Session Information
Session 5A, Democracy, National Identity and Social Minorities
Papers
Time:
2005-09-08
13:00-14:30
Room:
ENG
Chair:
Elaine Ricard-Fersing
Contribution
One interesting aspect of education as a field of research is that it is, to such a large extent, formed around an idea of representation of an educational practice within a certain institution, the school, whose very task is to produce and reproduce the national subject. Who is this national subject and how is it produced?The idea of a society formed around a common homogeneous culture, a common language, a common colour of skin, a common religion, a common society - in short, a common history based on an original identity - seems to be a characteristic way of describing Sweden. In, for example, Alf Åbergs's Vår svenska historia (Our Swedish History) the successive formation of Sweden as a nation with sovereignty over a (changing) territory (but always as an inside creating its outside) and populated by a single people - the Swedish people - is so bluntly and straightforwardly stated that there seems to be no other way of understanding the complexities of the multitude of people called Swedes other than through the singularity of one body with one mentality multiplied into replicas of the original identity. Åke Daun, in his book Swedish Mentality, attempts to describe this original identity of the Swede, basically by commenting and listing what is taken to be essential traits and characteristics of this imagined construct, such as being a rational melancholic with a puritan morality and a strong sense of democracy justice and freedom. Such a construct of a blueprint of "a Swedish mentality" can, perhaps, serve as something more than simply an amusing read comparable with the reading of one's horoscope, that is, it may contain some "truth." Yet, even this possible truth is beside the point, since it tends to overlook the fact that what people do and how people identify themselves in relation to others are not entirely dependent on an imagined mentality of the singular original identity but also on multiple open-ended relations within the everyday of ordinary life, which continuously disturb hegemonic attachments, fixations and obsessions. The blueprint of identity, then, can only be upheld by a severe repression of the alterity of open-ended relations with the other as well as by repressing the alterity of oneself; as such, it functions as a severe denial of complexity and change. The point I want to make in this paper is that the idea of a singular national mentality, expressed in terms of personal traits and characteristics, is an inherently conservative construct which functions as a suppression of alterity and difference through its insensitivity to, or rather denial of, temporality, complexity and change. In the following I will discuss briefly the idea of an original identity, the idea of a people and the idea of a nation, in order to make problematic the production of Swedishness as a unitary homogeneous original identity based on a denial of difference and multiple identifications. Particularly I will ask how this denial relates to a central binary opposition in Swedish language and cultural praxis: the dichotomy of Swedes-immigrants. Here I explore in what ways this dichotomisation functions as a 'cultural praxis' in the construction of a Swedish imaginary nation of today, and relate this image and construction to the writings in the Swedish national curriculum for the obligatory school- system.
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