BECOMING NATIONALISTS Two articles explore ways of coming to nationalism from the margins, so to say.

An imaginary Berlin Wall stands between nationalist trajectories of the Western hemisphere and those of the East. While the nationalism of the West is generally associated with Enlightenment, the Eastern version is usually referred to as dormant cultural or linguistic nationalism stirred up by Western education. It is an old academic canon that gained new respectability through Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities. But even if political realities in the postcolonial world apparently vindicated this academic canon, the same realities might trap us into writing history retrospectively. A pertinent case in point is the narrative of the emergence of the Indonesian nation in which the notion of a slumbering national identity has been central. A concomitant of that is the almost complete isolation of Indonesian historiography from important discussions in other postcolonial societies. This article proposes a heterodox perspective on the emergence of Indonesian nationalism, which is informed by literature on Senegal and Bengal. This choice is not coincidental, as these locations were the heartlands of the former French and English colonial empires.

For over two centuries the Dönme lived an open secret in Ottoman Salonika following their conversion from Judaism to Islam in the wake of the conversion of the messianic rabbi Shabbatai Tzevi in 1666. Neither the category “Jewish” nor “Muslim” expresses their religious identity. Unlike Jews, the Dönme ostensibly followed the requirements of Islam, including fasting at Ramadan and praying in mosques, one of which they built. Unlike Muslims, the Dönme maintained a belief that Shabbatai Tzevi was the messiah, practiced kabbalistic rituals, and recited prayers in Hebrew and Judeo-Spanish. According to the descendants of Dönme in Istanbul, the Dönme in Salonika saw themselves as a community apart; fulfilling the commandments of Shabbatai Tzevi caused Dönme to only marry among themselves, avoid relations with Jews, maintain their separate identity guided by detailed genealogies, and bury their dead in distinct cemeteries. (Dönmeler1919:15; Galanté 1935:67; and Stavroulakis 1993).

The long civil war in the Sudan between the government and the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) is usually simply described as a war between ‘the Arab North’ and ‘the African South.’ Equally simply, it is understood as a continuation, by new means and in new circumstances, of nineteenth-century and earlier inequalities between free people and unfree people, and of hostilities between slavers and those they preyed upon. In the twentieth century these asymmetries came to be represented by a religious distinction between Muslims and non-Muslims. However, these apparent distinctions between free and unfree, and between Muslim and non-Muslim begin to blur when we ask who is making them. Likewise, at closer inspection, the division into “the Arab North” and “the African South” begins to fragment and reconstitute into a complexity of alliances and interest groups. These complexities become more evident as engagement moves from hostile encounters in the remote vastness of the Sudan to peace negotiations and press conferences in hotels and offices in capital cities. In the latter settings marginalized populations can be heard. Of special here interest are the three culturally ‘southern’ populations whose homelands are in the geo-political North: Abyei, the Nuba Mountains, and South Blue Nile. In January 2003, a public statement, headed “Let us not be denied the right to decide on our future,” was delivered to the North-South peace conference in Kenya by a local NGO, the Relief Organisation of Fazugli (ROOF), on behalf of “the people of South Blue Nile.” It demanded that their representatives, along with those of the Nuba Mountains and Abyei be included in the current peace negotiations.

The Tanzimat—a series of legal and administrative reforms implemented in the Ottoman empire between 1839 and 1876—has been described by Roderic Davison as a modernization campaign whose momentum came “from the top down and from the outside in.” There can be little doubt about the basic historical veracity of this characterization. Ottoman reform was indeed the brainchild of a small, albeit influential, portion of the imperial bureaucratic elite and its direction and timing were undeniably influenced by foreign diplomatic pressure (in the context of the so-called “Eastern Question”). But by characterizing, correctly, the Tanzimat as a state-led, elitist project, Davison's argument enters an interpretive vicious circle which seems to be more a reflection of twentieth-century political sensibilities than of nineteenth-century realities. A “top-down” political project, according to this argument, is by definition less likely to succeed than a project that has “vigorous popular support.” And, since we know that the project in question ultimately failed to stop the breakup of the empire, it must indeed have lacked such support.

