This chapter considers different metaphors for racial encounters in American Classics departments, and how they interact globally. Beginning with the APA ‘Minority Scholarship’ in the early 2000s, the chapter traces different approaches to diversifying the demographics of traditional Classics departments in the United States, and how the field has developed in new regions. How might the proliferation of Classics programs in Southeast Asia be read as diaspora, or be distinguished from a form of neo-colonialism? How do Classics programs in Asia or the Global South interact with local histories of race and colonisation? Combining historical and contemporary case studies, this chapter reflects on different potential models of ‘diversifying’ Classics in a variety of global contexts.

This chapter is about the global epistemological politics of religion illustrated through a study of the transnational history of Pakistan and Israel. It argues that the entangled nature of these state-building ventures contributed to the circulation of particular understandings of ‘religion’ and its relation to the state, that this structured the minority politics of the British Indian Muslims and the Palestinian Jews, and that it both limited and enabled the claims to the nations and states that came to replace them. The case study focuses on two key individuals in the history of the Indian and Palestine partition and the Pakistani and Israeli independence that followed: Reginald Coupland and Muhammad Zafarullah Khan. It asks how they, the institutions they represented, and the ideas they carried, circulated, and influenced changed over the final decade before independence. It shows how claims for the recognition of religion in international relations are not separate from these forms of colonial epistemological politics but are intimately connected to them.

This chapter asks how two subjects defined in the terms of ‘religion’ – the ‘Muslim’ and the ‘Jewish’ subject – became recognizable as such in the decades prior to the independence of the ‘Islamic Republic’ of Pakistan and the ‘Jewish National Home’ of Israel, which aligned the recognition and formation of the religious minority, the nation, and the state. It addresses the recognition of Israel and Pakistan in the contexts of their colonial pasts and analyses the role of demography, the claim for political representation, and the work of two international commissions that shaped the borders of their statehood. It shows how emerging modes of cultural recognition built on and cemented very particular understandings of ‘religion’ and funnelled certain aspects of social, political, and cultural life into coherent, representable, and recognizable forms of religious difference. By looking in detail at the epistemological politics of religious difference, the chapter illustrates the costs that come with the recognition of ‘religion’ and ‘religious difference’ in the transition from empire to state. The double face of the imperial recognition of the ‘Indian Muslims’ and the ‘Palestinian Jews’, in other words, worked both as a condition for legitimate government and power and as a resource for the future challenge against them.

By asking how political communities are constructed and with what boundaries, this book has explored different conceptualizations of nation, different perceptions of territory and dynamics of unity and division. It has presented alternative notions of political community outside of the nation-state paradigm, in communities smaller than the state and going beyond the boundaries of the state. My work has devoted attention to the beginnings of political communities or to their reshaping processes. By establishing boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’, these communities defined themselves at different levels: the local, regional, transnational and national levels. In the border region between Ghana and Togo, these political communities were built on top of each other, like a palimpsest, and intersected with the Ghanaian and Togolese states that used these dynamics to their advantage. This book endeavours to make us rethink the notion of the nation-state and its associated concepts in light of these dynamics: citizenship, elections, border and nation-state.

This chapter explores Bowen’s relation to Ireland in literary and cultural criticism over the past half century. It charts how developments and trends in literary criticism – the rise of postcolonial studies and Irish studies, the development of ‘Irish modernism’ as a critical category – have shaped how we understand Bowen as an Irish writer, and her fiction as Irish literature, in the twenty-first century. In particular, it examines whether Bowen’s work readily corresponds to the nationalist and statist concerns that the category of Irish literature often implies. Through a reading of how Bowen figures Ireland and Irishness in A World of Love (1955), I suggest that Bowen’s Irish modernism operates beyond the limits of national and nationalist history, a circumstance that enables a reconsideration of some of the limits and ideologies of the category of Irish literature.

