The founding works of nationalism theory identify two overarching categories of nationalism: civic and ethnic. While the former is lauded as liberal, inclusive, and rational, the latter is derided as regressive, restrictive, and exclusionary. More recent work on nationalism has problematized these characterizations, but has largely retained the civic/ethnic binary. This article critiques the civic/ethnic binary from the perspective of postcolonial theory. Drawing on de Sousa Santos’s abyssal line and Fanon’s zones of being and non-being, the article argues that the relationship between metropolis and empire is foundational to the relationship between civic and ethnic nationalism. Yet the category of civic nationalism obscures racialized patterns of exclusion within civic nations, such that the standards of inclusion within a civic nation are constructed on the basis of excluding the nation’s Others. Because civic nationalism is predicated on the creation and denial of Others, presenting civic nationalism as a global ideal is impossible. The article concludes by considering the promise of transnational social movements in the global South as an answer to both civic and ethnic nationalism.

No abstract

In August 1964, the semi-centenary of the First World War's onset coincided with uncertainty about Britain's future: decolonization had resulted in a diminished role in the international sphere, and migration had begun to alter the dominant ethnic and religious character of the metropolis. Britons increasingly confronted the question of what it meant to belong to the postcolonial nation. In this context, First World War commemorations served a twofold purpose: first, they revised prior representations of colonial subjects in the war, in light of contemporary realities; and second, they served as an outlet for imperial nostalgia. This article considers the relationship between race, nation, and collective memory by analysing representations of Muslim colonial subjects in the 1964 BBC documentary, The Great War. A content analysis aims to explain how Britain's evolving collective memory reveals its dominant national identity and, by extension, its willingness to accommodate postcolonial newcomers.

This article proposes postcolonial critical realism (PCR) as an ontological framework that explains the structuring relationship between racialized, colonial discourses and the social world. Beginning with the case study of the global climate crisis, it considers how scholars and activists have made sense of the present crisis, and how their discourses reflect and reproduce the climate crisis at large. To theorize the relationship between racialized, power-laden discourses and material reality, it derives five tenets of PCR: first, colonial discourses underlie, and interact with, material structures; second, coloniality is global and made visible through differential events and experiences; third, subaltern lived experiences reveal the nature of reality at large; fourth, coloniality is power-laden, sticky, and often invisible; and finally, decolonization must target all three domains of the social world and their interactions. The article concludes by considering how this framework might enrich anticolonial thought in the social sciences, as well as social movements.

This article traces the processes of celebrating, forgetting, and reimagining the French Empire at the garden of tropical agronomy in Nogent-sur-Marne. Drawing from archival research, semi-structured interviews with stakeholders, and site observation, I consider why ruination has endured despite ongoing attempts to restore the site, and what is at stake in remembering the garden anew. Drawing from theories of national memory and postcolonial theory, I conceptualize the garden as a site of melancholia. Its ruination continues as a consequence of state bureaucracy, the role of the military, and its physical form. Sites of melancholia, I argue, present contested, multivocal, palimpsestic narratives that challenge national memory in two ways: first, by disrupting the relationship between past and present, and second, by foregrounding the racialized violence of the imperial project that gave rise to the contemporary nation. By unsettling the temporal and spatial idea of the nation, sites of melancholia pose a fundamental challenge to any cohesive narrative of national identity.