During the last two decades of the twentieth century, Tiruppur town in Tamilnadu state became India's centerpiece in the export of cotton knitted garments. Between 1986 and 1997, Tiruppur's export earnings skyrocketed from $25 million to $636 million, the number of garments exported increased more than nine-fold, and Tiruppur shifted from basic T-shirts to diversified multi-product exports of fashion garments. This industrial boom has been organized through networks of small firms integrated through intricate subcontracting arrangements controlled by local capital of the Gounder caste from modest agrarian and working-class origins. In effect the whole town works like a decentralized factory for the global economy, but with local capital of peasant-worker origins at the helm. What is more, these self-made men hinge their retrospective narratives of class mobility and industrial success on their propensity to ‘toil’: the word ulaippu is distinct from the conventional Tamil word for work. How did Gounder peasant-workers remake the dynamics of work through their toil, to make Tiruppur a powerhouse of global production?

In his groundbreaking Nationalism Reframed, Rogers Brubaker challenges conventional understandings of nations and nationalism by advancing a distinctive, if not innovative, approach to the subject. Drawing on recent theoretical developments that problematize the realist ontology implicitly assumed in previous literatures, Brubaker calls for an institutionalist approach to the study of nations and nationalism. As he points out, nation and nationhood can be better understood not as substance but as institutionalized form, not as collectivity but as practical category, and not as entity but as contingent event (1996:18). He then employs this approach to analyze the breakdown of the Soviet Union. According to Brubaker, nationhood and nationality were institutionalized in the Soviet Union in two different modes: political-territorial and the ethno-personal. While the incongruence between these two modes led to tensions and contradictions within Soviet society, the dual legacy of such an institutionalization, manifesting itself as unintended consequences, eventually shaped the disintegration of the Soviet Union and continues to structure nationalist politics in the successor states today.

Today cultural thingness is on the agenda. What Appadurai has called “methodological fetishism” has become the byword for a new type of inquiry into the ontology of possession and circulation of things. Of these, the Maussian ’gift' has emerged as an organizing topos for other institutions of exchange not structured by the contractual rationality of commodity.

Twenty years ago a work entitled The Nations Within examined the political structures that keep Native polities embedded within the United States, and the legal armature that sovereignty principles might provide for future activism (Deloria and Lytle 1984). The Native nations are still “within,” in the political sense, but they are “out” in public discourses; activism has given sovereignty claims more standing that all but dreamers would have imagined in 1984. During the same period, however, federal Indian policies have alternatively buttressed and undercut the power of tribal leadership, just as they have on other continents where imperial powers have cultivated “Native authorities.” Such destabilizing shifts impel scholars of Native political, economic, and cultural histories to examine less visible violence and inequalities that underlie political institutions, particularly those that remain as evident constructions of power change.

Reproducing Empire is an invitation to reconceptualize gender, sex, and reproduction as an analytical framework for understanding Puerto Rico. In this complex and multivalent work, Laura Briggs repositions ideologies of family, sexuality, and reproduction as central to U.S. imperial enterprises. In so doing, she focuses a powerful lens on how discourses of sex, science, race, reproduction, deviance, and domesticity have shaped and propelled U.S. colonialism, in both form and substance.

That ’modernity' is not simply a Western export to the rest of the world has been much noted recently. Only rarely, though, has the relationship between local and global, colonizers and colonized, and the West and ’the rest' in the production of modernity been so rigorously explored as it is in Timothy Mitchell's new book, Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity. With precise, careful analysis of such phenomenon as the economy, capitalism, and expertise, Mitchell illuminates how the world in which we live came to acquire its particular shape.

Sami Zubaida's Law and Power in the Islamic World is a fascinating politico-social history of the relations between Islamic law and the procession of political masters who have ruled the Middle East since the Prophet's death. One message is clear: the notion of an omnipotent shariءa, passed from caliph to caliph for fourteen centuries, is a myth held by both Islamist radicals and their Western critics.