[This entry offers terminological clarifications as an adjunct to the introductory articles.]
The mental or discursive representation or reputation of a person, group, ethnicity or ‘nation’. This imagological usage is not to be confused with the generally current meaning of “pictorial or visual depiction”. Nor is an image tantamount to anything that can or has been said concerning a certain person, country or group. Factual report statements which are empirically testable (e.g. “the French, unlike the Germans, have direct presidential elections”) are not part of image-formations. Images specifically concern attributions of moral or characterological nature (e.g. “Spaniards are proud”); often they take the form of linking social facts and imputed collective psychologisms (e.g., “Paris is the capital of French elegance”, “the Dutch love of liberty derives from a tradition of local government and resisting foreign dominations”). To the extent that a discourse describing a given nationality, country or society relies on imputations of national character rather than on testable fact, it is called imaginated.
Images can vary according to their perspective. A fundamental distinction is the one between auto-image (or ‘self-image’) and hetero-image: the referring to a characterological reputation current within and shared by a group, the latter to the opinion that others have about a group’s purported character. Thomas Mann writing, as a German, about German culture expresses a German auto-image; Madame de Staël’s De l’Allemagne expresses an outside view or hetero-image. Since images tend to invoke
generally current commonplaces and reduce the complexity of historical contingency to the invariance of ingrained topoi and clichés, they are often considered a form of stereotype. In practice, images are mobile and changeable as all discursive constructs are. (For this reason, some scholars have preferred, in the past, the term imagotype to that of ‘stereotype’.) The image of Germany as developed by Madame de Staël, although conceived in a specific French-German polarity, has been exported as far and as wide as Madame de Staël’s fame and writings have spread, and has influenced the image of Germany in countries other than France. It has been observed that in some cases countries have exported their self-image and that these have been adopted abroad as hetero-images; or, in other cases, that countries have imported the hetero-image from hegemonic foreign sources and interiorized them as auto-images. There is reason to suspect that the direction of these processes is determined at least in part by power relations.
Much as images are mobile, so too they are changeable, both in valorization and in substance. Many images of denigrated savages (e.g., indigenous inhabitants of Europe’s colonies, or the Irish) were revalorized in the sentimental climate of the decades leading up to Romanticism: the Noble Savage is still bereft of the refinements of civility and proper manners, but this lack is now given the positive connotation of authenticity, intuitive honesty, moral forthrightness and closeness to nature. Conversely, the image of the refined Frenchman acquires pejorative connotations around the same time: those of artificiality, pretentiousness, untrustworthiness. Such changes (which are often driven by a complex combination of cultural taste and political circumstance) can also affect the very substance of the characteristics imputed to a given nation: over time, images may spawn their very opposite counter-images. Thus, in the image of England, the eighteenth-century type of the choleric, suicide-prone Englishman triggers, in the nineteenth century, the type of the phlegmatic, imperturbable dandy with the ‘stiff upper lip’. Sometimes history witnesses a succession of counter-images: The image of Germany switches from that of unrefined boors (seventeenth century) to that of abstruse, artistically inclined romantics (early nineteenth century) to that of soulless, obedient implementers of ruthless systematics (twentieth century).
In practice, these successive counter-images do not abolish each other but accumulate. As a result, in most cases, the image of a given nation will include a compound layering of different, contradictory counter-images, with (in any given textual expression) some aspects activated and dominant, but the remaining counterparts all latently, tacitly, subliminally present. As a result, most images of national character will boil down to a characteristic, or quasi-characterological, polarity: passion and arrogance
in the Spaniards, refinement and immorality in the Italians, gaiety and rationalism in the French, suaveness and pugnaciousness in the English, otherworldliness and ebullience in the Irish, contemplativeness and sensuality in the Flemings, etcetera. The ultimate cliché about any nation is that it is ‘a nation of contrasts’. An imageme is the term used to describe an image in all its implicit, compounded polarities.
There is also reason to suspect that the images which nations form of each other often involve an imputation of images. Work done by Millas (2004) on the mutual perception of Greeks and Turks has shown that the most deep-rooted points of enmity and mistrust lay, not in the hetero-image Greeks had of Turks, or Turks of Greeks; nor in the auto-image that Greeks had of themselves in relation to Turks, or Turks of themselves in relation to Greeks; but rather in the suspicions Greeks had about the Turks’ hetero-image concerning them, or Turkish suspicions as to Greek attitudes to Turkey (“Do they think we’re savages?”). Such meta-images (how a nation believes it is perceived by others) have been used in texts like Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes, G.B. Shaw’s John Bull’s other island and E.M. Forster’s A passage to India, often to ironic effect, and present one of the most challenging and promising perspectives for future investigation.