Speaking to Nations: Stan Grant’s Talking to My Country and its repercussions for critiques of, and enabling other discourses about, nationhood in Australia and Europe

The ebbs and flows, which typically influences not just rhetoric around, but also how we think through nationalism, suggest nationalism is somehow at the core the same ‘thing’. But is it really? What connects the rise of nationalism in Australia in the 1880s, to the nationalism of the First and Second World Wars, to the myopic white assimilationist nationalism of the 1950s, to the multicultural liberal tolerance nationalism of the 1970s and 1980s, to the rise of Howard’s belligerent nationalism in the 00s and to the current form of neurotic-epidemic nationalism? And how does sentiment that drives the dominant discourse sit with other sentiments that are either completely different or counter-discursive formations? Nationalism in these years is clearly an extremely gut-attitudinal way of establishing self-contented exclusivist discourses that happily juggernauts its way across alternative discourses with even less consideration than other forms of nationalism. Yet, in the overt focus on its damaging effects are we not also belittling the many efforts at countering nationalism.
What a question… and how to go about answering it. Comparative considerations of the contemporary discourses surrounding refugees and migrancy in Australia and Europe (since this is what we are invited to do by the organisers), and how the deconstruction of such discourses might lead to more constructive ways of speaking through nation, might offer a way. I think Stan Grant’s book, Talking to My Country, through its combination of incisive criticism and insistence on constructive nation-(re)building offers an interesting launching pad. I am hoping to use Grant’s nation-rebuilding project to suggest ways that could open up similar spaces in equally exclusivist, the-nation-is-white-places in Europe. I am aware Grant has just published another book on the subject…