Reflexivity or orientation? Collective memories in the Australian, Canadian and New Zealand national press
Summary (2 min read)
Introduction
- This article examines how the Australian, Canadian and New Zealand national press reported on the 2012 Diamond Jubilee and London Olympic Games.
- This is especially apparent during transnational and international events, such as, the Diamond Jubilee and London Olympic Games (Black, 2015).
Cosmopolitanism
- Studies of globalisation have frequently considered the ways in which global interactions go beyond the confines of the national context to include transnational processes of collaboration.
- This, Bewes (1997) argues, forms part of Beck’s (1992; Beck et al., 2003) ‘reflexive modernization’, a perspective that is extended in his work on cosmopolitanism, which explores how national cultures have become more ‘open’ to global diversity (Beck, 2006).
- There is, in both Beck (2006) and Sreberny-Mohammadi’s (1991) remarks, a tendency to direct attention towards the impossibility of accounting for the ‘effects’ of ‘post-modern’ cultural ambivalences; an approach that circumvents the opportunity to explore how such assemblages, differentiations and contradictions are historically and ideologically defined.
- Specifically, Skey (2013) contests that there ‘are different forms of engagement with particular “others”, informed by vastly different social resources and constraints’ (2013: 248).
- Following Skey’s (2013) critique, it is apparent that ‘the analytical dimensions of the concept [cosmopolitanism] remain much too broad, premised on the idea of “openness” and a willingness to engage with “others”’ (2013: 249 see also Ryan, 2014).
Cosmopolitan Memory
- It was noted in the previous section that understandings of cosmopolitanism can overemphasise, and, in some instances, under-theorise, the extent to which interactions with ‘the other’ are performed (Skey, 2013).
- Such scrutiny of the ways in which national cultures engage with global processes, has underscored work that has examined the application of the cosmopolitan perspective (Kennedy, 2013; Ryan, 2014; Skey, 2013; 2014; Weenink, 2008).
- While Levy and Sznaider (2002) demonstrated the extent to which national collective memories revealed a degree of similarity, this was a process that was tempered by each nation’s history and the extent to which global collective memories combined ‘to form something new’ (2002: 89).
- National identity and imperial loyalty were closely entwined, securing the spread of British culture, while also creating a context from which the dominions could develop symbols and narratives that exhibited their own emerging identities as ‘separate’ nation-states (Gare, 2000; Holt, 1989; Llewellyn, 2015; Maguire, 1999; McDougall, 2005; McGregor, 2006; Ward, 2007).
- When considered in conjunction with the ‘reflexive awareness’ that characterizes cosmopolitanism, it is proposed that collective memories can offer a ‘means of orientation’ that, in the case of national newspapers, can serve an important function in positioning, managing and demarcating ‘the nation’.
Method
- This study selected the following national newspapers for analysis: The n and The Age ; The Globe and Mail and the Vancouver Sun ; and the Dominion Post and New Zealand Herald (New Zealand).
- Following this coding process, each newspaper was inductively examined in order to identify themes that critically reflected upon each ‘nation’ as well as the ‘Commonwealth’ (open coding).
- These examples reflect a complex coalescence of national and Commonwealth affiliation (Foster-Bell, 2012; The Globe and Mail, 2012), through which the apparent ‘global’ benefits of the Commonwealth were covalent with national sovereignty/identity (Hape, 2012).
- Indeed, the purpose here is not to deny the involvement of Australians in both the organisation of the 2012 games and the success of ‘Team GB’, but instead, to draw attention to the ways in which the above examples were closely bound by rivalries that reflected former ‘imperial’ clashes (Maguire, 1993; Malcolm, 2012).
- As Rudman’s (2012) comments suggest, changes in the relationship between New Zealand and Britain – and the emerging interdependence of New Zealand with Asia – were framed through narratives that paradoxically emphasized the Queen’s ‘foreign’ characteristics (‘Buckingham Palace’/‘English farming family’) (Milne, 2012) while at the same time appraising New Zealand’s assistance in supporting the former ‘motherland’ (Rothwell, 2012).
An ‘inevitable’ Republic and Australian anxiety
- It is apparent that ‘a consistent feature of contestation surrounding decolonizing Whitesettler nationalisms is the “resolution” of the critique and historical reassessment of colonialism and its legacy that challenges nationalist unity’ (Falcous, 2007: 387).
