Who and What We Are

History Against the Grain

"We birthed a nation from nothing,” says Rick Santorum, the goggle-eyed Christian nut job and former U.S. Senator. For Santorum’s audience it is all too clear who he means by “we” - an imagined nation of white Christian people hermetically sealed in time and exclusively responsible for the authentic American identity. Well, from the nothingness of Rick Santorum’s historical mind to the machinations of China’s language authorities, the history police never tire of telling us who and what we really are. According to historian Prasenjit Duara, the nation-state “stakes its claim to sovereign authority, in part, as custodians of authenticity,” and we regularly see efforts by sovereigns and stewards of the national interest to determine the cultural norms that most authentically define us. Our guest this episode, Gina Anne Tam is the author of Dialect and Nationalism in China, 1860-1960, a fascinating look at how various sovereign interests and cultural arbiters in China’s nation-building project wielded language as a litmus for defining China’s ‘authentic’ identity. From melting pot to Middle Kingdom, we consider how claims of cultural authenticity reflect more often the interests of national marketing than the lived experience of people.