Abstract
Scholarly understandings of collective identity depend upon two related insights: that political communities are imagined and that they are created through rhetoric. Those interested in investigating these processes initially focused on the nation and thus also on the role of elites, especially US presidents, in its creation and maintenance. Studies of national identity have always noted that conceptions of collective identity change over time, offering both important routes of inclusion and also maintaining powerful hierarchies and requiring specific kinds of exclusions. Increasingly, scholars are turning their attention to examinations of how communities within, outside of, and crossing the borders of nation-states constitute identities; sometimes congruently with, sometimes in opposition to, and sometimes ignoring conceptions of national identity. Understanding collective identity, then, requires specific attention to how identity itself is understood, who is empowered to articulate it, and how it is conceptualized and circulated.
Original language | English (US) |
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Title of host publication | The Routledge Handbook of Rhetoric and Power |
Publisher | Taylor and Francis |
Pages | 133-143 |
Number of pages | 11 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9781040130032 |
ISBN (Print) | 9781032554693 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Jan 1 2024 |
All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes
- General Arts and Humanities
- General Social Sciences