This chapter turns to Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Swahili coast narratives, focusing on his novel Desertion (2005), which tells stories about interracial intimacies between Indian, Swahili, and European characters across multiple generations in colonial and postcolonial periods. In the nineteenth century, colonial debates on Indian emigration to Africa insisted on a clear racial separation between “native” Africans and Indian “settlers.” Late twentieth-century East African nationalist discourses reproduced this racialized indigeneity as national identity. Gurnah’s critique of this racial nationalism lies in the novel’s experimental aesthetics, which involve perspectival storytelling, nested stories, and inclusion of multiple genres. The novel’s layered narration gives expression to abject, repressed Indian Ocean intimacies, reconfiguring colonial models of racial encounter as part of the longer history of migration and exchange in Indian Ocean. The melancholic return of Indian Ocean affiliations troubles both the racial-dystopic conception of nationhood in postcolonial East Africa and the utopic imagining of a multiracial community of the past or future.

This chapter asks the first of three questions about aid projects: what happens when politics is made central to its work. Charitable humanitarianism usually promotes itself as operating outside of politics. In Southern Africa, the Clutton-Brocks practised a form of inter-racial cooperation with the politics very much left in. The Cold Comfort Farm experiment near Harare was an affront to white minority rule. Clutton-Brock was deported, and his chief collaborator, Didymus Mutasa, was imprisoned. It failed as a practical aid project. Yet the grassroots initiative inspired others to establish similar ventures elsewhere: at Nyafaru on the border with Mozambique; in Malawi; and, most significantly, in Ruvuma in Tanzania. The memoirs and biographies of many Zimbabwean political leaders mention Clutton-Brock and Cold Comfort Farm for not only alleviating poverty through cooperative self-help but also for placing the spotlight on the underlying causes of poverty: the racist legislation of the Rhodesian government, particularly in regard to land tenure and ownership.

This chapter attends to the legacies of Indian Ocean migrations in Indian contexts, where nationalist politics also underwent a process of conflating national identity with not just territory, but with women as integral to that territorial sense of nationhood. Specifically, it examines queer desire and the gendered construction of the nation through Mauritian writer Ananda Devi’s novel Indian Tango (2007). Devi rewrites Satyajit Ray’s cinematic adaptation (1984) of Rabindranath Tagore’s influential national allegory Ghare-Bāire (The Home and the World) (1916) from a transnational queer feminist perspective. Examining the novel’s intertextual relationship with Tagore’s text, Ray’s film, and early twentieth century anti-indenture discourses, the chapter argues that Devi reorients feminine desire towards an erotic autonomy that reimagines diasporic affiliation and challenges the control of female sexuality within the heterosexual family as the basis of the nation. The assertion of diasporic connection through female erotic autonomy doubly deconstructs the Indian nationalist subject defined through the exclusion of the diasporic other as well as the queer female other.

This chapter connects the threads from the preceding two chapters by examining representations of “India” as part of the social, cultural, and physical landscape of Eastern Africa in fictional works by African authors of Indian descent. In Sophia Mustafa’s In the Shadow of Kirinyaga (2002) and Barlen Pyamootoo’s Bénarès (1999), the diasporic imagination cites and sites symbolic Indian spaces within local African contexts hierarchized by race, class, gender, and ethnicity. Placing these texts in a shared but differentiated discourses of race, colonialism, and nationalism in Mauritius and East Africa, the chapter demonstrates that they inscribe Indian cultural spaces in diasporic locations not to express nostalgia for a distant homeland or to make cultural claims on the locality; but instead, their diasporic imagination moves through local, unresolved histories of colonial, racial, and gendered violence, uniquely sustained by ongoing forms of displacement and dispossession. Anarchival movements in these texts uncover Black migration histories as entangled and interdependent with Indian diasporic insinuation of transnational ties.

This chapter examines Northern Ireland’s literary culture from the 1930s to the 1960s, highlighting how writers identifying as ‘Irish’ engaged with British institutions like the Left Book Club (LBC) and the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA). This reflects the complex identities characterising Protestant identity before and after the Second World War. During this period, the Belfast and broader Ulster context of the ‘Progressive bookmen’ represented a vibrant yet overlooked literary environment, challenging the narrow perceptions of a bigoted provincial atmosphere.Louis MacNeice (1907–63) was the most prominent of the writers discussed, alongside other influential figures like John Boyd (1912–2002), W. R. ‘Bertie’ Rodgers (1909–69), and John Hewitt (1907–87). All were steeped in leftist thought and opposed the Ulster Unionist establishment. The passing of the Flags and Emblems Act of 1954, codifying British symbols, and the rising tide of Irish nationalism posed significant challenges.Despite this, these Protestant writers advanced their values in union halls, WEA classes, pubs, and media outlets. The chapter explores their connections to local publications, the Labour movement, the Spanish Civil War, nationalism, and the BBC. Ultimately, while the Northern Irish conflict overshadowed the Progressive Bookmen, this chapter highlights their rich literary heritage and complex identities.

