Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse?

Mind the gap: The nation form and the Kohn dichotomy

“…In many ways, Kohn's own journey testifies to these transnational currents: He moved quite widely across Europe, Asia, and the Middle East before settling in the United States, and his views on nationalism were deeply influenced by anticolonial nationalist thinkers (see Gordon, 2017; Liebich, 2006; Wolf, 1976). The works of these non‐Western authors were, in turn, shaped by their encounters with Western discourses of nationalism (e.g., Chatterjee, 1986; Gebel, 2015; Goswami, 2004; Manela, 2007). We should not be surprised, then, to find uncanny resonances between the Kohn dichotomy and non‐Western typologies of nationalism.…”

“…As McCrone (1998, p. 9) notes, the distinction between civic and ethnic nationalism “does lend itself to ethnocentric caricature – why can't they be more like us ?” Seen in historical perspective, the Kohn dichotomy belongs to a long genealogy of orientalising discourses and colonial epistemologies that posit the West as distinct from and superior to the non‐West (Bugge, 2022; Tinsley, 2019). More specifically, as Chatterjee elucidates, Kohn's framework “is designed to explain how a profoundly liberal idea could be so distorted as to produce such grossly illiberal movements and regimes.” It achieves this goal by constructing a normative hierarchy between Western and non‐Western nationalism: Western nationalism is presented as “the classical, the orthodox, the pure type” and said to remain compatible with universal liberal values, while non‐Western nationalism is seen as “complex, impure, often deviant” (Chatterjee, 1986, p. 3). By projecting the negative features of nationalism onto the non‐Western “other,” the Kohn dichotomy allows Western nations to present themselves as fountains of “civic, liberal virtue” (Bugge, 2022, p. 506).…”

Anti-colonial thought and global social theory

“…It also argues that using anti-colonial as a generic term acknowledges its genesis in anti-colonial political struggles across the world and binds the different versions with an epistemic search for creating knowledge about a new society through a critique of the colonial. It is an umbrella term to describe a range of different methodological positions that have emerged in the wake of colonialism: indigenous sociology, indigeneity, and indigenous methodology (Atal, 1981;Akiwowo, 1986Akiwowo, , 1999Smith, 1999;Odora, 2002); endogeneity and endogenous thought; extraversion (Hountondji, 1995(Hountondji, , 1997(Hountondji, , 2009; autonomous and independent sociologies (Alatas, 2006); subaltern theory, derivative nationalism, and colonial difference (Guha, 1982;Chatterjee, 1986); colonial modernity (Barlow, 2012;Patel, 2017); internal colonialism (Martin, 2018); coloniality of power (Quijano, 2000); border thinking and de-linking (Mignolo, 2007); connected sociologies (Bhambra, 2014a); and post-colonial sociology (Go, 2016), south theories (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Daley, 2018). Undoubtedly these different positions highlight unique attributes, but they also flag an imperative for a common denominator that binds these perspectives.…”

The catharsis of male consumption: Reimagining masculinity in India

“…The next phase of Indian history, anti‐colonial nationalism, had seen a variety of masculinities to have evolved (Banerjee, 2005; Banerjee, 2012; Basu & Banerjee, 2006; Chatterjee, 1986; Nandy, 1983; Osella & Osella, 2006) and all these because “nationalism has typically sprung from masculinized memory, masculinized humiliation, and masculinized hope” (Enloe, 1989, p. 44). However, as Das reminds, all other masculinities in the immediate post‐colonial (post‐independent) age were swamped by the masculinity of “Nehru's secularist Fabianism with the success of Indian independence” (Das, 2017, p. 10).…”