Global Nationalisms Revisited

Course goals

By the end of this course, students will have acquired:
 

• Knowledge of the origins and historical trajectories of several 20th century global national movements at an advanced level
• The ability to analyze the origins, development and effect of global nationalist movements, ideologies, and state-building projects by applying appropriate theories, concepts and methods from the fields of nationalism studies, colonial and postcolonial studies, intellectual history, memory studies, and the history of partitions
• The ability to communicate research results and the underlying knowledge to specialists and non-specialists
• The ability to form and defend a stance based on solid argumentation

Content

The twentieth century saw the final disintegration of the Russian, Ottoman, and Habsburg, as well as of the European overseas empires. Subsequently, a score of new nation-states emerged, events with sometimes dramatic and lasting global repercussions. The establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948 was one such central event in the forging of twentieth-century geopolitics: a Jewish state was born and over seven decades of turmoil in the Middle East ensued, to remain with us until today. From a Jewish perspective, historiography has tended to regard the years leading up to 1948 as merely the prehistory to Jewish statehood. In reality, ‘there were few, if any straight roads in modern Jewish history’ (Zygmunt Bauman). The same can be said about Arab political history, which has often been presented in direct opposition to Jewish political history. If we zoom out our historical gaze, we find similar complexities in the nationalist narratives attached to other contested regions, such as India/Pakistan and Ireland.

In this course we will attempt to investigate and problematize 20^th century nationalism by taking a global approach to its history. We will engage with several classic theories of nationalism and bring these into conversation with historical case-studies that will force us to probe the nexus between nationalism, colonialism, religion, the history of partition, and memory studies. As a result, we will emerge from our explorations with a deeper understanding of the multi-faceted nature of the long “age of nationalism”, one that reaches beyond the (European) nation-state, and which has lasting implications for global society in the 21^st century.