Engaging, among others, with Benedict Anderson’s seminal study of “imagined communities,” this paper argues that nationalism comes into being with the rise of a Capitalist market and the ensuing competition, immediate or in due course, between the internal lregional and the extemal/interregional capitalists. The logic of nationalism is defined as being numerical, racial and linguistic, but the focus is removed from language as an emblem of nationhood and put on the dialectical workings of Capitalism. In the process, the paper attempts (...) to explain why nations needed to be communally imagined only in a particular phase of history. The paper also traces the connections between the nationalisation of labour and the globalisation of capital under Capitalism. Finaly, the paper questions whether it is accurate to see Asian and African nationalisms as “modularly imagined” on the basis of American andlor European nationalisms. (shrink)

Engaging, among others, with Benedict Anderson’s seminal study of “imagined communities,” this paper argues that nationalism comes into being with the rise of a Capitalist market and the ensuing competition, immediate or in due course, between the internal lregional and the extemal/interregional capitalists. The logic of nationalism is defined as being numerical, racial and linguistic, but the focus is removed from language as an emblem of nationhood and put on the dialectical workings of Capitalism. In the process, the paper attempts (...) to explain why nations needed to be communally imagined only in a particular phase of history. The paper also traces the connections between the nationalisation of labour and the globalisation of capital under Capitalism. Finaly, the paper questions whether it is accurate to see Asian and African nationalisms as “modularly imagined” on the basis of American andlor European nationalisms. (shrink)

A path-breaking intervention in current debates on reading and literature, the two complementary essays—one on literature and the other on reading—focus largely on texts in English and French, but also refer to other literatures. The authors propose a way of reading literature that not only synthesizes some earlier tendencies and puts them in context, but also propounds a revolutionary understanding of the nature of literature and reading. The writers taken up for discussion include William Shakespeare, Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, Marcel (...) Proust, Charles Baudelaire, Franz Kafka, William Burroughs, Dylan Thomas, Attia Hosain, Albert Wendt, Zadie Smith, Philip Hensher, Mohsin Hamid and many others. (shrink)

A lucid intervention in current debates about identity and difference, this book uses the concept of Otherness to look again at both Gothic fiction and Postcolonialism.