Notes

News Media Week 7
Sport & National Indentity


Reproducing the nation state -> Contemporary Manifestations
The ways in which modern nations are imagined.
What discursive and representational practices are mobilised to construct 'common sense' perspectives and feelings of national belonging?
Collective national engagement with events eg. Olympics/World Cup
Homogenous collective that the implied reader is 'a part of'
The nation is produced and brought to life - sutured - together into a composite stabilised category [Laclau & Mouffe]
Imagination is achieved through discursive and symbolic processes.
The nation state is reproduced as unproblematic - homogenous.

Narrativisation of a shared history, a shared present and a shared future [Nairn 1990]
Imagining and disseminating the nation
Read: Benedict Anderson - Imagined Communities [1983]

1) Newspapers enabled people to image these new national communities
2) It was not a language per se (French, German, Spanish, etc.) that helped constitute a nation, but 'print language' (ie. the words used by those charged with forging the nation state/sense of national identity
3) National mass media de-emphasised diversity - had a homogenising effect

Look up: Banal Nationalism
The nation and its construction is not restricted to forced statements of national pride. Rather is is a persuasive feature of societies.
{Us and them + here and there} - Banal rhetoric
It is the banal rhetoric of a national state that imposes a more permanent effect ('common sense').
'The metonymic image of banal nationalism is not a flag which is being consciously waved with fervent passion; it is the flag hanging unnoticed on the public building.' [Billig 1995]

BBC identity shaped by national rituals of state sport.
BBC helps shape and reproduce Banal Nationalism

Reproducing Stereotypes
Systematically articulated
Characteristics - Constructed and attached to nations
Example of above would be a football commentator referring to the German national team as 'efficient' or the nature of English football as 'physical'. Could Lionel Messi do it on a wet Wednesday night in Stoke? etc.

Nation states and national identity are not 'naturally occurring' phenomena, but are contingent historical cultural formations.
Definition - form of imaginative identification with symbols and discourses of a nation state.
The place to vigorously wave the national flag is confined within sport - something that is trivial in the grand scheme of things but regarded as important to retaining the culture and values of nation states.