*CFP* "NATIONALISM AND THE HUMAN CONDITION: THEN AND NOW", SPECIAL ISSUE, JOURNAL OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE AND AESTHETICS

The discourse of Nationalism has undergone a sea change in the recent years. Even If it received a new spirit of historiographic enquiry from Benedict Anderson’s “Imagined Communities” project, the current Nationalist discourse has largely tried to be supremacist, and in being so has laid bare its darker sides in invoking an “exclusivist” model of political subjectivity. The sovereign’s sense of heightened selfhood has something to do with this; it is thus quite similar in terms of what Bindu Puri suggests: “To debate involves an intellectual welcome to an opposition in ideas. The manner of that welcome is structured in a form, which is hospitable to learning. Such intellectual hospitality to a difference in ideas as an opportunity to learn suggests a diminutive presence of the ego in the life of the mind. However, it is in ideas that the ego could seem at its strongest. For one is most stubbornly attached to how one understands things—to one’s vision of what constitutes the best form of life in general or perhaps of political life. This is evidence of the strange dichotomy of the human condition. It is most restricted where it most needs to be free.” (Puri, The Tagore-Gandhi Debate on Matters of Truth and Untruth) 

The cruel irony thus lies here, that debates, which largely a midwife in the birth of democracies, finds herself out of commission, in the recent climate of exclusivity of the Nationalist discourse. Debates, which were a mainstay in the formulation and the possible future of the Indian Nationalism, as one finds in Gandhi’s debates with Savarkar, Tagore and Ambedkar; has today transmuted into a scripted spectacle organised in news channel studios.

It is not a novel observation, anymore these days, that the Nationalist discourses in all their absolutist grandeur, take special pride in Representation; which Carl Schmitt had once in all temerity gone on to suggest was a quality of polities from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. In films, in advertisements, in memes, and even in news channel debates, Nationalism writes and rewrites itself with the boldness of the “immanent” and castigating the history of cultural tolerance and syncretism to the darker depths of “alterity”. A future of relentless “Development”, one the removes the cultural nostalgia of ‘non-alignment’ and ‘progress’, and makes exclusion a causal determinist fact of the citizen’s life. What such a Nationalist agenda revels in, is in activating an episteme of ‘iconography’, in so far as each of its acts, incantations, decisions, censure acts as a creative “fifth estate” to various obvious avenues of representation, as opposed to popular expression. 

In this special issue of the Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, we shall be seeking essays on the subject of the rebirth of the Nationalist discourse on the international geopolitics, its significance, its historical context, its relation to the concept of the “nation” and its representations across avenues of popular expression.

Papers can also be conceptualised on the following subtopics:

• The long-standing debates on Nationalism and its relation to the concept of the Nation. 
• The method of “Nationalist fictions”, its philosophy and language. 
• Nationalist discourse in regional literature. 
• The position of dissent as opposed to the Nationalist Discourse; the re-birth of “sedition”. 
• Nationalism, “The Nation Question”, and the “Class Struggle”. 
• Change in Nationalist undertones in Indian films vis-à-vis the representation of fragile Nation-hood, in foreign language films. 
• The public intellectual and the course of popular dissent. 
• Nationalisms in Europe and the Great Wars. 
• Nationalisms and the crumbling European Union. 
• Weimar Nationalism. 
• Hindutva and other Supremacist discourses of Nationalist Fundamentalism 
• Relation of Fundamentalism to the Nationalist discourse.

Submission Guidelines

File must be in Microsoft Word format (Preferably Word 2010).

Paper size: A4, Font & size: Times New Roman 12, the title must be in 14 point size, bold.

Text and contents of the paper: Justified, Title page with the author’s name and institutional details, introduction, the main body of the text, conclusion, references and short bio note.

Spacing: One and a half, Margin: 1 inch on all four sides.

Word limit: Minimum 4000 and Maximum 6000 along with an abstract of 250 words and 5 keywords

The contributors will have to strictly follow MLA 8th edition in their papers.

Contributors should attach a brief bio-note of not more than 150 words of the respective authors (name, designation, affiliation, specialization, mail-id, contact no. etc.) at the end of the paper.

Contributors are requested to submit their manuscript to Dr. Goutam Karmakar goutamkrmkr@gmail.com and Rajarshi Roy rajarshiroy70@gmail.com

The last date of submission: 31st July 2020

Terms & Conditions:

Plagiarism will not be tolerated.

The Editors will carry the right to make changes if needed in the paper and the same will be conveyed to the contributor.

The Editors along with the publisher reserve the right to reject a paper if it lies beyond the scope of the theme.

Article submitted for the journal cannot be withdrawn or sent to somewhere else before getting the rejection mail.

If accepted the contributor will have to sign a copyright declaration assuring the originality of the article to the publisher.

About the Journal:

The Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics (ISSN 0252-8169) is a half-yearly journal published by the Vishvanatha Kaviraja Institute of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, India since 1977. The Institute was founded on August 22, 1977 coinciding with the birth centenary of legendary philosopher, aesthetician, and historian of Indian art, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy (1877-1947). Vishvanatha Kaviraja was a medieval Indian aesthetician. The Journal is committed to interdisciplinary and cross-cultural issues in literary understanding and interpretation, aesthetic theory.