Rescuing History from the Nation

Schooling, politics and the construction of identity in Hong Kong: the 2012 ‘Moral and National Education’ crisis in historical context

“…Since, he argues, colonial education rendered local residents submissive to the West and reluctant to identify with China, it is necessary to use 'national education' to reinforce consciousness of 'one country', thereby ensuring both national and local prosperity and stability. Qiang's views are predicated upon conceptions of a unitary and essentially homogenous Chinese nation-state long central to the construction of national identity on the mainland (Duara 1995). Deep-seated fears of foreign domination and national dissolution have disposed intellectuals and policy-makers to heed Liang Qichao's early-twentieth-century call for the use of history to forge a unifying sense of Chinese citizenship (Moloughney and Zarro 2011).…”

Replacing the nation in the age of migration: negotiating South Asian identities in Toronto

“…Although this essay analyses the ambivalence of multiple nations in shaping diasporic experiences, it disrupts the embedded epistemological framework of "methodological nationalism" in the social sciences (Wimmer & Schiller 2002) that reify the national FENNIA 193: 2 (2015) Ishan Ashutosh by viewing it as a priori and natural container for society. So long as the nation is assessed as a cohesive entity that envelops all social phenomena, scholars are bound to write nationalistic narratives, a point made abundantly clear in the title of Prasenjit Duara's (1995) Rescuing history from the nation. Methodological nationalism has occluded from analysis both an adequate explanation for the reproduction of nationalism and the new affiliations that have emerged in diaspora.…”

Relational alterity: Constructing dungan (hui), uygur, and Kazakh identities across china, central Asia, and Turkey

“…Nationalism is not arbitrary, but neither is there any core content to it, no essential essence that is not shifted and redefined in internal and external, often dialogical, opposition, using powerful symbols that John Comaroff (1987) has accurately described as defined by "totemic" relationality. And, as Duara (1995) has recently noted, all nationalisms and ethnicities are not necessarily by-products of or contained within the nation-state construction.…”