A cherished myth in devolved Scotland is that writers and artists were crucially responsible for the establishment of the new parliament. While there is some truth to this, understanding the full context requires looking beyond the literary texts typically viewed as pivotal in reviving national confidence. Alasdair Gray’s Lanark (1981) certainly impacted a small literary audience, but its status as a “national” novel emerged from broader print culture networks. To appreciate its political significance, we must consider magazines like Scottish International, which published extracts of Lanark in 1969, alongside cultural periodicals like Chapman and the Edinburgh Review, which integrated Gray’s political vision into their missions during the 1980s and 90s.This chapter considers a range of Scottish political writing that contributed to this process. Here, “political writing” refers not to grand rhetoric, but to the organised creation of a neo-national public that recognised itself. It encompassed literary novels, journalism, and philosophical essays, including Tom Nairn’s work and the Red Paper on Scotland, edited by Gordon Brown (1975). The Red Paper, published by the Edinburgh University Students Publication Board (EUSPB), was connected to numerous Edinburgh-based magazines and the literary publisher Polygon. By examining this network of magazines, campaign groups, and party factions (Labour and SNP), we can identify the discursive frameworks and political alliances that led to the Scottish Parliament’s establishment in 1999, tracing much of contemporary Scottish politics back to the writing, editing, and publishing efforts of prior decades.

Chapter 4 first tackles the early reception of the concept of Weltliteratur in German criticism. I argue that these discussions, informed by the emergent economic and cultural nationalism of the 1830s-40s, offered a protectionist critique of free trade cosmopolitanism. Based on the conviction that untrammelled exchange assisted the exploitation of less developed trading partners, protectionists such as Friedrich List agitated for the temporary restriction of imports in support of domestic productive forces. Echoing these doctrines, world literature was associated with an overgrown translation industry that advanced the expansion of already hegemonic foreign literatures, wiping out demand for home-grown products in budding national markets. This combination of commercial self-protection and cultural self-defence was taken up in wider regions of East-Central Europe, especially in Hungary. The second part of the chapter discusses the shifting positions of world literature in Hungarian criticism between the 1840s and 1860s, as represented by the work of János Erdélyi and Hugó von Meltzl and their alternate strategies of self-assertion and self-expansion from a minor-marginal position.

The new nationalism of the Xi Jinping era, which has brought together political nationalism and cultural nationalism – two largely opposing streams between 1919 and 1989 – has redefined the CPC and the PRC. On paper, the party is a class organization while the PRC is a class dictatorship that sanctions class sovereignty rather than popular sovereignty. Since 2001, the party has been represented as a national party as well as a class organization. Representing the nation entails the promotion of national culture, and a major component of the Chinese Dream is cultural revival. Consequently, the CPC and the PRC are nationalized in a shift from Marxist classism to synthesized Chinese nationalism. Their class identities appear to be at odds with their national identities, but the tension is minimized as the party turns Marxism into an empty signifier and sinicizes it out of existence.

The chapter examines Israeli poetry of the 1980s within its historical context, highlighting the era’s distinctive characteristics. While many critiques of this poetry overlook historical considerations – a phenomenon termed a “dead-end” in national historical thought – the chapter uses Kfir Cohen Lustig’s framework on the interplay between literature, the nation-state, and capitalism, adapting it to the analysis of poetry. The chapter posits that in the 1980s, amid the rise of global capitalism and the prevailing trend of autonomization (notably its dominance over state power), the fundamental poetic form was metonymy. This structure, based on the physical proximity among signifieds, establishes diachronic, horizontal relationships between signifiers. The operation of metonymy is illustrated through two poems by Rammy Ditzanny. Furthermore, by examining several other poets through the lens of various scholars, it is argued that metonymy’s foundational poetic principle underlies the diverse poetic styles of the period, including Imagism, collage poetry, and “object poetry.” This principle frequently coincides with the devaluation or negation of the subject and a rejection of the Oedipal structure.

