The contributions in Nationalism and the Postcolonial examine forms, representations, and consequences of ubiquitous nationalisms in languages, popular culture, and literature across the globe from the perspectives of linguistics, political science, cultural studies, and literary studies.

In this wide-ranging study, Neil Lazarus explores the subject of cultural practice in the modern world system. The book contains individual chapters on a range of topics from modernity, globalization and the 'West', and nationalism and decolonization, to cricket and popular consciousness in the English-speaking Caribbean. Lazarus analyses social movements, ideas and cultural practices that have migrated from the 'First world' to the 'Third world' over the course of the twentieth century. Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World offers an enormously erudite reading of culture and society in today's world and includes extended discussion of the work of such influential writers, critics and activists as Frantz Fanon, C. L. R. James, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Samir Amin, Raymond Williams, Paul Gilroy and Partha Chatterjee. This book is a politically focused, materialist intervention into postcolonial and cultural studies, and constitutes a major reappraisal of the debates on politics and culture in these fields.

The majority of the existing work on nationalism has centered on its role in the creation of new states. After Independence breaks new ground by examining the changes to nationalism after independence in seven new states. This innovative volume challenges scholars and specialists to rethink conventional views of ethnic and civic nationalism and the division between primordial and constructivist understandings of national identity. "Where do nationalists go once they get what they want? We know rather little about how nationalist movements transform themselves into the governments of new states, or how they can become opponents of new regimes that, in their view, have not taken the self-determination drive far enough. This stellar collection contributes not only to comparative theorizing on nationalist movements, but also deepens our understanding of the contentious politics of nationalism's ultimate product--new countries." --Charles King, Chair of the Faculty and Ion Ratiu Associate Professor, Georgetown University School of Foreign Service "This well-integrated volume analyzes two important variants of nationalism-postcolonial and postcommunist-in a sober, lucid way and will benefit students and scholars alike." --Zvi Gitelman, University of Michigan Lowell W. Barrington is Associate Professor of Political Science, Marquette University.

By presenting a new interpretation of Rabindranath Tagore’s English language writings, this book places the work of India’s greatest Nobel Prize winner and cultural icon in the context of imperial history and thereby bridges the gap between Tagore studies and imperial/postcolonial historiography. Using detailed archival research, the book charts the origins of Tagore’s ideas in Indian religious traditions and discusses the impact of early Indian nationalism on Tagore’s thinking. It offers a new interpretation of Tagore’s complex debates with Gandhi about the colonial encounter, Tagore’s provocative analysis of the impact of British imperialism in India and his questioning of nationalism as a pathway to authentic postcolonial freedom. The book also demonstrates how the man and his ideas were received and interpreted in Britain during his lifetime and how they have been sometimes misrepresented by nationalist historians and postcolonial theorists after Tagore’s death. An alternative interpretation based on an intellectual history approach, this book places Tagore’s sense of agency, his ideas and intentions within a broader historical framework. Offering an exciting critique of postcolonial theory from a historical perspective, it is a timely contribution in the wake of the 150th anniversary of Tagore's birth in 2011.

Offers a lucid introduction to postcolonial studies, one of the most important strands in recent literary theory and cultural studies.

Beyond Belief is a bold rethinking of the formation and consolidation of nation-state ideologies. Analyzing India during the first two decades following its foundation as a sovereign nation-state in 1947, Srirupa Roy explores how nationalists are turned into nationals, subjects into citizens, and the colonial state into a sovereign nation-state. Roy argues that the postcolonial nation-state is consolidated not, as many have asserted, by efforts to imagine a shared cultural community, but rather by the production of a recognizable and authoritative identity for the state. This project—of making the state the entity identified as the nation’s authoritative representative—emphasizes the natural cultural diversity of the nation and upholds the state as the sole unifier or manager of the “naturally” fragmented nation; the state is unified through diversity. Roy considers several different ways that identification with the Indian nation-state was produced and consolidated during the 1950s and 1960s. She looks at how the Films Division of India, a state-owned documentary and newsreel production agency, allowed national audiences to “see the state”; how the “unity in diversity” formation of nationhood was reinforced in commemorations of India’s annual Republic Day; and how the government produced a policy discourse claiming that scientific development was the ultimate national need and the most pressing priority for the state to address. She also analyzes the fate of the steel towns—industrial townships built to house the workers of nationalized steel plants—which were upheld as the exemplary national spaces of the new India. By prioritizing the role of actual manifestations of and encounters with the state, Roy moves beyond theories of nationalism and state formation based on collective belief.

This text combines Boehmer's keynote essays on the mother figure and the postcolonial nation, with incisive new work on male autobiography, 'daughter' writers, the colonial body, the trauma of the post-colony, and the nation in a transnational context.

Postcolonialism has become one of the most exciting, expanding and challenging areas of literary and cultural studies today. Designed especially for those studying the topic for the first time, Beginning Postcolonialism introduces the major areas of concern in a clear, accessible, and organized fashion. It provides an overview of the emergence of postcolonialism as a discipline and closely examines many of its important critical writings.

In this book, the prominent theorist Partha Chatterjee looks at the creative and powerful results of the nationalist imagination in Asia and Africa that are posited not on identity but on difference with the nationalism propagated by the West. Arguing that scholars have been mistaken in equating political nationalism with nationalism as such, he shows how anticolonialist nationalists produced their own domain of sovereignty within colonial society well before beginning their political battle with the imperial power. These nationalists divided their culture into material and spiritual domains, and staked an early claim to the spiritual sphere, represented by religion, caste, women and the family, and peasants. Chatterjee shows how middle-class elites first imagined the nation into being in this spiritual dimension and then readied it for political contest, all the while "normalizing" the aspirations of the various marginal groups that typify the spiritual sphere. While Chatterjee's specific examples are drawn from Indian sources, with a copious use of Bengali language materials, the book is a contribution to the general theoretical discussion on nationalism and the modern state. Examining the paradoxes involved with creating first a uniquely non-Western nation in the spiritual sphere and then a universalist nation-state in the material sphere, the author finds that the search for a postcolonial modernity is necessarily linked with past struggles against modernity.

"If it isn't obvious from the title of this book that this is going to be full of postmodern jargon, it becomes clear quite quickly that Chaterjee prefers difficult terms like 'problematic', 'thematic' and 'discourse' without always defining them - he even admits his admiration for Rorty, Barthes, Foucault and Derrida. Nonetheless, underneath all of this verbiage is a strong and convincing argument about the three stages of nationalism in India: the moment of departure (epitomized by Bankimchandra Chatttopadhyay), the moment of manoeuvre (Gandhi) and the moment of arrival (Nehru). Chatterjee clearly shows how nationalism in India was akin to Gramsci's concept of the 'passive revolution' - i.e. merely a drive towards independence, not towards transforming or breaking up colonial instutions. He argues that, instead of supporting nationalism, we should instead challenge the marriage between reason and capital. From the title of this book one might expect Chatterjee to draw links to other anti-colonial nationalisms but he doesn't; rather he only discusses India (not even other parts of South Asia). While this approach doesn't really make this book too useful for examining anti-colonial nationalisms in general, for someone like me who has never read a book on Indian nationalism this is a good introduction." -- from Amazon.ca.