Postcolonial Insecurities: India, Sri Lanka, and the Question of Nationhood

Sankaran Krishna

ISBN 10: 0816633304 / ISBN 13: 9780816633302

Published by University of Minnesota Press, 1999

About this Item

Series: Borderlines. Num Pages: 296 pages. BIC Classification: JP. Category: (UU) Undergraduate. Dimension: 227 x 150 x 19. Weight in Grams: 465. . 1999. First Edition. Paperback. . . . . Books ship from the US and Ireland.

Seller Inventory # V9780816633302

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Postcolonial Insecurities: India, Sri Lanka, and the Question of Nationhood
• Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
• Publication Date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0816633304
• ISBN 13: 9780816633302
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

An exploration of the connections between ethnicity and nation-building.

This ambitious work explores the vexed connections among nation-building, ethnic identity, and regional conflict by focusing on a specific event: Indian political and military intervention in the ethnic conflict between the Sinhalese and Tamils in Sri Lanka.

Drawing on interviews with leading players in the Indian–Sri Lankan debacle, Sankaran Krishna offers a persuasive analysis of this episode. The intervention serves as a springboard to a broader inquiry into the interworkings of nation building, ethnicity, and “foreign” policy. Krishna argues that the modernist effort to construct nation-states on the basis of singular notions of sovereignty and identity has reached a violent dead end in the postcolonial world of South Asia. Showing how the nationalist agenda that seeks to align territory with identity has unleashed a spiral of regional, statist, and insurgent violence, he makes an eloquent case for reimagining South Asia along postnational lines—as a “confederal” space.

Postcolonial Insecurities counters the perception of “ethnicity” as an inferior and subversive principle compared with the progressive ideal of the “nation.” Krishna, in fact, shows ethnicity to be indispensable to the production and reproduction of the nation itself.

About the Author

Sankaran Krishna is associate professor of political science at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and the director of the Center for South Asian Studies.