Nations And Identities

Ten essays define and explain how nationalism, identities and ethnic conflicts Hercules Millas are created and function. The Greeks, the Turks and their historiographies, textbooks and literary texts are studied as a case to show how ethnic images, perceptions and prejudices of the Other are formed and operate. Based on his personal interethnic lifelong experience, the author proposes a way to approach these issues in education, too. All the essays in this study make use of the comparative approach to demonstrate how national identities are associated with an imagined Other. The identity of the Self ?and national identity? as well as the related discourse can become meaningful and easy to understand when judged as counteractions of the involved groups. The whole endeavor is an effort to approach nationalism as a manifestation that needs to be examined with a variety of academic disciplines.
Imagologists are used to dealing with the distinction between auto-image and hetero-image. What Millas's research has highlighted is something which, to my knowledge, has not yet been thematized in image studies, but which is of great importance: the collapse between auto-image and hetero-image, our image of the other's image. I think something as important as this ?image of an image deserves its own name, so that it can be thematized without circumlocutions. The term ?meta-image seems to present itself. Prof. Dr. J. Th. Leerssen, University of Amsterdam