Intertwining histories : nation, migration and heritage

When it comes to the intersection of knowledge and nation, few modes of knowing are more relevant and more contested than history. As a scholar in cultural studies, a field whose main focus is contemporary, not historical, I have been predominantly interested in analysing and understanding the cultural condition of the present, not that of the past. Yet because history pervades the present, whether we are aware of it or not, it is deeply implicated in our public and private lives. History is an intimate part and parcel of contemporary culture and society, notwithstanding the historical amnesia and wilful forgetting of the past that is often said to be so characteristic of our postmodem times. And as society becomes ever more heterogeneous and more global, and therefore more complex and fractious, so does the role of history. The nation constitutes and knows itself through the telling of its history, but this very process of national history construction has come under severe pressure as a result of the partial deconstruction of "the nation" as a result of globalisation and its attendant centrifugal forces. These effects are clear in the difficulties many national societies currently experience in defining their national heritage, that is, in the way a nation collectively constructs a meaningful relationship between past and present, between its history and its contemporary condition. The meaning of heritage is profoundly symbolic: how and what a society values from the past says something about how it sees itself as a community today and how it projects itself into the future. Here, I wish to hold on to this broader, more ethical and political conception of heritage--one that can help us address the complex struggles around the constitution of national history in a time of increasing diversity, fluidity and global migrations. The nation I will refer to in particular is Australia. It is possible, of course, to argue, as does postcolonial historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, that we should not struggle for national history at all but, instead, rescue history from the nation, to render the very idea of a national history problematic. However, while the ideology of nationalism does indeed need continued and persistent critique, the very cultural centrality of nation in modem life, however problematic, does make its conceptual erasure from our vocabulary and imagination a rather impractical project. Whether we like it or not, an engagement within the present means an engagement with the nation - the actually existing nation. And an engagement with the nation means, inevitably, an engagement with its putative history and heritage.