Origins The Course Leadership		How it all began

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The National Imagination Initiative

Over the last decade, Clark’s foreign languages faculty has actively explored new intellectual approaches to the study of comparative literature within the context of a Foreign Languages department. Despite the broad and diverse range of our faculty’s research profiles and teaching interests, we share a common professional bond in that we all have been trained in a particular national language and culture. Comparative Literature has served us as a common ground for teaching, research and, perhaps most importantly, intellectual discussions that move colleagues and their students beyond the confines of individual national cultural traditions.

The series of department dialogues we initiated in the mid-1990s around the theme of national literatures and culture eventually led to the development of the pilot course, “Studies in the National Imagination.” This challenging new direction was motivated by a heuristic interest in probing the implicitly-held but seldom questioned belief that the source of national cultures was the result of linguistic and ethnic commonalities, that cultural identity and language were somehow naturally connected. We began our discussions with a simple inquiry into the relation between language (and implicitly language study) and culture (broadly understood as cultural production under the rubric of national literatures). Our discussions were initially informed by the works of authors such as Homi K. Bhabha, Benedict Anderson, Ernest Gellner and Eric Hobsbawm. These are writers who have theorized the concept of national communities in ways that bear directly on the themes that we teach and research in various national cultures. Over the past decade, as our readings and teaching around the concept of national cultures and language has evolved, so has our own thinking on the subject. It should be noted, however, that as the theme of globalization has become increasingly more central to humanistic studies, it has not been our intention to use the concept of the “national imagination” to secure an anachronistic and defensive notion of our areas of study. To the contrary, our objective is to use what we hold in common—training in language, professional interests in studying cultural production (literature, theater, film, related areas of artistic and intellectual exploration)—as the catalyst for our evolving understanding of the processes of cultural identity formation.