Narrating the Nation

Author: Stefan Berger
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1845458656
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360

Book Description
A sustained and systematic study of the construction, erosion and reconstruction of national histories across a wide variety of states is highly topical and extremely relevant in the context of the accelerating processes of Europeanization and globalization. However, as demonstrated in this volume, histories have not, of course, only been written by professional historians. Drawing on studies from a number of different European nation states, the contributors to this volume present a systematic exploration, of the representation of the national paradigm. In doing so, they contextualize the European experience in a more global framework by providing comparative perspectives on the national histories in the Far East and North America. As such, they expose the complex variables and diverse actors that lie behind the narration of a nation.

Nation and Narration

Author: Homi K. Bhabha
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415014830
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 356

Book Description
A collection of essays celebrating the fact that English is no longer just an English' language. Contributors include Gillian Beer, Rachel Bowlby, Doris Sommer and Sneja Gunew.

Rhetorics of Belonging

Author: Anna Bernard
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1781385734
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 217

Book Description
Rhetorics of Belonging describes the formation and operation of a category of Palestinian and Israeli “world literature” whose authors actively respond to the expectation that their work will “narrate” the nation, invigorating critical debates about the political and artistic value of national narration as a literary practice.

Nigeria at Fifty

Author: Ebenezer Obadare
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317985532
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 171

Book Description
Nigeria, Africa’s most populous and biggest democracy, celebrates her fiftieth year as an independent nation in October 2010. As the cliché states, ‘As Nigeria goes, so goes Africa’. This book frames the socio-historical and political trajectory of Nigeria while examining the many dimensions of the critical choices that she has made as an independent nation. How does the social composition of interest and power illuminate the actualities and narratives of the Nigerian crisis? How have the choices made by Nigerian leaders structured, and/or have been structured by, the character of the Nigerian state and state-society relations? In what ways is Nigeria’s mono-product, debt-ridden, dependent economy fed by ‘the politics of plunder’? And what are the implications of these questions for the structural relationships of production, reproduction and consumption? This book confronts these questions by making state-centric approaches to understanding African countries speak to relevant social theories that pluralize and complicate our understanding of the specific challenges of a prototypical postcolonial state. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Contemporary African Studies.

Nation Without Narration

Author: Ramon A. Fonkoué
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781621964827
Category : Cameroon
Languages : en
Pages :

Book Description
"This book traces the roots of the current turmoil and sheds light on overlooked factors impacting nation building in post-colonial Cameroon. It demonstrates the urgency of cross-disciplinary work on African societies and the continued relevance of postcolonial criticism as a theoretical framework. It extends the postcolonial critique inaugurated by Homi Bhabha's Nation and Narration into twenty-first-century sub-Saharan Africa. It also reframes the question of modernity and development in this context, suggesting an approach with bearing on people's lived experience. This study draws from a diversity of fields-political science, literature, history, cultural studies, and postcolonial studies-to demonstrate the limitations of a philosophy of nation building that turned into state consolidation. It is a timely study on Cameroon's currently volatile situation that is applicable to other postcolonial contexts, in Africa and elsewhere"--

The Indian English Novel

Author: Priyamvada Gopal
Publisher:
ISBN: 0199544379
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233

Book Description
The Oxford Studies in Postcolonial Literatures series offers stimulating and accessible introductions to definitive topics and key genres and regions within the rapidly diversifying field of postcolonial literary studies in English. It is often claimed that unlike the British novel or the novel in indigenous Indian languages, Anglophone fiction in India has no genealogy of its own. Interrogating this received idea, Priyamvada Gopal shows how the English-language or Anglophone Indian novel is a heterogeneous body of fiction in which certain dominant trends and recurrent themes are, nevertheless, discernible. It is a genre that has been distinguished from its inception by a preoccupation with both history and nation as these come together to shape what scholars have termed 'the idea of India'. Structured around themes such as 'Gandhi and Fiction', 'The Bombay Novel', and 'The Novel of Partition', this study traces lines of influence across significant literary works and situates individual writers and texts in their historical context. Its emergence out of the colonial encounter and nation-formation has impelled the Anglophone novel to return repeatedly to the question: 'What is India?' In the most significant works of Anglophone fiction, 'India' emerges not just as a theme but as a point of debate, reflection, and contestation. Writers whose works are considered in their context include Rabindranath Tagore, Mulk Raj Anand, RK Narayan, Salman Rushdie, Nayantara Sahgal, Amitav Ghosh, Arundhati Roy, and Vikram Seth.

