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Partha Chatterjee - The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories - 9780691019437 - V9780691019437
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The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories

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Description for The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories Paperback. Looks at the results of nationalist imagination in Asia and Africa that are posited not on identity but on difference with the nationalism propagated by the West. This title shows how anticolonialist nationalists produced their own domain of sovereignty within colonial society well before beginning their political battle with the imperial power. Series: Princeton Studies in Culture, Power, History. Num Pages: 296 pages. BIC Classification: HBTQ; HBTR; JPFN. Category: (P) Professional & Vocational; (U) Tertiary Education (US: College). Dimension: 234 x 157 x 19. Weight in Grams: 442.
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.

Product Details

Publisher
Princeton University Press United States
Number of pages
296
Format
Paperback
Publication date
1993
Series
Princeton Studies in Culture, Power, History
Condition
New
Number of Pages
296
Place of Publication
New Jersey, United States
ISBN
9780691019437
SKU
V9780691019437
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 7 to 11 working days
Ref
99-1

About Partha Chatterjee
One of the leading members of the well-known Subaltern Studies collective of scholars, Partha Chatterjee is Professor of Political Science at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences in Calcutta. His other works include Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World (Zed/Minnesota).

Reviews for The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories
One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 1994 "[This] is a work of magisterial erudition, the product of a mind working at the fullest command of its critical and creative powers ... destined to become a landmark, not just in its field but in that most important of histories which is the evolving narrative of our self-awareness."
The Calcutta Telegraph

Goodreads reviews for The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories


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