together, these linguistic resources suggest that these literary texts are instances of curricular discourse and practices that invoke Scottishness as a “solid, historic monolith of unmistakable, traditional characteristics” (Schoene, 1998, p.55). Concomitantly, these texts function as points of identification and “attachment … because of their capacity to exclude, to leave out, to render ‘outside’…” (Hall, 2005, p.18) other facets of Scottishness. These texts tend to abjure key developments that are relevant “in many personal or group histories of contemporary British citizen” (Sayegh, 2008, p. 17): issues of hybridity, nomadism, exile, migration and the postcolonial condition that articulate different forms of consciousness and “dislocation” and “its attendant discomforts and disagreements” (Hughes, 2002). Finally, by bringing together a number of theoretical perspectives such as postcolonial /decolonial theories, critical discourse analysis and literary criticism, this paper speaks to a range of concerns such as nationalism, global citizenship and representational violence within institutional frameworks and spaces for the construction of national identities. In so doing, this papers contributes to our understanding of how nationhood is invested in other curricular contents, beyond Scotland not only in its attempt to naturalize, mobilize and legislate for specific conditions of belonging but also in highlighting the ways in which the semantic order of nationhood have been recast by neoliberal governance which has appropriated the social justice possibilities of citizenship and the language of curricula.

Author

• Mostafa Gamal, Edinburgh College