Dialogics of Cultural Encounters: Nations and Nationalities in Periods of Conflict

This book on new globalism offers revisionist readings of a post-postcolonial world where nations and nationalities engage in conversation even in periods of open of covert conflict. The essays collected in this volume take a post-Orientalist, post-nationalist, and post-historicist approach to a historically colonial issue: cultural encounters between nations and nationalities. Traditionally, the issue is framed as a conflict between the native forces o insurgency and the alien hegemonic power, the opposition grounded mainly on economic and political fields but stretching into collateral areas of subtle social and cultural sections as well. However, this dialectic model, often retrospective in its methodology, attributes values and significance to past events which at their moment of occurrence are products of material forces unrelated to the official historiography. The authors of these essays instead propose a contrasting dialogic model for rewriting these cultural encounters, focusing on currents of private conservations going on below the radar screen of official discourse and public policy. Their focus is on the discourse of cultural reconstruction rather than on subaltern politics, on the language of cohesion rather than on exclusive alterity, on fellowship rather than on hegemony. At critical moments when parts of the world are ravaged by war and destruction, these essays argue, there is always an inevitable undercurrent building strength and preparing grounds for a “third space” new culture of globalism. Te book celebrates the autonomy of this countermovement, both in history and into the future.