Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The concept of nation and the concomitant advocacy of various nationalisms have offered colonized peoples significant political and imaginative resources in contesting the authority and legitimacy of the European empires. As an idea or way of thinking, the nation has afforded colonized peoples the chance to conceive of and represent themselves as coherent imagined communities, bonded by common qualities and attributes. It has equally functioned as a major tool of political resistance: the advocacy on the part of the colonized of their belonging to national communities was in many cases the primary means by which anti-colonial political resistance was forged. Such political movements, or nationalisms, occurred in diverse forms throughout the colonized world (hence my preference for the plural term throughout this chapter), from the relatively large-scale European settler colonies of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand to so-called Third World locations, such as India and Nigeria, where indigenous peoples were governed by small sections of European colonialists. Indeed, it is important to grasp from the outset that, as the editors of Nationalisms and Sexualities (1992) explain, ‘there is no privileged narrative of the nation, no “nationalism in general” such that any single model could prove adequate to its myriad and contradictory historical forms’ (Parker et al. 1992: 3). In postcolonial ... log in or subscribe to read full text