Rescuing history from the nation pdf

He demonstrates the necessity of incorporating contestation, appropriation, repression, and the return of the repressed subject into any account of the past that will be meaningful to the present. Duara demonstrates how to write histories that resist being pressed into the service of the national subject in its progress—or stalled progress—toward modernity.. I chose to title this chapter 'rescuing theory from the nation' after Prasenjit Duara's title of his inspiring book Rescuing History from the Nation because I believe we are both Author : John M.

Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation , , — Author : O. Ruth McVey notes how the conceptual supremacy of the nation Prasenjit Duara offers the first systematic account of the relationship between the nation-state, nationalism, and the concept of linear history. As a result, they have written repressive, exclusionary, and incomplete accounts. The backlash against such histories has resulted in a tendency to view the past as largely constructed, imagined, or invented.

In this book, Duara offers a way out of the impasse between constructionism and the evolving nation; he redefines history as a series of multiple, often conflicting narratives produced simultaneously at national, local, and transnational levels.

In a series of closely linked case studies, he considers such examples as the very different histories produced by Chinese nationalist reformers and partisans of popular religions, the conflicting narratives of statist nationalists and of advocates of federalism in early twentieth-century China. Download Free PDF. Book Review Rescuing History from the Nation. A short summary of this paper. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Different from most earlier postconoial historians, Duara focuses more on the narrative structure of linear History and aims at criticizing the nation as the subject of History. Rescuing History from the Nation is divided into two parts. While the first part deals with the theoretical problem of the nation as the subject of History, the second part, composed of five empirical studies, tries to showcase bifurcated histories in early twentieth century China, which have been repressed and obscured by national History.

Early twentieth century China is the perfect studying object for this study that concerns the relationship between nation-state, nationalism and linear History since China was then controlled by the groups of modern nationalists who themselves are greatly influenced by the narrative of evolutionary History.

Duara argues that early twentieth century China was a weak state but had a strong statist discourse, which is always accompanied by nationalism. Uniformity and the building of a nation-state were expected under such discourse and therefore other narratives, which disunify the nation-state will be repressed. Bifurcated history is his way of rescuing. Therefore both transmission and dispersion should be studied.