The Ernest Gellner Nationalism Lecture: Nationalism and the crises of global modernity
Date
2021-07-01
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Repository Usage Stats
views
downloads
Citation Stats
Attention Stats
Abstract
Whether or not there is a direct causal relationship, nationalism is at the heart of all the crises in the modern world and becomes entangled in its effects. As the fundamental source of authority for all modes of governance in the world, we are beholden to its capacity to resolve these cascading crises. I argue that the nation form is the ‘epistemic engine’ driving the globally circulatory and doxic Enlightenment ideal of the conquest of nature and perpetual growth that sustains the runaway technosphere. The cascading crises that we have already witnessed in this century—financial, economic, epidemic and climatological—are rooted significantly in this technosphere. At the same time, we will have to find our way through and out of these forms to secure a sustainable planet. I explore the interstitial spaces and counter-flows of social movements that are seeking to develop a post-Enlightenment and a planetary, rather than a global, cosmology.
Type
Department
Description
Provenance
Subjects
Citation
Permalink
Published Version (Please cite this version)
Publication Info
Duara, P (2021). The Ernest Gellner Nationalism Lecture: Nationalism and the crises of global modernity. Nations and Nationalism, 27(3). pp. 610–622. 10.1111/nana.12753 Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/23706.
This is constructed from limited available data and may be imprecise. To cite this article, please review & use the official citation provided by the journal.
Collections
Scholars@Duke
Prasenjit Duara
Prasenjit Duara is the Oscar Tang Chair of East Asian Studies at Duke University. He was born and educated in India and received his PhD in Chinese history from Harvard University. He was previously Professor and Chair of the Dept of History and Chair of the Committee on Chinese Studies at the University of Chicago (1991-2008). Subsequently, he became Raffles Professor of Humanities and Director, Asia Research Institute at National University of Singapore (2008-2015).
In 1988, he published Culture, Power and the State: Rural North China, 1900-1942 (Stanford Univ Press) which won the Fairbank Prize of the AHA and the Levenson Prize of the AAS, USA. Among his other books are Rescuing History from the Nation (U Chicago 1995), Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Rowman 2003) and most recently, The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future (Cambridge 2014). He has edited Decolonization: Now and Then (Routledge, 2004) and co-edited A Companion to Global Historical Thought with Viren Murthy and Andrew Sartori (John Wiley, 2014). His work has been widely translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean and the European languages.
Unless otherwise indicated, scholarly articles published by Duke faculty members are made available here with a CC-BY-NC (Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial) license, as enabled by the Duke Open Access Policy. If you wish to use the materials in ways not already permitted under CC-BY-NC, please consult the copyright owner. Other materials are made available here through the author’s grant of a non-exclusive license to make their work openly accessible.