Literary Nationalism and Cultural Recognition in Three Nation States: America, India and Japan

With the rise of nation states in the last two hundred years there has been an increase in the use of literary and nonliterary texts to imagine the nation as fatherland or motherland, find a unique identity, give its people a singular character and create notions of patriotism and sacrifice. Often European imperialism created colonial dominance and forced subjugated peoples to mount a resistance to become free. Both American and Indian literary nationalisms were created against British colonial dominance while Japanese imported selective aspects of European modernity. Since the nation is an imagined space, and literary renderings of the nation is also imagined, the intelligentsia gives national significance to selected literary texts. However, literary imaginings of a nation forcefully levels ethnic, religious and caste differences to quickly create a unified identity of a nation through texts which legitimize social and political representation of dominant groups. Therefore, the first constructions of literary nationalism gives way to a second kind of literary nationalism which is indigenous and marginalized in nature such as Native Indian, African, Dalit or Tribal literary nationalisms. Indigenous literary nationalism aims at wresting a space for itself within the dominant imaginings of the nation and claims economic and political advantage. So even within the claims of a dominant literary nationalism there are other competing claims from marginalized and downtrodden groups for representation. The conceptions and reworking of literary nationalism within competing claims of representativeness get changed from time to time, just as the idea of the nation gets reimagined.departmental bulletin pape