The nation and is fragments : colonial and postcolonial histories / Partha Chatterjee.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Caṭṭopādhyāẏa, Pārtha, author.

Series:

Princeton studies in culture, power, history.

Princeton studies in culture, power, history

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Nationalism--India--Bengal--History.

Nationalism.

India--History.

India.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xiii, 282 pages)

Manufacture:

Baltimore, Md. : Project MUSE, 2021

Place of Publication:

Princeton, NJ : Princeton Univ. Press, 1993.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments.

Chapter One. Whose Imagined Community?

Chapter Two. The Colonial State

Chapter Three. The Nationalist Elite

Chapter Four. The Nation and Its Pasts

Chapter Five. Histories and Nations

Chapter Six. The Nation and Its Women

Chapter Seven. Women and the Nation

Chapter Eight. The Nation and Its Peasants

Chapter Nine. The Nation and Its Outcasts

Chapter Ten. The National State

Chapter Eleven. Communities and the Nation

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Published by Princeton University Press.

This book has been composed in Adobe Sabon.

Princeton University Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

Printed in the United States of America.

Includes bibliographical references (pages [263]-272) and index.

Description based on: online resource; title from pdf title page (ACLS Humanities, viewed January 12, 2021).

ISBN:

9780691033051

0691033056

9780691201429

0691201420

OCLC:

1227051825