The Many Failures of Malay(sian) Nationalism – Part 1
‘A nation is the same people living in the same place.’ ‘By God, then,’ says Ned, laughing, ‘If that’s so I’m a nation for I’m living in the same place for the same five years. So of course everyone had the laugh at Bloom and says he, trying to muck out of it: ‘-Or also living in different places.’ Ulysses, by James Joyce Nationalism in the abstract is notoriously tricky to define: a cursory reference to Anderson’s seminal “ Imagined Communities ” should be sufficient prompting for the interested reader to investigate further – the nation is a social construct limited to a certain in-group, in which members of that in-group recognise their distinctiveness (which is in turn recognised by other groups) on the basis of shared sociocultural practices and behaviours. That thesis is broadly convincing insofar as it provides a basis for taxonomy and categorisation; but in the service of inclusivity and general application may not necessarily examine the purposive elements