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After the 2008 global crisis, Italy has experienced a relevant resumption of emigration. Tens of thousands of young Italians have chosen London as their favourite destination, giving rise to a new Italian community in the city. This article focuses on the transformation of migrants' national identity and on a distinctive device of identity expression: language. Sample cases, extracted from a dataset collected for an original doctoral project, are used to explain how the insertion of English elements in speakers' native language become the expression of the loss of pure national identity and of the renegotiation of transnational and migratory identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite its hegemony as a financial centre, the City of London occupied a relatively minor place in the discourse of British imperialism. Periodic collapses and scandals made the City an inscrutable source of anxiety, engendering a need to distance it from the mainstream of national life. This distancing centred on doubts about the City’s national identity, stemming from its increasingly cosmopolitan interests and its contingent of prominent Jews, who were conventionally understood to have no nationality. Scrutiny of discourse on the City leads to a richer understanding of the role of ‘Semitic discourse’ in the construction of British national identity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper engages a close analytical reading of the lyrics of ‘God Save the King/Queen’ in order to understand what the functional survival of this song tells us about the rhetorical/affective investments of national devotion in the British sense. This study asks also how the lyrics of ‘God Save the King/Queen’ figure in the general definition of anthem and in the generic classification of anthems worldwide? Because of the song's international spread, and status as ‘Ur-anthem’, much may be gleaned from it as to both the nature of the speech act entailed in the prayer-type of anthem and the nature of ‘anthem quality’ more generally. ‘Anthem quality’, for the purposes of this paper, is defined as that soul stirring effect which certain combinations of music and lyrics achieve, most typically in the service of national affiliation. Theories of nation and nationalism are drawn on to frame affective relations between nation, state and citizenry as implied by, fostered by and utilized in anthems. Parodies and other derivative texts are considered in order to reach a better understanding of the sources and the pragmatic uses of anthem quality in the world today. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Over 10 years have passed since the current phase of devolution in the United Kingdom started and the article investigates its effects on Scottish political discourse on national identity focusing on the unionist version. Based on an analysis of recent political utterances in Scotland, the article argues that the current devolution settlement has revived and entrenched unionist nationalism in the Scottish political discourse. It also shows that one of the effects of devolution on the debate on national identity is a clearer sign of increasing contestation of Britishness, and suggests that devolution is a double-edge sword in management of multiple national identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Scottish National Party (SNP) has been strongly critical of attempts to resuscitate British national identity and has sought to present an alternative Scottish cultural and political identity that is projected as ‘wholly civic’. However, questions persist as to how the SNP understand concepts such as citizenship and nationality and the extent to which their civic nationalism is reflected empirically in speeches and policies, particularly since forming a minority Scottish government in 2007. This article seeks to explore how the SNP and other Scottish separatists construct an independent Scottish state, nation and people. In particular, it will assess how Scottish separatists address Scottish nationality, multi-nationality and also its transnational imperial legacy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines nationalist impulses toward a familiar, traditional heteronormativity through the language and imagery of a sample of tabloid newspapers in Britain during the Falklands War in 1982. In doing so, it asks how tabloid representation of the war created a particular and normative version of 'Britishness', central to which was the English woman, whose body became the site for a specific coalescing of race, gender and sexuality; a fixed notion of whiteness and normative heterosexuality located in the particular, unstable cultural space of a struggling 'post-colonial' Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article claims that while the concept of ethno-nationalism may be taken as shorthand for describing what appear to be the dominant features of certain political conflicts, it possesses little explanatory value -- instead obscuring and confusing more than it reveals. Using the Northern Ireland case as an illustrative example, it is argued that the reluctance to problematise or contextualise ethnic claims means that ethnic conflict theorists may effectively contribute to the reproduction of dominant narratives. The article explicitly rejects the notion that a single framework should replace the ethno-national model. Instead, it highlights the importance of focusing issues of timing and historical sequencing, source criticism and empirical evidence, as well as the significance of marginal narratives and experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines whether shared national values form a vital component in the construction and development of national identity. In so doing, it challenges Kymlicka and Norman in their assumption that shared values have little relevance for national identity. Drawing upon competing nationalist discourses in Canada, Quebec, Scotland and the United Kingdom, we argue that the idea of shared values serves as a useful tool in shaping and reinforcing national identities within multinational states. Such values contribute to defining the collective conception of national identity, describing who we are as a people, and what it is that binds us together while distinguishing us from others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes some of the ways that 'Greater Britain' functioned as a component of British national identity for some of those devoted to the ideal of a united empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As outspoken advocates of a united empire, historians such as Charles Lucas and Hugh Egerton, promoted and adapted what was essentially a cultural 'story' that helped shape and communicate this identity. The article also seeks to demonstrate how these ideas were reflected in a variety of organisations that supported the ideal of a united empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is concerned with the dialogic construction of Greek national and British imperial identities. It examines the gendered language in which the Greeks and the British addressed each other in the 1860s and the 1870s. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, anthropology, studies of nationalism and post-colonial theory, it looks at the symbolic structure of Anglo-Greek cultural exchange. In this analysis, it is argued that the familial imageries both sides employed to describe themselves and/or each other were constitutive of the roles they had assumed in Anglo-Greek relations, but also part of the very process of Greek nation-building and British imperialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]