Nation-Building by Anthology

Abstract

In a short space of years, nation and nationality have lost their position as ever-present but unquestioned markers in literary and cultural study. In the play of argument, they have become movable pieces. In particular, a wide array of books and essays has intensively pursued the relations of literature and national identity in the wake of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983)— most notable among them, the essays collected by Homi Bhabha in Nation and Narration , Doris Sommer’s Foundational Fictions , and the volume Nationalisms and Sexualities , edited by Andrew Parker and others after a Harvard conference of the same name. Among these, Gregory Jusdanis’s Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture: Inventing National Literature has received less attention than it deserves. The book’s diminished visibility follows from the same source as its value: it comes to the discussion with a stake neither in western Europe and the Americas nor in what for scholars in the humanities have become the fashionable parts of the developing world, but in a country whose present few of us can see for its past, namely modern Greece. Jusdanis’s subject in this discussion is one that not many seem prepared to take up—the “minor” literature and culture that nonetheless struggles with its own adaptations of those problems of modernity and identity that have been chronicled elsewhere. And yet societies such as Greece can contribute urgently to the discussion because of the density of what might be called the middle stratum of their modernizing experience—the stratum between an adopted paradigm of national identity and a complex, often ambivalent social reality. This middle stratum is the site of a multitude of local interpretations that mediate between the other two layers and produce astonishing concatenations of classical Greek, European, and American cultural forms. With its particular siting and its arguably “minor” urge to measure modern Greece against more internationally prominent countries (an impulse that seldom runs in the opposite direction), Jusdanis’s book is one of the most useful recent additions to the broad field of books that treat the making of nationhood.