Chapter 2 provides the historical context of the Ghana–Togo borderland region. I show how the border communities I have visited manifested both plurality and unity, showing strong remnants of Ewe unity despite the border but also dissensions reaffirming the border as a separation. I then delve deeper into the roots of the historical in-betweenness of the border region explaining the multiplicity of political communities layered on top of each other from the precolonial period to the 1956 plebiscite. Finally, I analyse the scholarship’s approach to nation-building projects arising from the border region in the 1950s. While the literature on political activism in the border region concludes on the failure of the diverse political projects that arose, the persistence of these projects today is not fully explained. I argue that the palimpsestic and interconnected nature of political communities in the borderlands contributes to explain this phenomenon – which suggests that other frameworks smaller than the Westphalian conception of nation-state are at work.

This chapter uncovers the emergence and early history of the terms folk song and folk music in English during the nineteenth century as they circulated across the Atlantic and around the globe. One person in particular was responsible for this discourse: the prolific author and translator Mary Howitt. I show that these terms initially emerged in direct reference to the German Volkslieder, though they were not associated explicitly with the work of Johann Gottfried Herder nor with any particular nation or region. I use this material to argue that folk music was neither a repertoire nor an idiom, but rather an idea conditioned by Romantic thought. Indeed, it was the concept of folk music that most enchanted writers during this period – writers who were never of the folk they depicted. These terms are a nostalgic reply or retort to the interlaced revolutions and encounters that have defined modernity. Ultimately, this history exemplifies a long intellectual struggle in the West over the meaning and musical significance of working-class culture, nature, time, and colonial alterity.

This chapter outlines distinctions between national and nationalist uses of folk music as a frame for discussing its slipperiness as a concept and the political and identitarian implications of its performance, its collection and publication, its use in education and in religion, and its adoption into works of art music. Consideration of folk practices in Britain, France, Spain, and the USA from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries is combined with special attention to expressions of Celtic otherness within nation states. The chapter also addresses the manner in which sub-national musical nationalisms (or ethnic nationalisms), operate as positive symbols of subaltern resistance and celebration when folk or folk-like material is imported into the art music of late nineteenth-century concert halls. At the same time, the chapter addresses the ‘primitivism’ of folk music and the connections nineteenth-century thinkers made between national folk musics and the precepts of social Darwinism.

This methodological introduction outlines definitions of both the modernist epic and of nostalgia. In particular, it introduces the concept of “archaeological nostalgia,” the longing for the past of a place one already inhabits. This new categorization of nostalgia proves key to understanding the emotion’s role in modernist poetics. Existing scholarly debates surrounding the nature of nostalgia are also surveyed to demonstrate its political significance, and a “weak theory” of modernist epic as a capacious genre is offered.

From the Frontier Wars to contemporary conflicts, this chapter considers the role of Australian poetry in shaping understandings of war. It includes early critiques of British command during the Boer War and national mythmaking around Breaker Morant. It then considers the patriotism and propaganda of poetry in World War I and the generation of the Anzac or digger myth in national identity. It considers the role of humour and the vernacular in popular poetry, and writing from the homefront. It traces the change in attitudes as World War I continued and resulted in a heavy loss of Australian lives. The chapter also considers poetry written during World War II and the Vietnam War. It considers how writers experimented with form and imagery to create a vehicle of protest, as well as to navigate disillusionment and loss. The chapter considers poetic engagements with a movement into perpetual war and conflict in the late twentieth century, including the role of media. Lastly, it considers the voices of asylum seekers and the role of poetry in protesting and critiquing government policy around border security.

