Postcolonial melancholy: A reply to Luke Gibbons

Postcolonial melancholy A reply to Luke Gibbons Francis Mulhern Luke Gibbons (RP67) certainly has a way with words, especially those of others; his representation of my views (RP65) is something less than fastidious. l However, there is little value in dwelling much on this; an appropriately detailed self-defence would consist mainly of requotation. Interested readers […]

A Nation, Yet Again: The Field Day Anthology

A Nation, Yet Again The Field Day Anthology Francis Mulhern Anthologies are strategic weapons in literary politics. Authored texts of all kinds – poems, novels, plays, reviews, analyses – play more or less telling parts in a theatre of shifting alliances and antagonisms, but anthologies deploy a special type of rhetorical force: the simulation of […]

Ethnic War in Bosnia?

COMMENTARY Ethnic War in Bosnia? Cornelia Sorabji Bosnia is fading from the news, winter has descended to sever its population from the outside world, and military intervention of any significant scale has not occurred. In Britain much of the debate over the desirability of such intervention has revolved around the idea of ‘ethnic war’. Given […]

On National Identity: A Response to Jonathan Rée

On National Identity A Response to Jonathan Ree Ross Poole Jonathan Ree’s ‘Internationality’l makes a number of significant contributions to the sparse philosophical literature on nationalism. The concept which gives the paper its title promises, I think, to be particularly useful. Just as we are now accustomed to think of individual subjects as constituted in […]

Internationality

Internationality Jonathan Ree With the unification of Gennany and the fragmentation of the Soviet Union and its satellites, nationhood has suddenly become a topical issue. * And, by good fortune, scholars are well prepared to debate it: in the past decade several historians and social scientists have revived and perhaps transfonned the whole question of […]

Cosmopolitanism and boredom

Cosmopolitanism and boredom Bruce robbins * Martha C. Nussbaum with Respondents, For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism, edited by Josh Cohen, Beacon Press, Boston MA, 1996, 151 pp, $15.00, pb., 0 8070 4313 3. ʻIn the course of my lifeʼ, Joseph De Maistre famously observed, ʻI have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians; I […]

Orientalism in reverse

Orientalism in reverse Gilbert achcar The years 1978–79 constitute a watershed in Oriental and Islamic Studies, for they witnessed three outstanding events. I am referring here to events that occurred on two utterly different and therefore incomparable levels, but all three have powerfully impacted the academic field nonetheless. The first two events took place on […]