Office Hours: Monday 12: 30-2: 30 Scott 208

Nationalism

Political Science 490
Elizabeth Shakman Hurd

Office Hours: Monday 12:30-2:30

Scott 208

[e-mail]

“Nationalism is the cultural sensibility of sovereignty…”

-Anthony Giddens, Nation-State and Violence, p. 219.
“[Nationalism] is determined not by the character of its elements, but by a certain organizing principle which makes these elements into a unity and imparts to them a special significance.”

-Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, p. 7.

“’Nation-building’ describes the nationalist project of states which aim to hold on to their conceptual hegemony over the nodal point ‘nation.’”
-Walker Connor, Ethnonationalism—The Quest for Understanding, p. 40.
Nationalism is one of the most powerful organizing principles of modern politics. This course focuses on why, how and with what political effects groups of people come to imagine that they are part of a community with a shared national identity and geographical home or nation. We will analyze the emergence and endurance of nationalism as a factor in modern domestic and international politics and society, examine the rise of nationalism both inside and outside of Europe, and analyze its relationship to modern theories and practices of sovereignty, colonialism, religion, ethnic identity, conflict, democracy, gender and territoriality. 

Course Requirements
Class attendance and participation will be crucial components of the final grade, and comments on the week’s reading are mandatory for all participants. Oral presentations of course materials will be required. No late work will be accepted without a written medical excuse. Final papers will be kept and made available for two weeks into spring quarter 2007 after which they will be discarded.
Presentations
Each participant will be responsible for one 15-minute presentation during the quarter. Presentations will take place at the beginning of each class. Each presenter should summarize central themes of the reading and then pose questions for discussion. A copy of the presentation will be given to the instructor at the beginning of the seminar.

Writing assignments

• 
  One 3-5 page “think piece” on the week’s readings (on a different week than the presentation).
  

• 
  10-15 page final paper (due Monday, March 12^th)
  

Grading

Course grades will be based on: 1) class attendance and participation in discussion (20%); 2) presentation (20%); 3) think piece (20%); and 4) final paper (40%).

Required Texts

The following books are available for purchase at Beck’s Books on Clark St. All books are also on reserve at the library. Readings with an asterisk (*) next to them on the syllabus will be available in a folder in the break room for copying.

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991 (1983).
Brubaker, Rogers, Nationalism Reframed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
Campbell, David. National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity and Justice in Bosnia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1998).
Day, Graham and Andrew Thompson. Theorizing Nationalism: Debates and Issues in Social Theory (New York: Palgrave, 2005).
Marx, Anthony. Faith in Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
Shepard, Todd. The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006).
Smith, Anthony. National Identity (Ethnonationalism in Comparative Perspective) (Reno: University of Nevada, 1993).

Seminar Topics

4 January Introduction

11 January Theorizing nationalism: a survey

Day and Thompson, Theorizing Nationalism, ix-xii 1-107, 149-168, 191-198.

Recommended:
Calhoun, Craig. Nationalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
Gellner, Ernest. Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983. (on Gellner see http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/gellner/)
Hutchinson, John and Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Hobsbawm, E.J. Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge, 1990).
Ozkirimli, Umut. Theories of Nationalism: A Critical Introduction. New York: Palgrave, 2000.
Thiesse, Anne-Marie. La création des identités nationales (Paris: Seuil, 2001).

18 January Ethnonationalism and its rivals

Smith, Anthony. National Identity (Ethnonationalism in Comparative Perspective) University of Nevada, 1993), Introduction, pp. 1-98.

*Özkirimli, Umut. “The nation as an artichoke? A critique of ethnosymbolist interpretations of nationalism.” Nations and Nationalism 9, no. 3 (July 2003): pp. 339-355.
*Hobsbawm, Eric and Terence Ranger (eds.) The Invention of Tradition. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 1-14, 263-307.
Ronald Grigor Suny. “Provisional stabilities.” International Security 24: 3 (Winter 1999). Available on JSTOR.
Recommended:
Mitchell, Timothy ‘Heritage and Violence’, in Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 179-205.

