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ralowe's review against another edition
4.0
this book studies novelist bankimchandra chattopadhyay, gandhi and prime minister jawaharlal nehru. respectively partha chatterjee means for them to represent gramsci's arc of passive revolution: departure, maneuver and arrival: the people-nation's journey from colonization to svaraj. i'm trying to edgeplay where i shut down around the nation-form. sure why not. chatterjee applies pan-arabist marxist thinker anoaur abdel-malek's "problematic" and "thematic" paradigm for orientalism. it seems that the "problematic" might be summarized as that which appears to the outgroup observer as a kind of incoherent difference. aside from what can be extracted for the purposes of someone else's ethnography or the force used to maintain the internal consistency of the ingroup (see patriarchy), and further given what contingency we're talking about, those aspects of nationalism are i guess okay with me? the "thematic" more has to do with "uniting nations," rendering difference as contained and isometric within some neoliberal inclusivity scheme, agency itself as always given and located elsewhere more consequential than where and who you are, increasingly administered by hashtag. what i didn't expect was to come out of reading this confirming that nationalism is worthy of thought. i mean my love of xclan was held until now as an instance of semi-private irony as a queer feminist. what is good about this is that chatterjee is thinking about the downfalls also, and still unwilling to except marxist dismissal of nationalist ideology. i guess that's kind of where i'm at. but maybe i was already there, listening to xclan. additionally i found myself intrigued by the thought of gandhi enough to want to look further into my question of a kind of inverted leviathan in his direct action body invovling the principle of satyagraha. nationalism can and tends to require an integration of the spiritual and industrial which remains legitimate in the dismantling colonial power structures but no further.
sonicdonutflour's review
challenging
reflective
slow-paced
3.0
This book traces the development of movements for decolonization and the ways their language in demanding freedom often defaults to ideas, which like colonialism itself, are products of post-enlightenment western frameworks. Very heavy and kinda clunky.
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