Nationalism, Colonialism, and Culture

The role of national literatures in consolidating the cultural heritage of modern nations is indisputable. National literary histories organize and collate a remote, often premodern past, even as they consolidate linguistic standards and canonize new generic forms: in this sense they are essential for articulating the linguistic and aesthetic dimensions of the relationship between “tradition” and “modernity.” In much of the world, however, while tradition could be perceived as indigenous, modernity was necessarily an imported construct, violently imposed by colonial rule, but also creatively and critically adapted by literate élites. Modernity, like nationalism, was generally a modular or mobile framework whose specific content would be provided by the interaction between a given literary archive and an ascendant national narrative. National narratives, modernizing and anti-colonial in aspiration, nonetheless had to confront numerous historical, cultural and epistemic challenges. How is one to constitute an independent cultural field when the very terms of discussion are themselves the product of western scholarship? How to distinguish and delimit the nation territorially and linguistically in the face of regional diversity, civilizational currents, migrations and cosmopolitan cultural flows that clearly exceed a putative national tradition? Readings will be primarily from literary theory, antrhopology and historiography; authors to be studied include Benedict Anderson, Eric Hobsbawm, Sheldon Pollock, Fredric Jameson, Frtanco Moretti, Pascal Casanova, Edward Said, Johannes Fabien, Partha Chatterjee, Roberto Schwarz, James Clifford, and Kumkum Sangari.