REMAKING WALES - NATION-BUILDING AND THE GEOGRAPHICAL IMAGINATION, 1925-50

Despite the fact that many nationalist movements have the interpretation and control of social space at their core, studies of nationalism have tended to ignore the cultural dimensions of land and territory. There are, however, moves towards a historically and culturally sensitive reading of the role of geography in nationalism. This paper applies such a reading to the ideology of Plaid Cymru, the Welsh Nationalist Party, in the interwar period. It begins by outlining the significance of the geographical and cultural imagination in Welsh politics and then traces the emergence of geographical discourses of Welshness. The territorially rooted sense of national identity was threatened by the policies of the British state and this paper focuses on the geographical discourses mobilized during campaigns of resistance to military land requistioning. Territory was also important in the integrative sense of nation-building and this paper considers one such scheme-the construction of a North-South road to unite Wales. It ends by arguing for an imaginative reading of the nation.