The Declaration of Independence, usually regarded principally or even exclusively as a manifesto about certain “inalienable rights,” is better understood, especially historically, as a complex argument about popular sovereignty. Who exactly were “the people” who were entitled, as in the America of 1776, to secede from the British Empire and then claim their own rights of “self-determination”? The Declaration begins with the assertion that Americans were “one people.” But that was demonstrably false, even in 1776, and has become even more so since then. After all, James Madison, in Federalist 10, emphasizes the plurality of interests, including, religion and property, that generate “faction” and the possibility of tyranny of governing elites. Does the Declaration, even if complemented by the Constitution, supply enough of an “American creed” to supply the basis for genuine unity and political amity or does it instead plant the seeds for further division and even secession in the name of self-determination and government by consent of the governed?

In a series of articles and essays, the literary critic Baruch Kurzweil (1907–1972) portrayed the history of modern Hebrew literature as a history of crisis: of the breakdown of the old traditional world of religion and faith and the emergence of a new secular world. Kurzweil saw this history as a tragedy. Though the figure of crisis became associated with Kurzweil, he was by no means the first critic to employ it. In fact, it has played a central role in modern Hebrew literary criticism since its inception. Indeed, crisis emerged as a privileged figure for portraying the relationship between evolving literary forms, themes, figurations, and vocabulary to rapidly changing demographic, social, cultural, economic, and political contexts. In this chapter, I attempt to contextualize Kurzweil’s ideas within the framework of crisis and tragedy in Hebrew literary criticism, and then briefly suggest their potential implications for the present moment.

Simultaneously an assertion of universal natural rights and the unique story of a particular peoplehood, the Declaration of Independence has from the beginning played a central role in the ongoing struggle over the ever-contested meaning of American identity. Though its ringing phrases have at times become occasions for smug self-congratulation, more often, the Declaration has presented an opportunity for self-evaluation, offering an internal critique of American practices that fall short of the claims the Declaration makes about American values and character. In this sense, the Declaration has become a capacious and evolving civic myth that in its best moments has invoked – and cultivated – a pluralistic solidarity out of volitional adherence to civic ideals and participation in democratic rituals that has substituted for the “natural” ascriptive allegiances characteristic of ethnonationalisms. The essay also suggests that this story of peoplehood was within the scope of Jefferson’s own intention. Through common commitment to the principles of the Declaration, Americans might unite as a nation.

Chapter 5 explores the conspicuous absence of a Romantic Welsh national novel patterned after the fictions of Maria Edgeworth and Walter Scott. Reading over a dozen “failed” attempts at producing such books, the chapter argues that the unique position of Wales did not furnish it with the materials necessary for a conventional bardic nationalist novel. Edgeworth’s and Scott’s spectacular commodification of national cultural difference could not be made to work in the Welsh case. Where Edgeworth’s Irish and Scott’s Scottish trade politically independent but doomed identities for a cultural nationalism that is, above all, reconcilable with a capacious imperial Britishness, the Welsh had no such option, since Welshness was and had been synonymous with (ancient) Britishness for centuries. What was at stake in Welsh national fictions was instead the definition of Britishness itself.

The introduction of Invisible Fatherland lays the historiographical and conceptual groundwork for the book’s empirical chapters. The literature review traces the shift in Weimar studies from teleological narratives of inevitable collapse to a more balanced view of the first German democracy. Drawing on Jan-Werner Müller and Jürgen Habermas, the author clarifies the concept of constitutional patriotism by distinguishing it from civic and ethnic nationalism. She critiques the homogenizing tendencies of Weimar political thought, particularly Rudolf Smend’s influential theory of symbolic integration, for limiting our understanding of the republic’s original and innovative political culture. Finally, the introduction engages the work of scholars such as David Kertzer, Michael Walzer, and William Reddy to prepare for an empirical study of the republic’s symbolic style and emotional tone. Altogether, the introduction establishes an analytical framework for recovering Weimar’s constitutional patriotism and its relevance to contemporary debates on democratic resilience.

Explores the origins and consequences of partition for peace and war and pathways to accommodation.

China’s engagement with the global arena and its economic modernization are anticipated to foster democratization and alignment with the liberal international order. However, despite several decades of economic development, the authoritarian system remains resilient, and China’s foreign policy has become increasingly assertive. This chapter aims to unveil the micro-foundations underlying the unexpected trajectory of China’s rise by examining the public’s nationalist and international orientations. The findings indicate that international orientations exert a limited influence on popular attitudes toward domestic politics and foreign relations, whereas nationalist orientations significantly bolster public support for the authoritarian regime and China’s assertive foreign policy. Additionally, intergenerational variations in public opinion are evident, with the Xi generation displaying a distinct pattern of political values compared to preceding generations.