25 January More rivals: nationalism as cultural and historical artifact

Anderson, Imagined Communities

Recommended:
Bhatt, Chetan. Hindu Nationalism: Origins, Ideologies and Modern Myths (Oxford: Berg, 2001).
Bozdogan, Sibel. Modernism and Nation Building: Turkish Architectural Culture in the Early Republic (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001).
Billig, Michael. Banal Nationalism (London: Sage, 2004 (1995).

1 February Nationalizing states, national minorities, national homelands

Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed

Recommended:
Greenfeld, Liah. Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003 (1993).
Banu Gökariksel and Katharyne Mitchell, “Veiling, secularism and the neoliberal subject: national narratives and supranational desires in Turkey and France.” Global Networks 5, no. 2 (April 2005), pp. 147-165.
Claire Sutherland, “Nation-building through discourse theory.” Nations and Nationalism 11, no. 2 (April 2005), pp. 185-202.
Brubaker, Rogers, Margit Feischmidt, Jon Fox and Liana Grancea, Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town. Princeton University Press, 2006.

8 February Gender, race, nation

*Yuval-Davis, Nira. Gender and Nation. (New York: Sage, 2000 (1997), 1-25, 39-92.
Day and Thompson, Theorizing Nationalism, 128-148.

Recommended:
Stone, John and Dennis Rutledge (eds.) Race and Ethnicity: Comparative and Theoretical Approaches (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003).
Banton, Michael. The International Politics of Race (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003).
Isyar, Bora. “The origins of Turkish Republican citizenship: the birth of race.” Nations and Nationalism 11, no. 3 (July 2005), pp. 343-360.
Puri, Jyoti. Encountering Nationalism (New York: Blackwell, 2003).
Shibusawa, Naoko. America’s Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006).
Hanchard, Michael. Party/Politics: Horizons in Black Political Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001).
Spickard, Paul (ed.) Race and Nation (New York: Routledge, 2004).

15 February Nationalism, colonialism, postcolonialism

Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization
Recommended:
Chatterjee, Partha. The Nation and its Fragments. Princeton University Press, 1993.
Bowen, John R. Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves: Islam, the State, and Public Space (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).
Burton, Antoinette. After the Imperial Turn: Thinking With and Through the Nation. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). 
Bhabha, Homi. Nation and Narration (Routledge, 1990).

22 February No class (make-up held March 8th)

Begin reading Faith in Nation.

1 March Nationalization of religion, sacralization of the nation

Marx, Faith in Nation
Recommended:
Van der Veer, Peter & Hartmut Lehmann. Nation and Religion: Perspectives on Europe and Asia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
Marr, Timothy. The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
Çinar, Alev. “National History as a Contested Site: The Conquest of Istanbul and the Islamist Negotiations of the Nation,” Comparative Study of Society and History 43, no. 2 (April 2001), pp. 364-391.
Zubaida, Sami, “Islam and nationalism: continuities and contradictions.” Nations and Nationalism 10, no. 4 (October 2004), pp. 407-420.
Hastings, Adrian. “Holy lands and their political consequences.” Nations and Nationalism 9, no. 1 (January 2003), pp. 29-54.
Juergensmeyer, Mark. The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State (University of California, 1993).

8 March: Deconstructing nationalism

Campbell, National Deconstruction

Recommended:
Habermas, Jürgen. The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays (Boston: MIT Press, 2001).
Bhahba, Homi. ‘DissemiNation’, in The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 139-170.
Connolly, William E. ‘Democracy and Territoriality’, in The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1995), pp. 135-161.
Honig, Bonnie Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
Soguk, Nevzat. States and Strangers: Refugees and Displacements of Statecraft (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1999).
Nimni, Ephraim (ed.) The Challenge of Post-Zionism: Alternatives to Fundamentalist Politics in Israel (London: Zed Books, 2003).
Cheah, Pheng and Bruce Robbins (eds.), Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1998).