Nation-Building by Anthology

Bibliographic Data

ID7748291
AuthorsRoland Greene (corresponding author)
Year1995
Volume4
Issue1
Pages105-119
Publication date1995-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueDiaspora A Journal of Transnational Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1044-2057 • E-ISSN: 1911-1568
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/dsp.1995.0017
OpenAlexW2005532223
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited12

Diaspora 4:1 1995 Nation-Building by Anthology Roland Greene University of Oregon Belated Modernity andAesthetic Culture: InventingNational Literature . Gregory Jusdanis. Theory and History ofLiterature 81. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1991. In a short space of years, nation and nationality have lost their position as ever-present but unquestioned markers in literary and cultural study. In the play of argument, they have become movable pieces. In particular, a wide array of books and essays has intensively pursued the relations of literature and national identity in the wake of Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities (1983)— most notable among them, the essays collected by Homi Bhabha in Nation and Narration, Doris Sommer's Foundational Fictions, and the volume Nationalisms and Sexualities, edited by Andrew Parker and others after a Harvard conference of the same name.1 Among these, Gregory Jusdanis's Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture: Inventing National Literature has received less attention than it deserves . The book's diminished visibility follows from the same source as its value: it comes to the discussion with a stake neither in western Europe and the Americas nor in what for scholars in the humanities have become the fashionable parts ofthe developing world, but in a country whose present few of us can see for its past, namely modern Greece. Jusdanis's subject in this discussion is one that not many seem prepared to take up—the "minor" literature and culture that nonetheless struggles with its own adaptations of those problems ofmodernity and identity that have been chronicled elsewhere. And yet societies such as Greece can contribute urgently to the discussion because of the density of what might be called the middle stratum of their modernizing experience—the stratum between an adopted paradigm of national identity and a complex, often ambivalent social reality. This middle stratum is the site of a multitude of local interpretations that mediate between the other two layers and produce astonishing concatenations of classical Greek, European, and American cultural forms. With its particular siting and its arguably "minor" urge to measure modern Greece against more internationally prominent countries (an impulse that 106 Diaspora 4:1 1995 seldom runs in the opposite direction), Jusdanis's book is one of the most useful recent additions to the broad field of books that treat the making of nationhood. A scholar ofmodern Greek, Jusdanis shows the place that a western notion of "literature" occupied in the emergence of Greece as a modern nation-state. He argues, with a wealth of evidence, that the collective will of a population is often formed by ideological motions that take the forms of literary theory and practice; that what in other contexts might appear merely belletristic—an anthology of avowed masterpieces, for instance—can become a charged event in the fashioning of a national or group self-image; and that literature is finally an ambivalent agent in modernization and the construction of collective identity, in part because the fit between literary and social projects is often imprecise from the outset, and in part because in the modern world literature tends to harness—and often , only barely contain—semantic, ideological, and psychological forces that threaten to undermine any social movement of which it is made an instrument. This latter point, though mentioned intermittently in Jusdanis's argument, is relatively underplayed there: he prefers to see literature as an all too effective factor in modernization and the production of identities, with the result that "in putting literature in the service of nationalism [intellectuals] destroy its potential to reflect critically on the nation and the identity it helped shape." He goes on: "At the initial stage ofnationalism literature can assist a people in constituting an autonomous state free from external domination. But since literature, like modern art in general, aspires to a negative function as well—to criticize all totalities, including the national one—it occupies a paradoxical position in simultaneously mediating identity and reflecting on it from a distance" (47-^48). This is perhaps the crucial threshold where Jusdanis's argument leaves off and his readers are invited—even obliged—to take up his conclusions and reinterpret them, transform them in light of local contingencies . How does that "paradoxical position

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Diaspora · Literature · Media studies · Modernity · Narrative · National identity · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Anthropology · Gender Studies · History · Irish and British Studies · Law · Philippine History and Culture · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies

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