Historical narratives can reverse which conquered people anchors national identity

Evidence

But from the seventeenth century onward, these Gauls became the principle or, so to speak, the motor of history. Thanks to a sort of inversion of polarities and values, the Gauls became the first or fundamental element, and the Germans came to be described as a mere extension of the Gauls. — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 138

Categorization

• XREF: This inversion-of-polarities mechanism parallels how colonized peoples’ histories get rewritten by nationalist projects — relevant to postcolonial readings in the Islamophobia module. — connects to: Colonial histories are internal to the identity of the colonizer nation; Diasporic identity politics entails recovering suppressed histories; Identity politics must return to the past only through narrative reinvention (+6 more)

Related

• Identity politics must return to the past only through narrative reinvention (similarity 0.85)
• Theorists can dissociate freedom from any single ethnic origin and reattach it to another (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Historical narratives retroactively reframed the Ottoman Egyptian conquest as Egyptian nationalism. #exemplifies (0.90)