Official Stories: Politics and National Narratives in #Egypt and #Algeria is first and foremost a study of how state leaderships construct and reconstruct the national narrative over time in response to crises. National narratives are generated at different levels, both popular and official, but my interest was in understanding state policy and intent, so I chose to look only at manifestations of the official narrative. Even there, however, the narrative is multi-stranded and complex. It includes not just the state version of the nation’s history, but also a range of values, aspirations, identity elements, etc. Since I wanted the study to be comparative and to capture evolution over time, I decided to delimit the number of narrative strands to be covered, ultimately selecting the themes of the founding story or myth, definitions of national unity, and parameters of national identity for detailed exploration. The literature on the historical aspects of national narratives overlaps to some extent with memory studies, but I was interested in what others have called the construction of a usable past: how leaderships script historical elements in order to utilize them to maintain power in the present. I wanted to understand changing constructions of national identity and unity in this same framework of their utility to regime maintenance. Thus, part of the theoretical grounding of the study derives from classic works on nationalism and national identity construction. In addition, there is broad literature in propaganda studies, which overlaps with my concerns in that it explores how leaderships (and others) have constructed messages to address challenges or achieve particular political outcomes. However, as I progressed through the project, I was drawn to an approach that focused specifically on crisis points—which have been theorized as providing the greatest opportunities for shifts in a narrative—and what changes may have been introduced in response. Thus, I also situate this work theoretically among works that have sought to explore the resilience of authoritarianism, demonstrating that the reframing or reconstruction of the national story, national identity, or conceptions of national unity need to be understood as one of many tools available to leaderships seeking to consolidate or maintain power.
Posted on: Wed, 24 Sep 2014 19:31:28 +0000
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