Studies of nation and nationalism have long privileged questions about the origins and essence of the nation. When is a nation and what is a nation are the two questions that have occupied much of the debate in the twentieth century. The problem with such essentialist inquiries lies in the presumption that nations are innate, natural, and fixed entities fundamental to people's existence. Modernist critics, on the other hand, have argued for greater attention to contingency, in which the nation is shaped by inexorable pressures—particularly those of modernization. Both primordial and constructivist theoretical frameworks, despite their incongruence, suffer from a similar weakness: that of an unmitigated top-down approach that retains elite perspectives on nation building and nationalism. Within such a perspective, nations and nationalism are assumed to be bounded, driven by a singular impelling cause such as modernity, and originating from elite imaginations that trickle down to the people.
Repossessing...
