Secularization and the Question of the Nation

National identity, like all identities, is fundamentally driven by latent internal conflicts that may become manifest in periodic moments of crisis. The ever-present conflictual nature of identity, which may be repressed through the successful deployment of narrative devices, becomes manifest when a given narrative becomes inoperative as the consequence of certain events or encounters of forces. However, the crisis is not the product of the failures of a particular narrative but a fundamental feature of identity that moments of narrative failure allow us to glimpse.

The dominant narrative device deployed in accounts of transformations of national identity is secularization. It is through the narrative device of secularization that a continuous transhistorical identity can be forged between a historical nation once defined by its essential religiosity and a contemporary society for which secularity is deemed a fundamental value and social form.

In reference to my work on the history of the relationship between religion and national identity in Québec, this presentation will examine how, within moments of crisis in national identity, religion and the secular prove crucial to conceptions of national identity. The centrality of the religious and the secular to historical understandings of identity, and the prominence of secularization in narratives of transformations of the nation provide a valuable entry to analyzing moments of crisis, struggle and transformation in national identity, and are revelatory of both the fragility and endurance of national identity. Thinking of the history of the nation in this way provides an alternative historical narrative of the nation, one in which crisis serves as the locus of dissolution, transformation and consolidation.

By Ian Morrison
Associate Professor of Sociology at The American University in Cairo

For more information about the HUSS Research Seminar Series: https://huss.aucegypt.edu/huss-research-seminar-series

Public and Community Events | View More Events

Contact the organizers