This chapter explores one of the main frames through which period drama has been discussed, national identity, and considers the place of race in ‘narratives of nation’. I use this phrase to recognise national identity as an (at times contested) process, and to allow me to incorporate different countries’ programming into my discussion. Each country's national identity is shaped through different ideologies, histories and myths. Like history, national identity is always a narrative, created by stories we tell or are told about our nation's past. To draw on Stuart Hall, rather than thinking about national identity as an ‘already accomplished historical fact’ which period drama then represents, we should think of national identity ‘as a “production”, which is never complete, always in process’ (1989: 68). Period drama can contribute to this production in process, as television is a ‘primary site where the nation is imagined and imagines itself’ (Malik 2001: 2). But period drama is a ‘stage of competing memories and desires’ (Vidal 2012a: 47). It can offer conservative visions of the past that are aligned with the status quo, contributing to myths of nation that mobilise the dangerous, non-existent ‘phantom homeland’ of nostalgia (Boym 2001: xvi). However, it also has the potential to present ‘histories hitherto excluded from the national imaginary’ (Burton 2017: 79) and explore tensions, critique or rewrite our perspectives on our national pasts, producing a playful or forceful challenge to myths of nation.

John Caughie suggests that ‘[t]he past and our relationship to it is not entirely stable nor is it lacking in its own contradictions and tensions’ (2000: 212). Period drama's engagement with ‘narratives of nation’ often embodies these contradictions and tensions. It frequently struggles to bridge the competing concerns of social critique, disruption and difference on the one hand and marketability through familiar imagery and genre tropes on the other, with the latter blunting the force of the former. National identity provides a prime space to consider the racial investments of period drama. Who gets to be part of a country's narrative of nation? Whose history gets to be dramatised and through which perspective?