National identities on the move: Examples from the historical worlds of Greater Britain and Hellenism

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to explore 'the mobility of national identities' with reference to the field of education. It argues that as products of multimodal discourse, national identities can move across or between geopolitical settings, and in the process of their movement they tend to shift and change their shape in certain ways. To test this argument the article employs examples from the nineteenth and twentieth century worlds of Greater Britain and Hellenism. In particular, by looking at various school books and practices it seeks to illustrate the movement of identity from Britain to New Zealand and from Greece to Cyprus and the changes that the mobile identities went through as they moved across these settings. The article finishes with an initial theorisation of the 'dimensions' of the mobility of national identities and a call for comparative education to engage with mobile and shifting identities in the postcolonial and postmodern cosmos. © 2009 Taylor & Francis.