Abstract
While ‘nationalism’, as Pheng Cheah observed, ‘has almost become the exemplary figure for death’, death itself has served as an abiding figure for the nation.1 Embodied by such monuments as tombs and war memorials, the foundations of national identity are often commemorative, forged through a memorialization of loss and invocation of the memory of the dead. But national identity is spectral in other ways as well. Its protean, notoriously amorphous expressions are not only phantasmic, the atavistic conjurations of an imputed national past, but also fantastic, the projections of an imagined national future. As Benedict Anderson has famously argued, nations come into being through imagined affiliation, affective fantasies of shared identity and history.2 Drawing on this observation, recent criticism has explored the analogous, and at times coeval, relation between national identity and historical memory.3
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Notes
Cheah, Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), p. 1.
Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983; London: Verso, 1991).
For discussion, see my chapter ‘Forgetting the Ulster Plantation’ in England’s Internal Colonies: Class, Capital, and the Literature of Early Modern English Colonialism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp.171–99, as well as Philip Schwyzer, Literature, Nationalism, and Memory in Early Modern England and Wales (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004).
On theories of memory, see especially Kerwin Lee Klein, ‘On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse,’ Representations, 69 (Winter 2000) 127–50
Pierre Nora (ed.) Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, 3 vols, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996)
and Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
Quoted in W. T. Jewkes, ‘Sir Francis Drake Revived: From Letters to Legend,’ in Norman J. W. Thrower (ed.) Sir Francis Drake and the Famous Voyage, 1577–1580: Essays Commemorating the Quadricentennial of Drake’s Circumnavigation of the Earth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 119.
See Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds) The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
The story of Drake at bowls has a long history, first appearing in Thomas Scott’s Second Part of Vox Populi (London: William Jones, 1624);
see Harry Kelsey, Sir Francis Drake: The Queen’s Pirate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 321.
My point is influenced by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s discussion of ‘minor literature’ in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), esp. 16–27.
David Lloyd, ‘Nationalisms Against the State’, in Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd (eds) The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), pp. 173–97.
William Shakespeare, 2 Henry IV, ed. A.R. Humphreys, Arden Shakespeare (London and New York: Routledge, 1989).
Henry Robarts, A most friendly farewell, Giuen by a welwiller to the right worshipful Sir Frauncis Drake knight (London: Walter Mantell and Thomas Lawe, 1585), sig. A2v.
See, for example, Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations Voyages Traffiques & Discoveries of the English Nation (1598–1600; London: J. M. Dent, 1927), 10 vols, pp. 7: 77–97.
Peele, A Farewell. Entituled to the famous and fortunate Generalls of our English forces: Sir Iohn Norris & Syr Frauncis Drake (London: I. C, 1589), sig. A3.
Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 248.
Nerlich, Ideology of Adventure: Studies in Modern Consciousness, 1100–1750, Volume 1, trans. Ruth Crowley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 116.
Stevenson, Praise and Paradox: Merchants and Craftsmen in Elizabethan Popular Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
Étienne Balibar, ‘Citizen Subject’, in Who Comes After the Subject, ed. Eduardo Cadava et al. (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 33–57;
John Michael Archer, Citizen Shakespeare: Freemen and Aliens in the Language of the Plays (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005);
Julia Reinhard Lupton, Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
Among earlier studies, see Patrick Collinson, ‘De Republica Anglorum: Or History with the Politics Put Back’ and ‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’, in Elizabethan Essays (London: Hambledon, 1994), pp. 1–30, 31–57
and J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975).
Mary Fuller, Voyages in Print: English Travel to America, 1576–1624 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 141–74.
Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 187, 175.
Among other sources on this topic, see Anne Barton, ‘Harking Back to Elizabeth: Ben Jonson and Caroline Nostalgia’, ELH, 48 (1981) 706–31.
D. R. Woolf, ‘Two Elizabeths? James I and the Late Queen’s Famous Memory’, Canadian Journal of History 20 (1985) 167–91;
Curtis Perry, ‘The Citizen Politics of Nostalgia: Queen Elizabeth in Early Jacobean London’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 23 (1993) 89–111, republished in The Making of Jacobean Culture: James I and the Renegotiation of Elizabethan Literary Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997), pp. 153–87;
John Watkins, Representing Elizabeth in Stuart England: Literature, History, Sovereignty (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002).
Claire Jowitt, Voyage Drama and Gender Politics 1589–1642 (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003), pp. 61–103, 140–90.
Ernest Renan, ‘What is a Nation?’ in Homi K. Bhabha (ed.) Nation and Narration (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 8–22. Cf. Anderson’s discussion of Renan in Imagined Communities, pp. 199–201.
Fredric Jameson, ‘Marx’s Purloined Letter’, in Michael Sprinker (ed.) Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 60.
Jaques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), p. 6.
Claire McEachern, The Poetics of English Nationhood, 1590–1612 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 6.
Michelle O’Callaghan, The ‘Shepheards Nation’: Jacobean Spenserians and Early Stuart Political Culture, 1612–1625 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000), p. 128.
Thomas Cogswell, The Blessed Revolution: English Politics and the Coming of War, 1621–1624 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 97.
David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), p. 198.
William Camden, The History of the Most Renowned and Victorious Princess Elizabeth Late Queen of England, ed. Wallace T. MacCaffrey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 209;
William Davenant, The Dramatic Works of Sir William D’Avenant, vol. 4 (New York: Russell & Russell, 1964), pp. 53, 55, 58, 65.
Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. David Fernbach (London: Penguin/New Left Review, 1981), p. 3:448. For a relevant discussion
see Barbara Fuchs, ‘Faithless Empires: Pirates, Renagadoes, and the English Nation’, ELH, 67 (2000) 45–69.
Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
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Netzloff, M. (2007). Sir Francis Drake’s Ghost: Piracy, Cultural Memory, and Spectral Nationhood. In: Jowitt, C. (eds) Pirates? The Politics of Plunder, 1550–1650. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230627642_9
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