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England’s political-economic scene is a battleground of competing ideologies, all under the umbrella of neoliberalism. From conservatism to socialism, what forces have historically shaped these political cultures and people’s attachment to them?
            Examining five political ideologies at play in England—conservatism, liberalism, economic liberalism, social democracy, and socialism—Mike Wayne unearths the historical rationale for their relationship to cultural identities, including rural England, gentlemanly capitalism, industrialism, and Empire. By revealing how national identity, class, and political economy intersect, Wayne is able to elucidate England’s enduring attachment to the neoliberal economic system.
            Grounding his cultural and material perspective in Gramscian and Marxist theory, Wayne illuminates the cultural dimensions of English political life in the last century.
 

As increasing attention is drawn to globalization, questions arise about the fate of "the nation," a political and social unit that for centuries has seemed the common-sense way to organize the world. In Nation Work, Timothy Brook and André Schmid draw together eight essays that use historical examples from Asian countries--China, India, Korea, and Japan--to enrich our understandings of the origin and growth of nations.

Asia provides fertile ground for this inquiry, the volume argues, because in Asia the history of the modern nation has been inseparable from global influences in the form of Western imperialism. Yet, while the impetus for building a modern national identity may have come from the need to fashion a favorable place in a world system dominated by Western nations, those engaged in nationalist enterprises found their particular voices more often in relation to tensions within Asia than in relation to more generic tensions between Asia and the West.

With topics ranging from public health measures in nineteenth-century Japan through textual scholarship of Tamil intellectuals, the willful division of Korea's history from China's, the development of China's cotton industry, and the meaning of "postnational-ism" for Chinese artists, the essays reveal the fascinating array of sites at which nation work can take place.

This will be essential reading for historians and social scientists interested in Asia.

Timothy Brook is Professor of History, Stanford University. André Schmid is Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies, University of Toronto.

National narratives create imaginary relations within imagined communities called national peoples. But in the American narrative, alongside the nexus of belonging established for the national community, the national narrative has represented other peoples (women, blacks, "foreigners", the homeless) from whom the property of nationness has been removed altogether and upon whose differences from them the national people depended for the construction of their norms. Dismantling this opposition has become the task of post-national (Post-Americanist) narratives, bent on changing the assumptions that found the "national identity."
This volume, originally published as a special issue of bounrary 2, focuses on the process of assembling and dismantling the American national narrative(s), sketching its inception and demolition. The contributors examine various cultural, political, and historical sources--colonial literature, mass movements, epidemics of disease, mass spectacle, transnational corporations, super-weapons, popular magazines, literary texts--out of which this narrative was constructed, and propose different understandings of nationality and identity following in its wake.

Contributors. Jonathan Arac, Lauren Berlant, Robert J. Corber, Elizabeth Freeman, Kathryn V. Lingberg, Jack Matthews, Alan Nadel, Patrick O'Donnell, Daniel O'Hara, Donald E. Pease, Ross Posnock, John Carlos Rowe, Rob Wilson

During the last two decades, a decline in public investment has undermined some of the national values and institutions of Costa Rica. The resulting sense of dislocation and loss is usually projected onto Nicaraguan “immigrants.”

Threatening Others: Nicaraguans and the Formation of National Identities in Costa Rica explores the representation of the Nicaraguan “other” in the Costa Rican imagery. It also seeks to address more generally why the sense of national belonging constitutes a crucial identification in contemporary societies. Interdisciplinary and based on extensive fieldwork, it looks critically at the “exceptionalism” that Costa Ricans take for granted and view as a part of their national identity.

Carlos Sandoval-García argues that Nicaraguan immigrants, once perceived as a “communist threat,” are now victims of an invigorated, racialized politics in which the Nicaraguan nationality has become an offense in itself.

Threatening Others is a deeply searching book that will interest scholars and students in Latin American studies and politics, cultural studies, and ethnic studies.