Skip to main content

Home    Aim    Team       

Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization and the Institution of Modern Greece (25th anniversary edition)

Item

Title

Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization and the Institution of Modern Greece (25th anniversary edition)

Spatial Coverage

Date

September 2021

Abstract

Against the backdrop of ever-increasing nationalist violence during the last decade of the twentieth century, this book challenges standard analyses of nation formation by elaborating on the nation's dream-like hold over the modern social imagination. Stathis Gourgouris argues that the national fantasy lies at the core of the Enlightenment imaginary, embodying its central paradox: the intertwining of anthropological universality with the primacy of a cultural ideal.

Crucial to the operation of this paradox and fundamental in its ambiguity is the figure of Greece, the universal alibi and cultural predicate behind national-cultural consolidation throughout colonialist Europe. The largely unpredictable institution of a modern Greek nation in 1830 undoes the interweaving of Enlightenment and philhellenism, whose centrifugal strands continue to unravel the certainty of European history, down to the internal predicaments of the European Union or the tragedy of the Balkan conflicts.

This 25th anniversary edition of the book includes a new preface by the author in which he situates the book's original insights in retrospect against the newer developments in the social and political conditions of a now globalised world: the neo-colonial resurgence of nationalism and racism, the failure of social democratic institutions, the crisis of sovereignty and citizenship, and the brutal conditions of stateless peoples.

(Edited blurb from publisher’s website)

Type specialization

Format

Data sets

Language

Number Of Pages - Duration

328

Rights

All Rights Reserved

note

The original edition of the book has been translated in Greek and is distributed by Kritiki (2007).

Linked resources

Filter by property

Relation
Title Alternate label Class
Dream nation: 200 years on

Position: 8076 (20 views)