ANN: Transnational Histories of the 'Royal Nation'

MILINDA BANERJEE Discussion

We are delighted to announce the publication of Milinda Banerjee, Charlotte Backerra, and Cathleen Sarti (eds.), Transnational Histories of the ‘Royal Nation’ (Palgrave, 2017), as part of the Palgrave Studies in Modern Monarchy series: https://www.palgrave.com/de/book/9783319505220. With fifteen chapters based on case studies from nineteenth to early twenty-first century East Asia, South-East Asia, South Asia, Europe, Russia, North Africa, and Latin America, the book demonstrates the absolute centrality of monarchic concepts and practices in the forging of globally-entangled nationalist modernities. The chapters focus on intellectual, legal, socio-political, religious, performative, aesthetic, and memory cultures surrounding the monarchy-nation nexus. What unites the different chapters is their transnational methodological gaze in analysing the plural forms of the ‘royal nation’. The different contributions powerfully underline how actors in the specific societies they focus on learnt from actors in other societies, as well as exported their own models, while placing kingships – real, remembered, and imagined – at the centre of nationalist imaginings of sovereignty, territoriality, law, identity, state ritual, art, theology, and media presence. Monarchy thus became a crucial debating ground for conflicts and discussions about race, class, community, and gender: a tool for imposing the dominance of ruling elites, as well as a site for contesting established hegemonies, including, of course, colonial ones. Issues of subaltern resistance to elite hierarchies are also analysed in the book. The Introduction and Conclusion of the volume provide the overarching central argument of the book, about the (now, often-forgotten) role that monarchic themes have played in the transnationally-linked production of nationalisms and nation-states. Far from being simple antiquated relics of the past, the book offers historical depth to our understanding of monarchic forms as globally mobile tools which were pivotal to the birth of modern nationalisms. This argument has more than academic relevance in an age where we seem to be witnessing a planetary re-emergence of nationalist rulerships with quasi-kingly pretensions, and which, further, often refer to each other for validation. Our book, in this sense, offers a genealogy for contextualizing and comprehending our political now.