Patrick Colm Hogan, Understanding Nationalism: On Narrative, Cognitive Science, and Identity. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2009. ISBN: 978-081421107-6. Price: US$69.95

Patrick Colm Hogan’s Understanding Nationalism: On Narrative, Cognitive Science, and Identity is an exemplary addition to the growing interdisciplinary field of cognitive cultural studies, whose proponents examine literary and cultural artifacts through the lenses of neurobiology, anthropology, cognitive linguistics, philosophy of mind, evolutionary psychology, and related disciplines within the biological and social science spectrum. Hogan himself is one of the leading theorists of cognitive cultural studies, thanks to groundbreaking books such as The Mind and its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion (2003) and Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts: A Guide for Humanists (2003). These works have emphasized universal narrative structures and patterns of thinking which undergird literary and cultural artifacts. The most important of these prototypes is heroic narrative, which Hogan describes as the “default form for nationalism” (16). Heroic structure involves “a sequence of events bearing on the usurpation of in-group authority and … threats posed by an out-group” (12). The typical conclusion of such a plot is the triumph of the national in-group over its opponents, though the details vary considerably across cultures. In chapter five, Hogan links together three different heroic nationalist plots from widely disparate contexts. First, he examines the King David story in the bible and shows its importance for Israeli nationalism, especially the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict. Hogan then analyzes the blockbuster American film Independence Day (1996) in order to highlight its distinctively American features. He suggests that American heroic nationalism depicts the United States as a protector of world freedom, even when invasion of other nations is involved (as in the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan). The transition between Israeli and U.S. nationalisms meshes because the King David story briefly surfaces in Independence Day (a Jewish character named David helps defeat the aliens using a humble laptop computer, in a neat parallel with the David and Goliath story). Hogan shows how patriotic films like Independence Day, combined with George Bush’s martial rhetoric in his September 11 speeches, primed Americans for two wars in the Middle East. Bush’s speech achieved cognitive resonance through its use of heroic emplotment, pitting freedom-loving Americans against a vaguely defined but malevolent enemy. Hogan shows how ostensibly non-narrative works like speeches often fit predictable narrative patterns. The chapter exemplifies a distaste for politicians who manipulate citizens’ patriotic sentiments while secretly harboring their own reasons for going to war, including “control of oil, establishing a right to invade enemy nations, etc.” (187n). Insofar as Hogan implies that a nation’s reasons for going to war are rarely compelling enough to justify the killing of innocents he may be undermining the scientific neutrality that ostensibly underwrites the cognitive approach. A second nationalist prototype, the sacrificial narrative that emerges during times of famine, military defeat, or devastating plagues is the subject of Hogan’s sixth chapter. Fundamentally religious, this kind of narrative involves national sacrifice to placate an angry God. In the “purgative” form of the sacrificial plot, a nation identifies an internal enemy supposedly at fault for the country’s problems (304). In the most extreme cases, this enemy is targeted for extermination as in Nazi Germany’s “final solution.” Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (1925-6) is, thus, a particularly devastating example of a purgative sacrificial plot. By contrast, Mohandas Gandhi’s lectures on the Bhagavad Gītā (1926) exemplify such a “penitential” sacrificial plot enjoining practices such as fasting, chastity, and non-violence to further nationalist aims, rather than resorting to violence. The juxtaposition of Hitler and Gandhi in this chapter is unsettling, to say the least. Gandhi suffers somewhat in the comparison, turning out to be more eccentric and militaristic than most people would imagine. …