On flags and fascists

ere I come back to Gordon Brown’s explicit suggestion to achieve a new harmonious order under the flag of a unified British national identity.

The ethnic/civic divide

Barack Obama is about to lead a country with millions and millions of houses the front gardens of which are decorated with American flags. Gordon Brown’s own brand of patriotic fervour would like to see something similar happening in his country. More about it next time. This time, our topic as such is not the good international news following the catastrophe of a global financial quasi-meltdown. There is plenty of it anywhere else. Our topic is still how Gordon Brown goes on about his mission of articulating a sense of ‘progressive’ British national identity. To do so, almost three years down the line, I still take as reference the symptomatic keynote speech he delivered in the Fabian (Society’s) Future of Britishness Conference (14 January 2006). This week I go academic and I  do a bit of name-dropping. Next week I’ll look at it from a more political angle.

Territorial animals

This follows last week’s reflections on the patriotic predicament  to which a global dimension is also added that explains how the new ‘progressive’ British neo-nationalist discourse works. On the clip iconic folk singer Billy Bragg ‘repeats’ Gordon Brown. More next week.

The patriotic predicament, British style

This is about the sheer futility involved in the attempts at developing a new, as it were, minority-led, ‘progressive’ and ‘alternative’ yet still grand-national British patriotic predicament by the very ‘secular’, ‘liberal’, ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘unprejudiced’ representatives of the British ethnic minorities themselves (Afro-Caribbean, Muslim…). The clip below offers a possible way of linking the particular and the universal. 

Gentle perspectivism

The notion of gentle perspectivism refers most particularly to how scholarly work on ‘external’ phenomena should be approached by academics but blends in this argument below about the foreign gaze as well. As to the clip: just a gentle take on manners and this obsession with ties that British men accross the class divide display at every possible public occasion. 

Exiles (III)

More against that kind of fashionable metropolitan cosmopolitanism where freedom of decision seems always guaranteed. The name of the clip “Betik eskamak kentzen” refers to a Basque popular song by fishermen’s wives “always removing the scales from the fish” .

Exiles (II)

Last week we ended by placing emphasis on the possibility of positive things happening from living in a state of exile and marginality. This week we explore the tension between the exile’s search for evasion within the different homes/worlds inhabited and the necessity of continuous self-assessment. Central to the clip below is a poem called The River by Basque exile Joseba Sarrionaindia. 

Exiles

Last week I mentioned Edward Said, a huge thinker of Palestinian origin who died a few years ago after a long illness with leukaemia. Following a more or less deserved holidays we should all have settled down by now. Here I continue with his reflections on exiled intellectual life. No major short-circuits and no animals this time. Just a straightforward series of quotes on his honour, and a video clip by Joseba Sarrionaindia, perhaps the Basque writer who better epitomises the ups and downs of exile life.

On Summer and travel –and III- Mask lovers, lobsters & polyglots

Last on the lazy summer series. Since the log is also about the language of migrants and exiles here below is a clip in memory of Edward Said.

On Summer and travel –II- Why global terrorist monsters should not complain

Summer: everything slows down. Here is the second on the series on travelling cultures. The clip is related to the topic but is already thinking of Christmas. Blues.