International Nationalisms explores the literary and critical discourses surrounding the concepts of the nation and nationalism in the postcolonial, global conjuncture through a particularly comparativist--or what Edward Said calls a contrapuntal--approach. Therefore, as opposed to theorizing a particular nationalist genre, the nationalist Bildungsroman (after Pheng Cheah) or all of "third world" literature (after Fredric Jameson), the project instead focuses on nationalism as an ideologeme, or an integral ideological structuring unit that runs across the literatures of the decolonizing period. In doing so, the project is especially invested in the way that different textual representations of nationalism expose and explore the ramifications and disputations over the content of the nation and the national, and, in the process, produce a series of overlapping and inter-related nationalisms not just in the decolonizing nations, but in the former metropole as well. As such, the dissertation is comprised of a series of comparative readings across Anglophone postcolonial and postimperial British literatures that uncover possibilities for engaging with discourses of the nation and nationalism as a series of overlapping utopian and limiting imaginings in the period between decolonization and globalization. Without endorsing or rejecting the concept of nationalism as such, this project instead seeks to understand how nationalism, far from disappearing during the period of global capitalism, continues to find expression and assume new forms in contemporary literature under the pressures of globalization. The dissertation thus begins by tracking the development of the postcolonial nationalist project in the decolonizing states through a consideration of postcolonial nationalist Bildungsromane such as Ayi Kwei Armah's The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's Petals of Blood and their development of a postcolonial nationalism that privileges difference and becoming, thus providing a critical reinterpretation of Frantz Fanon's call for a "national consciousness that is not nationalism [which] is alone capable of giving us an international dimension." The chapter ends with a consideration of its adaptation by metropolitan literature, as in David Caute's post-imperial novel, The Decline of the West, and emphasizes the ideological role that decolonization has played in the UK's own concerns over postimperial national identity. The second chapter takes up the issue of postcolonial immigration to the UK and the development of a postimperial British bureaucratic nationalism. This chapter explores the spaces of the welfare-state in relation to postcolonial immigrant fiction, arguing that these spaces formed a begrudging, agonistic space of postcolonial recognition that is counter-balanced and delegitimized by a rising English cultural nationalism. From here, the project turns to contemporary Anglo-British fiction in the third chapter and the development of exclusionary forms of English and British nationalisms that seek to redefine national prestige in the face of immigration and globalization. Finally, the project culminates with the consideration of postcolonial and postimperial science fiction and its development of a radical utopian project of postnatoinalism that attempts to transcend the ideological terrain of the global late capitalist conjuncture as a world system. This larger comparative framework allows both for a more nuanced consideration of the social-cultural relationship as well as the formal literary developments of what are often thought of as disparate genres and traditions.
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