Nation and Imagined Community Draft

Hall conveys "a nation is a symbolic community and it is this which accounts for its power to generate a sense of identity and community" (1992, p.292) Hence, thus revealing national cultures are not unique, inherent or genuine expressions of identity rather it is how we recognize ourselves in allowing memories to fix the past with the present in images and representations (1992, p.293). As such national cultures exist unified as long as they are shared by those who exist within them. In the example of the Australian nation migration elucidates the myth of the indivisibility of the nation as minorities can allow multiple alternative imaginations of the nation culturally, politically and religiously. This is problematic as the narrative of Australian multiculturalism and tolerance has been central to the maintenance of discourse of the Australian nation. Yet if a nation is embedded only in mutual solidarity then there is the predicament that as national memories become more democratic they become more impersonal.

In National identity Anthony D. Smith argues that commonality is sustained by in "unity signifies social cohesion, the brotherhood of all nationals in the nation"... "encourages the idea of the indivisibility of the nation and justified the eradication often by force of all intermediate bodies and local differences in the interests of cultural and political homogeneity" (76). However, to the contrary despite the importance of individual choice in many instances have proven that although individual choice is significant in determining human behaviour it is rather ethically formed and although may be determined by culture can be separate from their own Nation. The discursive construction of national identities raises the notion that "national identities-conceived as specific form of social identities-are discursively, by the means of language and other semiotic systems, produced, reproduced, transformed and destructed " (p.6 )For...