Postcolonial Insecurities by Sankaran Krishna

Postcolonial Insecurities by Sankaran Krishna

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.

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.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780816633302
ISBN 10	0816633304
Title	Postcolonial Insecurities
Author	Sankaran Krishna
Series	Borderlines
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	University of Minnesota Press
Year published	1999-11-15
Number of pages	356
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.