1 online resource (x, 275 pages)

Prasenjit Duara offers the first systematic account of the relationships among the nation-state, nationalism, and the concept of linear history. Focusing primarily on China and including discussion of India, Duara argues that many historians of postcolonial nation-states have adopted linear, evolutionary history of the Enlightenment/colonial model. As a result, they have written repressive, exclusionary, and incomplete accounts

The backlash against such histories has resulted in a tendency to view the past as largely constructed, imagined, or invented. In this book, Duara offers a way out of the impasse between constructionism and the evolving nation; he redefines history as a series of multiple, often conflicting narratives produced simultaneously at national, local, and transnational levels. In a series of closely linked case studies, he considers such examples as the very different histories produced by Chinese nationalist reformers and partisans of popular religions, and the conflicting narratives of statist nationalists and of advocates of federalism in early twentieth-century China. He demonstrates the necessity of incorporating contestation, appropriation, repression, and the return of the repressed subject into any account of the past that will be meaningful to the present

Duara demonstrates how to write histories that resist being pressed into the service of the national subject in its progress - or stalled progress - toward modernity

Includes bibliographical references (pages 237-257) and index

1. Linear History and the Nation-state -- 2. Bifurcating Linear Histories in China and India -- 3. The Campaigns against Religion and the Return of the Repressed -- 4. Secret Brotherhood and Revolutionary Discourse in China's Republican Revolution -- 5. The Genealogy of Fengjian or Feudalism: Narratives of Civil Society and State -- 6. Provincial Narratives of the Nation: Federalism and Centralism in Modern China -- 7. Critics of Modernity in India and China

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