In developing his theory of the “literary field,” Pierre Bourdieu essentially had in mind the case of France from the second half of the nineteenth century, the use of which as a case undoubtedly contributed to his marginalizing numerous aspects of the national microcosm. Among its unstated and unrecognized particular qualities, France is mono-national (rather than multinational) and monolingual (rather than multilingual), and occupies the dominant position in the international Francophone world (much as Germany is at the heart of the German-speaking world). A state, a nation, a language, a territory, a literature — all of these make one unit and prevent one from considering situations more complex or tangled, such as those of many minority literatures. These allow the tackling of issues — among others, problems of their “autonomy” in relation to realities outside of literature such as the political, religious, linguistic, and economic. Rather than imposing constraints on a research agenda, the study of minority literatures allows one to shed light on the complex and contradictory relations between the political (the national, the communal, and sometimes the state), the market, and the literary game.

The Roma or Gypsies entered Romania's historic provinces, Wallachia and Moldavia, in the twelfth century. Over the next 200 years, the Roma, who had come to the Balkans from northern India, were enslaved. By the fifteenth century, the practice of Gypsy slavery was widespread throughout the two provinces. In part, their enslavement came about as a means of securing Gypsy skills as craftsmen, metalsmiths, musicians, and equine specialists. Over time, a complex body of laws was passed in Wallachia and Moldavia to strengthen the control of Romanian noblemen over their Gypsy slaves (robi). However, by the eighteenth century, some mild efforts were undertaken to better the plight of Romanian Gypsy slaves.

Most of the one and one-half million Poles who immigrated to the United States before World War II were people of rural, Catholic, Slavic stock in search of greater economic and social opportunities. They settled in urban centers primarily in the middle Atlantic, mid-Western, and New England states where they formed communities (Polonias) around the steel mills, coal and iron mines, slaughter houses and meat packing plants, oil refineries, shoe and textile factories, granaries and milling plants. Their labor was an important element in the industrialization of America. They were among the millions of unknown persons from eastern and southern Europe, as Michael Novak put it, “who have strengthened family and neighborhood life in America, and from 1930's to the present have made possible the longest strides in the nation's history in economic matters and civil rights.” Very few scholars and intellectuals, however, could be found among these Polish immigrants. When Polish scholars, intellectuals, or artists emigrated from partitioned Poland, usually after unsuccessful revolutions, they settled in France or some other European country.

Ethnicity is found in real-world contexts where non-ethnic forms of identification are available. This conclusion is drawn from an empirical study carried out in the multiethnic town of Kurdzhali in Southern Bulgaria, where members of the Bulgarian majority live alongside the Turkish minority. Drawing on the “everyday nationhood” agenda that aims to provide a methodological toolkit for the study of ethnicity/nationhood without overpredicting its importance, the study involved the collection of survey, interview, and ethnographic data. Against the expectations of some experienced scholars of the Central and Eastern Europe region, ethnic identity was found to be more salient for the majority Bulgarians than for the minority Turks. However, the ethnographic data revealed the importance of a rural–urban cleavage that was not predicted by the research design. On the basis of this finding, I argue that the “everyday nationhood” approach could be improved by including a complementary focus on non-ethnic attachments that have been emphasized by scholarship or journalism relevant to the given context. Rather than assuming the centrality of ethnicity, such an “everyday identifications” approach would start from the assumption that ethnic narratives of identity always have to compete with non-ethnic ones.

A diaspora is a migrant community which crosses borders, retains an ethnic group consciousness and peculiar institutions over extended periods (Cohen, 1997, p. ix). It is an ancient social formation, comprised of people living out of their ancestral homeland, who retain their loyalties toward their co-ethnics and the homeland from which they were forced out (Esman, 1996, p. 317). The Jews were the most ancient and well-known diasporic people. For a long time, “diaspora” meant almost exclusively the Jewish people. Hence diaspora signified a collective trauma, a banishment, where one dreamed of home but lived in exile. However, in recent years other peoples, such as Palestinians, Armenians, Chinese, Tatars, etc., who have settled outside their natal territories but maintain strong collective identities, also have defined themselves as disasporas. As Cohen states, “the description or self-description of such groups as diasporas is now common,” which allows a certain degree of social distance to displace a high degree of psychological alienation. Accordingly, during the last decades, disaspora has been rediscovered and expanded to include refugees, gastarbeiters, migrants, expatriates, expellees, political refugees, and ethnic minorities (Safran, 1991, p. 83).

Every nation has its own ways of telling its national story. Such narratives attempt to incorporate and explain the terms of a nation's history, culture, language, territory, economic welfare, and its citizens' sense of belonging. Some national stories are more complicated than others and require specific terminology to describe their nation and its “other.” Belarus is one of these complicated cases. Belarusian national character is often defined by the concept of tuteishaść, or “localness,” by which the people of Belarus identify themselves in relation to other nations and countries.

After the Rose Revolution, President Saakashvili tried to move away from the exclusionary nationalism of the past, which had poisoned relations between Georgians and their Armenian and Azerbaijani compatriots. His government instead sought to foster an inclusionary nationalism, wherein belonging was contingent upon speaking the state language and all Georgian speakers, irrespective of origin, were to be equals. This article examines this nation-building project from a top-down and bottom-up lens. I first argue that state officials took rigorous steps to signal that Georgian-speaking minorities were part of the national fabric, but failed to abolish religious and historical barriers to their inclusion. I next utilize a large-scale, matched-guise experiment (n = 792) to explore if adolescent Georgians ostracize Georgian-speaking minorities or embrace them as their peers. I find that the upcoming generation of Georgians harbor attitudes in line with Saakashvili's language-centered nationalism, and that current Georgian nationalism therefore is more inclusionary than previous research, or Georgia's tumultuous past, would lead us to believe.