Postcolonial Studies

Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities (1983) has been influential in its suggestion that nationalism is constitutively paradoxical, the expression of a historical rupture that must assert itself as an historical continuity. This has encouraged studies of the temporality of nationalism and highlighted the function of print capitalism in the development of national identities. Divisions between materialism and deconstructionism feature in studies of nationalism as they do in debates over colonialism. Materialists analyze historical anticolonial nationalist resistance as a collective and liberatory struggle for self-determination; deconstructionists analyze it as a master narrative derived from and complicit with the West. The Western source is, for some deconstructionist thinkers, the Enlightenment, for others, humanism, for others, colonialism, and for others, European nationalism.

According to materialists, anticolonial nationalism has historically mobilized leaders and masses as a political unity that represents the needs and desires of the entire colonized population. Materialist scholars apply class analysis to differentiate between socialist, populist nationalisms and bourgeois nationalisms. Their approach rests on a dialectical understanding of the reciprocal transformability of leaders and masses as political agents.

Deconstructionists, who see the concept of political unity as a ruse, question such an understanding. They contend that it is the interests of a male social elite that nationalism actually served (and serves) and that these interests conflict with the interests of women, the peasantry, workers, and the poor. The deconstructionist critique of nationalism rests on a categorical or structural (as opposed to a dialectical and historical) understanding, which posits that these heterogeneous groups are fixed in their autonomous, essentially cultural, differences. Any claim, or attempt, to unify them does violence to those differences; any attempt to politically represent, or "speak as" the entire dominated population is actually an exploitative act of "speaking for," that is, another example of self-consolidation through others.