Looking Forward to the Past: National Identity and History in Malta

Abstract

Critiques of the essentialising tendencies of nationalist discourse are well established in the social sciences—particularly in anthropology. This article builds on the calls for a more processual approach to national identity. It focuses not only on the problematic essentialism of discourses of national identity, but also on their inherent teleology. Social scientists have shared with nationalists a view of national identity as a problem that needs to be solved, and in doing so have adopted a teleological view that assumes that at some point in the future resolution is both possible and desirable. Picking up on recent theorisations of identity, the article argues that identity is inherently irresolvable, and for this reason we are better off investigating not the content of particular national identities, but the processes through which identities are debated—or indeed identity itself as a category is debated. The article concerns national identity in Malta, particularly the role of historians in articulating the identity debates. It links controversies within the historical community to the distinctive polarities of Maltese party politics, which developed in colonial Malta and continue into the post-colonial era. Although initially concerned with defining the content of national identity, political and historical debate shifted in the late twentieth century to focus on how it should be defined—and indeed whether identity was a useful category for describing Malta and its people. The article argues that this shift from content to process should be acknowledged by analysts of national identity, who should revise their analyses accordingly.

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