The imagology site will maintain a blog of contemporary manifestations of national essentialism – the spread of ethnotypes and the belief in ethnicity/“culture” as a social explanation. Many of these are diffuse, ephemeral, “banal”. Hence the need to capture and document them.
We congratulate Dagmar Lorenz on the “Outstanding Academic Title” citation with which her book Nazi Characters in German Propaganda and Literature has been honoured. This book is vol. 24 in the Studia Imagologica series.
The citations are awarded annually by Choice (the review periodical of the Association of College and Research Libraries of the American Library Organization) to a select number of the 6000 publications it reviews each year.
We are delighted to announce that the handbook edited by Manfred Beller and Joep Leerssen, Imagology: The Cultural Construction and Literary Representation of National Characters : a Critical Survey (Amsterdam/Leiden: Rodopi/Brill, 2007), has been made available for Open Access consultation on this website by kind permission from Brill Publishers in Leiden. The contents are posted here under Creative Commons license CC-BY-NC-ND, meaning that users can make free use of the posted articles, provided they give appropriate credit (source reference), refrain from using the material for commercial purposes, and do not distribute the material in modified or altered form.
For users’ convenience, the handbook’s many cross-references have been turned into clickable hyperlinks. The bibliographies are given as they were in the 2007 book; more recent material may be found in the website’s Bibliography section.
We invite you to check out the handbook contents under the Ethnotypology tab!
The Volkskrant reports (21 August 2019) that The Natherlands have the right to name a new exoplanet. The public have been asked to submit suggestions to a committee (oops, sorry, a “National Committee”, of course). Its president, Marieke Baan, is putting her hopes on a “nice, Dutch theme” for the name (een lekker Hollands thema), such as one of the Wadden islands or a painter (Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Bosch, Vermeer, etc). Banal nationalism takes to the stars — to infinity and beyond.