Abstract
This chapter takes as its point of departure the opening chapter of the work of Gabriella Elgenius (2011) and, to a lesser extent, the work of Benedict Anderson (2006) who has argued that nations are but ‘cultural artefacts’ and ‘imagined communities’. I am drawn to the idea that the nation as an entity exists first and foremost in the imagination, an artefact comprising various elements chosen to fit that imagining. For, as will be discussed in this chapter, just as nations are cultural artefacts, so too are the aspects of heritage that they choose to symbolise, imagine, define and build themselves. Elgenius argues that symbolism is an important part of the nation-building process. For her, these symbols include such things as flags, anthems and national days. She further states that ‘nations are layered and their formations ongoing and visible in the adoption of national symbols’ (2011, p. 1). Taking the Channel Islands as my case study, in this chapter I shall argue that the German occupation of 1940 to 1945 added a new layer to the islands’ identity. That is, it provided a new range of symbols and events (cultural artefacts) out of which new identities were imagined and constructed. Alongside new layers of post-occupation identity that have gradually accreted since 1945, the formation of the nationhood of the Channel Islands has similarly been an ongoing process and has been subject to similar ongoing change.
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Acknowledgements
The second half of this chapter has reproduced some of my earlier paper: Carr G. (2017) ‘A culturally constructed darkness: dark legacies and dark heritage in the Channel Islands’ in G. Hooper and J.J Lennon (Eds) Dark Tourism: Practice and Interpretation. pp. 96–107, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. My thanks to the publishers for allowing me to reproduce sections of that paper here.
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Carr, G. (2018). Denial of the Darkness, Identity and Nation-Building in Small Islands: A Case Study from the Channel Islands. In: R. Stone, P., Hartmann, R., Seaton, T., Sharpley, R., White, L. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Dark Tourism Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-47566-4_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-47566-4_15
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