questions about national identity

this week, the issue of national identity has been constantly in my head. it seems like 2 unrelated modules i am taking have spontaneously decided to focus on national identity. in Culture, Text & Identity, we've been looking at Chinhua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia and the issue of the nation through the Enlightenment and nativism, while the topic of the week for Poetry In English Since 1945 has been Scottish Poetry and the grapling of the issue of Scotland as a nation.

in fact, the i've been reflecting on all the issues so much that the when i read a question in the graduate application for M&C Saatchi (which was 'Distil the 21st Century in 21 words'), the first phrase that came to my head was 'disintegration of national boundaries and identity'.

scary.

while i was sitting in my Scottish Poetry class, i started to think how even more foreign this is to me than it is to the other people in the class. i have enough problems understanding poetry in English, let alone dialect (and/or understanding half the references). hopefully things will pick up when we study Indian poets. Or Aussies.