The Gift of The Nation

In order to question the modernist common sense of mainstream sociology, epitomised today by the charge of methodological nationalism, this article offers an overall reading of Marcel Mauss’s The Nation. Conceived during the Great War and written mainly in 1920, Mauss’s work radically re-examined both the nation and nationalism from a regenerated sociological viewpoint centered on the relations between societies. Distinguishing between partial relations of exchange and total relations of encounter, Mauss came to discover the gift as a total social fact, seeing it as the traditional unconscious spring of the federative dynamics that had to be reactivated in Europe to associate its nations in a great ‘Inter-nation’ and avoid the risk of a new total war. The Nation, by reviving the original ambition of Émile Durkheim’s sociology to be a way rethinking and reshaping the concepts and institutions of modernity, helps us explore the contradictions and pathologies involved in the concept and history of the nation, in a situation currently marked by the return of nationalism and the quest for a social Europe.

The Language of Partition: A Study of the Narrative Structures of Selected Stories

The Partition of India in 1947 that resulted in the death and displacement of millions of people continues to inhabit the cognizance of the people of South Asia as a historical phenomenon laden with violence. Although the bequest of the Partition is palpable in episodes of religious tension, discourses on minority belonging, secularism, nation and nationalism in India, critical exploration of the phenomenon as a tension-ridden historical episode has largely been restricted. The present research paper deals with the stylistic aspects of a series of seven short fictional narratives from Bengal and Punjab. In this paper, the scholar talks about how the creative-imaginative representation of Partition has till date remained confined to the discussion of thematic aspects with the result that the elements of narration have remained insignificant in critical mediation. As such, the scholar addresses the gap in the genre of Partition studies by critically reading and stylistically scrutinizing the narrative elements of a series of selected Partition narratives to see how violence as a leitmotif in these seven selected fictional texts is documented.

The "Primal Pseudos": Adorno's Concept of Nationalism

Even though the term “primal pseudos” appears only once in Theodor W. Adorno’s lecture History and Freedom, it is the key for the understanding of Adorno’s concept of nation and nationalism. In the aforementioned lecture the term “primal pseudos” describes the contradiction immanent in the concept of the nation. The critical investigation into the immanent contradiction of the concept of the nation discloses the impossibility of what nationalism wants rather than its falseness.

Indian Cultural Nationalism – Defining New Contours (Desha-shastra)

Nation and nationalism are one of the most discussed terms in modern academics and popular media. India has embraced the people, practices, cuisines, customs, faiths, rituals, religions from different parts of the world. And it is an ever growing accommodative spirit of India and its nationalism. Not ‘only, rather’ but ‘also’ is the Indian approach. It has withstood cultural colonialism in one thousand years. The cantors of India have changed with time but have not given up on culture. Therefore a serious study of Indian view of nationalism as expressed by its ancient seers and modern thinkers is the need of the hour. The paper has three sections: 1. Definition of Cultural Nationalism in Indian approach; 2. Some main concepts of Indian Cultural Nationalism and 3. Indian Cultural Nationalism in the contemporary time Received 9th December 2020; Revised 15th March 2021; Accepted 28th March 2021

Reimagining the national map

The map of the nation may be considered a power tool that persists in reproducing exclusive forms of nationalism in response to migration crises. Yet, in this article, we argue that in an era marked by new, rampant rhetoric regarding nationalism, maps are surprisingly among the few spaces left to cultivate progressive imaginaries of cultural diversity and migration as intrinsic, positive features of national experiences. Discussing critical readings of national mappings, we encourage a dialogue between map studies and nation and nationalism studies through the lens of everyday cartographic nationhood. Taking Italy as a context of analysis, the paper considers subject-centred refabrications of national maps (IncarNations), alien phenomenologies of national cartographic objects (AlieNations), and transformative creative cartographies of migrant nations (ContamiNations) to promote an alternative understanding of the national map as a sensitive tool of pluralism in multicultural societies.

The Construction of Geography by Nationalism: Homeland, Motherland, Fatherland

In this study, the relationship between space and geography in the composition of nationalism is examined. As a modern ideology, nationalism has been the most powerful ideology for the last two centuries that have shaped the world map, constructing identities and influencing people’s worlds of meaning. Understanding the content of nationalism, which is such a powerful ideology, is essential in understanding today’s events. Therefore, in the present study, the relationship between nationalism and geography is explained through the concept of space, which is one of the two components of identity phenomena. This statement, what is the effect of geography on the composition of nationalism? The answer to the question is made around. It is necessary to understand the conceptual and methodological frameworks of the study to answer this question. The literature review constitutes the methodological framework of the study. The literature on nationalism has been analyzed in this manner. The conceptual framework, on the other hand, constitutes nationalism, nationalism-nation, and nationalism-geography relations. French, German and Turkish nationalisms explain the concepts of homeland, motherland, and fatherland. Consequently, it can be said that in addition to the role of geography in understanding nationalism, it also determines the forms of nationalism concerning the concepts of homeland, motherland, and fatherland.

Salman Rushdie's Midnight’s Children: Cultural Cosmopolitan Reflection

This article aims to prove Salman Rushdie's Midnight’s Children as a cultural cosmopolitan novel through the lance of cosmopolitanism. Out of various types, cultural cosmopolitanism is my focus in this paper. Culturally, cosmopolitanism means openness to different cultures. Cosmopolitanism is a kind of cultural outlook involving an intellectual and aesthetic attitude of openness towards peoples, places and experiences from different cultures, especially from different nations. This type of cosmopolitanism refers to an ideal about culture or identity. Cultural cosmopolitans view that membership in a particular community is not essential for one’s social identity. It stresses that such cultural membership is irrelevant. It refers to partiality for cultures besides one’s own culture of origin as with a traveler or globally conscious person. The parochial feeling of nation and nationalism is, sometimes, an obstacle to the unity and humanitarian feeling. After the outbreak of pandemic Covid 19, people living in any corner of the world have realized- to a great extent- that the feeling of cosmopolitanism and humanism should be at the center of every human. Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children evokes people, in this cosmos, cannot be confined within the boundary of limited nationalism.