ABSTRACT
Approaching national community as open to rearticulation by cultural minorities challenges dominant understandings of nations as neatly bound, relatively homogenous ethno-cultural units. This chapter draws on Craig Calhoun’s approach to nation as produced within the discursive formation of nationalism in order to contest these presumptions. Calhoun sees nationalism as simultaneously a way of categorising human populations and a normative claim, which shapes forms of diversity and is intimately implicated in democracy. For postcolonial theory, I suggest that Calhoun’s account of nation affords a useful bridge between ‘textualists’ who regard nationalism as enforcing homogeneity on heterogeneity and ‘materialists’ who concede its value for anti-colonial and anti-imperial politics. Specifically, in underscoring nations as not inheritances but rather creations forged through political struggles, Calhoun allows us to turn postcolonial insights regarding culture to the domain of the national and comprehend how contemporary anti-colonial politics may take place within the bounds of the nation-state. The chapter also explores historical and contemporary manifestations of the idea of nation in Australia. This discussion not only contextualises the book, but helps to flag the partialities of Eurocentric understandings of nation and demonstrate how national identity and culture are not necessarily counter to the cause of cultural diversity.
