Revisiting Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Conversation with Partha Chatterjee

Partha Chatterjee
November 19, 2013

The International Conference for the Study of Political Thought and the Yale Political Theory Workshop invite you to Revisiting Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Conversation with Partha Chatterjee on November 20, 2013 at 4:15pm in the Luce Hall Auditorium.

Partha Chatterjee’s Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, published in 1986, was a pathbreaking analysis of the contradictory character of anticolonial nationalism. The work was seminal to the critique of nationalism emerging in the work of the Subaltern Studies Collective and the cornerstone of Chatterjee’s own long and influential engagement with the dilemmas of postcolonial politics and their conceptualization. Almost three decades after the publication of Nationalist Thought, we are delighted to revisit this classic work and raise new questions about the history of anticolonial nationalism and its contested legacies today.

  • How should we understand the relationship of anticolonial nationalism and internationalism? How and why did anticolonial nationalism become a statist project?
  • In what ways are the developmental and democratic elements of the postcolonial state compatible or coherent projects?
  • To what extent has nationalism as an analytical and normative category been exhausted or overtaken (i.e. by struggles over democracy)? What new conceptual vocabularies might be draw upon to examine the specific trajectory of politics in the postcolonial world?