Cambridge Scholars Publishing The Nation and its Margins: Rethinking Community

This volume questions the idea that the nation-state is the only available form of community, and challenges its hegemonic control over forms of socio-cultural belonging. The contributions here explore cross-cultural and transnational encounters which highlight narratives that escape the neat boundaries constructed by nationalities. They complicate our understanding of peoples and groups and the varying spaces they inhabit by allowing narratives that have been made invisible, due to hegemonic national control, to emerge. This volume throws light on moments of cultural encounters in the Global South, specifically South Asia, South-east Asia, West Asia, and Latin America, exploring what happens when diverse communities come together to challenge the notion that claiming national identity is the only acceptable mode of being, belonging, and existing in the world. In doing so, the book reveals other radically innovative forms of attaining cohesion and identity. About the Author Aditi Chandra is Assistant Professor of art history at the University of California, Merced and is a recipient of the 2019-20 UC President’s Faculty Research Fellowship in the Humanities. Her current work examines how landscaping, site museums, postcards, and the eviction of refugees, transformed Delhi’s Islamic architecture into modern, tourist monuments in the 19th and 20th centuries. She has published and curated exhibitions of visual material on this subject. Vinita Chandra is an Associate Professor in Ramjas College in Delhi University, India. She has been teaching English Literature since 1986. Her area of specialisation is postcolonial theory and literature, and her research focuses on the battles over the construction of identity in post-colonial nations through literature, and the dangers of silencing marginalised voices.