Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Race and Nation in Subsets of Popular Culture

Since my first reading of Imagined Communities a couple years ago, various cultural appearances racism and nationalism led me to the belief that Anderson's contention that racism and antisemitism cannot possibly derive from nationalism is based on a shallow analysis of the dynamics of concepts such as nationalism and racism. Examples of nationalism as a causation for racist views don't only occur in the macroscoptic, historic sense, but also simply within pop culture. Purely through a vague interest in music and the internet, I came across racist views born from nationalism several times.

First, through an online article from the Guardian Unlimited, Top 10 Right-Wing Rockers, I found out that Eric Clapton made a speech supporting a blatantly racist MP, Enoch Powell, saying "Stop Britain from becoming a black colony," and "Keep Britain White," amidst a deluge of racial slurs. A subgenre of heavy metal, black metal, originated in Norway in the early 1990s, and became the source of a number of satirical internet memes in the past few years, mocked for its ridiculous aesthetic and attacked for its views. Those view are an opposition to Christianity, largely based in a feeling that it was imposed on the historic Norwegians, with a feeling of nationalism deeply rooted in the past. This often leads to a hatred for any and all foreign influences, racial or otherwise. Billy Bragg's album England, Half-English, however, is concerned with removing nationalism and patriotism from racism and conservatism; the lyrics to the titular song mention Lions, Saint George, and other icons of English culture and note their foreign influences, arguing for the glory of England as a changing, diverse state.

Benjamin's quote, brought up in lecture, from the sixth thesis in On the Concept of History, "Every age must strive anew to wrest tradition away from the conformism that is working to overpower it," seems particularly applicable in addressing these particular instances. In the racist emergences of nationalism, both rely on an old, conformist idea of their nation; Clapton's Britain must remain the way it started, ethnically, as all immigrants contaminate (to use Anderson's word) the British nation by introducing their ethnicities and cultures. Similarly, black metal's views against at least Christianity, and usually foreign ethnic groups, stems from feelings that they somehow harmed the Norwegian nation, based on views that it should remain constrained to its original nature. In these instances, there is no individual nation against whom one would have "an ordinary political enmity" (149), but rather one would hold a political enmity against all other nations for fear of their influences diluting the character of the nation.
This same trait may be seen in the Birthers, who do not argue against Obama becoming President directly because he is of a certain ethnic appearance, but rather object to his "foreign influence," either in his foreign birth or even simply family of a foreign culture, which they feel will corrode the essential America, an America of the past to which the Birthers openly wish to return.

The only explanation Anderson can offer is that ethnicity denies nationality in racism, an argument he makes by explaining that anti-semitism stems from the fact that Jewish people are considered to be Jewish, "whatever passports they carry or languages they speak" (149), and thus that "for the Nazi, the Jewish German was an imposter" (149), focussing on the idea of race superceding national identity, and thereby overriding nationalism. However, this ignores the possibility that ideas of nation can be tied to ideas of ethnicity, in a desire to keep a nation as it was. Billy Bragg's nationalism, which is not racist, does not allow conformism to override his view of England, which encompasses older and newer traditions, and embraces a changing, adapting England as a great one, not as one that is losing it's national character. Thus, a nationalist spirit which fails in Benjamin's task, to "wrest tradition away from the conformity that is working to overpower it," could easily fall into racism from the rigidity of the concept of a nation.

(I'm having some difficulty posting to the blog, hopefully this works.)

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