The corporate constitution of national culture

Michael Silk, Jessica Francombe, D L Andrews

OAI: oai:purehost.bath.ac.uk:publications/30280389-5e71-472b-82cd-ef9b3bc84168 • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2014.941326

Focussing on corporatized and mediated imaginings of nation – as highly political, public and pedagogic processes – we aim within this paper to address important questions of cultural identification and discursive address. Our focus is on the ubiquity of the year 1966 in popular narratives of Englishness in the immediacy of major football tournaments: connoting far more than football, we argue that the mythopoesis of 1966 – as a somewhat artificial, powerful myth-making mnemonic – is a historically situated toponym that conjures up the supremacy of England on the international stage. Further, through the performance of an aesthetic of selective silence, we propose that the mythopoeia of 1966 reasserts a utopic abstraction of nation, and acceptance and enactment of, and acquiescence to, mythical English ‘values’.