- Clearly, Australia’s ties to Britain, and the values that underpinned the ‘Anglosphere’ were presented as a prominent feature of Australia’s domestic politics, a relationship that should not be displaced because of offended ‘neighbours’.
- The above examples reveal that discourses of oppression, can be continued into the present, albeit in more symbolic ways.
Summary and Conclusion
- Across the Commonwealth press, both Commonwealth and monarchical attachments were clearly evoked.
- Moreover, it fails to elucidate upon those examples where the nation’s past stands as ‘the other’ (Cole, 2001).
- In doing so, examples of ‘national reflexivity’ did not objectively overlook, uncritically absorb or acknowledge differences with ‘the other’ (Beck, 2006), but instead, were closely related to collective memories drawn from each nation’s ‘imperial history’.
- Collective memories of the British Empire provided an interpretative matrix through which ‘selective renditions’ (Falcous and Newman, 2013) from each nation’s imperial past were rendered through a process of ‘memory conflict’ (Ryan, 2014) that could both assert or undermine ‘the nation’ (Rothwell, 2012).
- In doing so, the British Empire/Commonwealth provided a wealth of past and present reflections that were reflexively used to ‘orientate’ each nation’s postcolonial emergence.
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"Reflexivity or orientation? Collect..." refers background in this paper
...(New Zealand Herald, 6 June 2012, italics added) This is constitutive of British-dominion relations over the twentieth century (Kohe, 2015) whereby ‘strategies of state minimilization, deregulation, and reorientation to global – particularly Asian-Pacific – markets were symptomatic of the…...
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4 citations
"Reflexivity or orientation? Collect..." refers background in this paper
...Elsewhere, Ho (2013) has viewed such attachments as a form of ‘Colonial (re)connectivity’, a process which reflects the ‘emotional imagination and reconnection between the coloniser and the colonised’ (p. 2210)....
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2 citations
"Reflexivity or orientation? Collect..." refers result in this paper
...…Sun, 11 August 2012) and New Zealand’s ‘future … bound … with Asia’ (Rudman, 2012), worked in direct contrast with Australian reports, whereupon Australia’s ties with the former British Empire revealed ‘deep concerns about the status of its historical experience’ (Hughes-d’Aeth, 2003: 220)....
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Frequently Asked Questions (7)
Q2. What is the meaning of ‘cosmopolitan memory’?
Ryan (2014) highlights that:Cosmopolitan memory as a concept, although excellently delineated, is fraught with the dangers of potential conceptual reductionism, for a lack of precision in defining the exact nature of its relationship with national memory cultures may culminate in its theoretical deployment as an all-encompassing term, which signifies that national memory cultures adopt universal ethical criteria, without an attendant scrutiny of the intricacies of their relationship (2014: 511).
Q3. What was the role of New Zealand in the Olympic Games?
In other instances, both the Diamond Jubilee and Olympic Games provided theopportunity for the former dominions to subjugate their colonial pasts for narratives that emphasised their own national autonomy and identity.
Q4. What was the biggest source of talent for London 2012?
(The Weekend Australian, 11/08/12a)Similarly, Wilson (2012) stated:Britain’s openness to people, trade and ideas also helped London 2012 to do a better job than any other host city by using foreign talent to stage the Games, with the biggest source of that talent being Australia.
Q5. What is the significance of the New Zealand code?
whereas such codes sought to ‘invert’ New Zealand’s colonial past, paradoxically, these codes were ambivalently located alongside New Zealand’s history of Anglo-European migration and the tendency for Pakeha attributes to hold salience in New Zealand’s national mythology (Bell, 1996; Falcous, 2007).
Q6. What is the definition of ‘reflexive modernization’?
Bewes (1997) argues, forms part of Beck’s (1992; Beck et al., 2003) ‘reflexive modernization’, a perspective that is extended in his work on cosmopolitanism, which explores how national cultures have become more ‘open’ to global diversity (Beck, 2006).
Q7. What was the main point of Carney’s reflections?
As can be seen, Carney’s (2012) reflections were laden by the failure for republican debates to gain any substantial support within the former dominions.