When we think about our identity, our sense of belonging and cultural values where do you associate yourself? When we get behind our athletes at the recent Olympic Games we immediately call them ours because they wear the green and gold, but who do they really identify themselves as? This national culture has slowly disintegrated in an evolving technological and deterritorialised space. ‘Much has been written about how electronic media have transformed our understanding of temporality, spatiality, and a sense of who we are as individuals’. (Sun, 2002, p.115) The global atmosphere as Wanning Sun puts it is memoryless, losing the inability to translate historical stories to our younger generations.
The fear of losing one’s freedom or the ability to gain
employment in Australia is ever increasing, and thus contributes to the national
consciousness and patriotism that our government continues to promote. In doing
this we control other races and cultures such as the Chinese, through slavery
and delve to ensure our superiority.
‘…there will be nothing we Chinese
will be able to do to wipe away the humiliation and suffering of being an
enslaved people.... Wake up! If you do not make a determined effort to
strengthen our nation, we will soon be confronted with the death of our people
and the destruction of our ancient civilisation’. (Sun, 2002, p.114)
The mediatised and technological world has progressed our
international sphere into one of angst, searching for national stories and one’s
identity, whilst being caught in the midst of a “motherland fantasy”.
References:
Image: Drake K 2008, Our
National Identity, National Identity Task Force, retrieved 14 August 2012, http://canadian-unitarian-council.pbworks.com/w/page/13798009/Our%20National%20Identity.
Sun, W 2002, ‘Fantasizing the homeland, the internet, memory and
exilic longings’, Leaving China: media, migration, and transnational
imagination, Rowan & Littlefield, Lanham, Md., pp. 113–36.
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