The history of poetry in Australia is a history of languages and nations. This volume provides multiple perspectives on that history. Literary histories are always full of contention and this is especially so in Australia where the political and social reality of nation is itself in contention. Poetry was an influential medium through which the structure, experiences and values of settler colonialism and then nationhood were articulated and debated. But it was also complicit in the unconscious assumption of terra nullius in the language of settlement. This is not, then, a history of the untroubled development of a nation and its poetic traditions, but of deep and ongoing debates over language, aesthetic paradigms, land ownership, and cultural and spiritual life. History emerges through documents and narration of ‘the past’; it is part of what Lisa Lowe calls ‘the economy of affirmation and forgetting that structures and formalises the archives of liberalism, and liberal ways of understanding’. Poetry is also part of this economy yet can, perhaps more than any other genre, approach that which eludes the archive or exceeds it. This includes those subjects, practices and geographies that have been excluded from ‘the human’ as well as aspects of the ordinary, of embodiment and feeling. It may provide a mode of care for cultures and communities. With its epistemological and ontological charge, poetry has been both constitutive of and the limit-point of representation.

The Epilogue picks up the story that this book begins with, the story of the demolition of the last symbol of Ottoman Sofia’s water culture, the city’s main thermal bath, elaborating on the construction of the modern Bath Square as a showcase of the young Bulgarian nation’s resolve to join the modern world. I argue that the making and imposition of national space in the post-Ottoman period led to the creation of an entirely new place in Sofia’s historic center by the beginning of the 1910s. The modernization of the street network replaced the old naming system that reflected the streets’ natural and social environments with a new one that employed the already large arsenal of national heroes and events. The efforts of urban planners and architects to create Sofia’s image of a capital city of a modern nation-state converged in the project for the construction of Bath Square whose key features would be monumentality and representativeness. The new buildings represented not the environmental characteristics of place but the success of the nation-state and the steadfast pursuit of modernity.

This chapter traces the emergence of Joyce’s aesthetic from Stephen Hero to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, analyzing the development of Stephen Dedalus as would-be artist in the context of Irish colonial experience. It pays particular attention to the influence of Oscar Wilde. Both Wilde’s Picture of Doran Gray and Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist belong to the Bildungsroman tradition, that is, to the novel of development, which their narratives challenge and transform by presenting the central character’s growth to maturity as deviating from cultural expectations rather than fulfilling them. Joyce’s narrative, however, points toward a new nation’s emergence.

Was Luigi Cadorna bound to head the Italian army in 1914? For over a century those tracing the Chief of Staff’s rise and fall across the Great War have argued it was highly likely, if not a foregone conclusion. Scion of a dynasty of soldiers serving the Savoys since the eighteenth century, he was in uniform from childhood, and enjoyed an exceptional career. Come the European conflict, Cadorna appeared to have all the qualities of a national condottiero: the brilliant heir to noble warrior stock, to use one of his hagiographers’ formulas. But the most surprising thing about that personal myth is that Cadorna himself firmly believed it. As his confidant and informal biographer at Supreme Command, Colonel Angelo Gatti, would write: ‘he is sure he is the man of God, and the necessary continuer of his father’s work. Raffaele Cadorna took Rome, Luigi Cadorna will take Trento and Trieste.’

This chapter examines the interconnectedness of whiteness, gender, and national identity in Hollywood movies. It begins with Birth of a Nation, Hollywood’s first blockbuster and its original sin. It then turns to films that bookend the Classical era – The Jazz Singer (1927) and The Searchers (1956) – to illustrate how much of the ideology put on screen in Birth of a Nation became profitable subject matter and generic habit in the studio era. It then turns to Rocky (1976), examining the centrality of Hollywood in shaping the racial ideology of colorblindness in the decades after the civil rights movement. The chapter concludes by discussing what the author calls Hollywood’s white racial imaginary, a critical framework that allows for a more adequate diagnosis of the implications of the machinations of whiteness in contemporary Hollywood.

The Introduction explains what East Asia is and how it is defined here: which is culturally, primarily in terms of shared use of the Chinese writing system, shared institutional models, Confucianism, and common forms of Buddhism. It argues that East Asia has changed greatly over time and is internally diverse, but that there are also important commonalities and continuities. The relatively recent origins of some traditions are also discussed. East Asias global importance and continued relevance are emphasized.