The Location of Culture

Author: Homi K. Bhabha
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136751041
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 440

Book Description
36,000 copies sold New preface by the author influenced all major scholarship in post-colonial studies since publication One of the bestselling Routledge titles of the last decade Will form part of the Literary Studies list's Post-Colonial promotion this Autumn

What Is a Nation? and Other Political Writings

Author: Ernest Renan
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231547145
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 535

Book Description
Ernest Renan was one of the leading lights of the Parisian intellectual scene in the second half of the nineteenth century. A philologist, historian, and biblical scholar, he was a prominent voice of French liberalism and secularism. Today most familiar in the English-speaking world for his 1882 lecture “What Is a Nation?” and its definition of a nation as an “everyday plebiscite,” Renan was a major figure in the debates surrounding the Franco-Prussian War, the Paris Commune, and the birth of the Third Republic and had a profound influence on thinkers across the political spectrum who grappled with the problem of authority and social organization in the new world wrought by the forces of modernization. What Is a Nation? and Other Political Writings is the first English-language anthology of Renan’s political thought. Offering a broad selection of Renan’s writings from several periods of his public life, most previously untranslated, it restores Renan to his place as one of France’s major liberal thinkers and gives vital critical context to his views on nationalism. The anthology illuminates the characteristics that distinguished nineteenth-century French liberalism from its English and American counterparts as well as the more controversial parts of Renan’s legacy, including his analysis of colonial expansion, his views on Islam and Judaism, and the role of race in his thought. The volume contains a critical introduction to Renan’s life and work as well as detailed annotations that assist in recovering the wealth and complexity of his thought.

The Struggle for the National Narrative in Indonesia

Author: Michael Hatherell
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 981163811X
Category : Political Science
Languages : id
Pages : 159

Book Description
This book offers a unique analysis of how political representatives construct ideas about the nation in contemporary Indonesian politics. In their struggle to define what the authors call the ‘national narrative’, would-be national leaders seek to develop a story about the nation’s past, present and future. These stories feature a unique plot, set of characters, and a moral that the political narrator hopes will resonate. In contemporary Indonesia, the authors assess two prominent national narratives: the technocratic and populist national narratives. The book concludes with an analysis that considers other potential sources of ideas about the nation, as well as the potential implications for domestic politics and Indonesian grand strategy.

Narratives of Citizenship

Author: Aloys N.M. Fleischmann
Publisher: University of Alberta
ISBN: 0888646178
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 409

Book Description
Examining various cultural products-music, cartoons, travel guides, ideographic treaties, film, and especially the literary arts-the contributors of these thirteen essays invite readers to conceptualize citizenship as a narrative construct, both in Canada and beyond. Focusing on indigenous and diasporic works, along with mass media depictions of Indigenous and diasporic peoples, this collection problematizes the juridical, political, and cultural ideal of universal citizenship. Readers are asked to envision the nation-state as a product of constant tension between coercive practices of exclusion and assimilation. Narratives of Citizenship is a vital contribution to the growing scholarship on narrative, nationalism, and globalization. Contributors: David Chariandy, Lily Cho, Daniel Coleman, Jennifer Bowering Delisle, Aloys N.M. Fleischmann, Sydney Iaukea, Marco Katz, Lindy Ledohowski, Cody McCarroll, Carmen Robertson, Laura Schechter, Paul Ugor, Nancy Van Styvendale, Dorothy Woodman, and Robert Zacharias.