Abstract
In examining the pervasive politics of nationalism and the difficulties in imagining community without it, The Persistence of Nationalism is an impressively ambitious book. It is particularly innovative in its construction of a critique of nationalism not through literature on nation and nationalism, but through ideas of coexistence, urban encounters and time as plural within poststructuralist, feminist and postcolonial literatures. The strength of this approach is its avoidance of rehearsing well-worn debates around defining nationalism as ethnic or civic, real or invented, primordial or modern which, as the author asserts, preclude asking critical questions about the persistence of nationalism and possibilities of resisting it. This refreshing approach means the literature discussed is extensive and can seem eclectic. The result is what is, at times, a dense text that demands quite a lot from the reader. However, Closs Stephens’ skilful weaving together of such a broad range of approaches is both thought-provoking and productive.
The first part of the book is theoretical and explores the narratives that contribute to a ‘nationalist imaginary’. This includes a detailed dissection of work by Ernest Gellner, Max Weber and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, which foregrounds the presumed necessity of the state and the dominance of linear and homogenous accounts of time in nationalist discourses. The second part focuses on the urban – specifically urban encounters and Jean-Luc Nancy’s idea of the mêlée – as a way of thinking politics beyond the confines of nationalism. As such, the book is an important contribution to a growing body of work in urban and cultural geography on the city as a ‘way of thinking coexistence that defies the forces of unification’ (p. 120). The empirical grounding is provided through an appraisal of critical cultural engagements with imaginative geographies of the ‘War on Terror’: primarily the ‘7 Million Londoners, One London’ poster campaign in response to the 7/7 bombings and Mohsin Hamid’s 2007 novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist.
Closs Stephens makes a convincing case for how, rather than offering progressive alternatives to nationalism, the cosmopolitan and globalist ideas that underpin these critical interventions instead reproduce a nationalist imaginary. She contrasts these ‘failings’ to imagine alternative forms of community with more ‘successful’ academic critiques such as Cynthia Weber’s film project in response to the ‘I am an American’ Ad Council adverts and Judith Butler’s essay ‘Violence, Mourning, Politics’. Whilst the author’s argument is certainly persuasive, and these are instructive examples, there is an implied hierarchy of popular versus academic critique. This could perhaps have been tempered by additional attention paid to the role of audiences, and an acknowledgement that, certainly in the case of the poster campaign, promotion of unity is sometimes simply a strategy of political rhetoric. My only other concern was that the inclusion of a chapter on the designs of Holocaust memorials in Berlin, whilst elucidatory of other imaginaries of coexistence, was somewhat of a distracting departure from the precious discussions. In sum, by tracing the persistence of nationalism in a range of cultural and theoretical expressions that we assume to eschew it, Closs Stephens highlights the sheer scale of the challenge in resisting nationalism. Crucially, she provides a series of signposts to how we might conceive of ‘a future politics beyond what we are already able to imagine’ (p. 12).