The volume, which Banerjee edited together with Charlotte Backerra and Cathleen Sarti, was inspired by debates on transculturalty that where initiated during his time at the Cluster in project A5 “Nationising the Dynasty”. The book focuses on intellectual, legal, socio-political, religious, performative, aesthetic and memory cultures, to demonstrate the centrality of monarchic concepts in the emergence of globally entangled nationalist modernities. It does so by analyzing plural forms of the ‘royal nation’ through a transnational methodology. The volume further offers historical depth to an understanding of monarchic forms as globally mobile tools that were crucial for the emergence of nationalism. During a time where the re-emergence of nationalist rule with quasi-kingly pretensions can be observed, this argument is highly relevant. The volume, thus, also offers an insight for contextualizing and deepening the understanding of contemporary political phenomena.
The 2012 conference “Nationizing the Dynasty – Dynastizing the Nation” took place at the University of California, Los Angeles and was funded by the Cluster “Asia and Europe”. The Cluster’s A5 project members, including Banerjee, organized this event.
Milinda Banerjee was PhD candidate and member of the research project A5 “Nationising the Dynasty”. He was further Associate Research Fellow in Junior Research Group “Transcultural Justice: Legal Flows and the Emergence of International Justice within the East Asian War Crimes Trials 1946-1954”. He is currently working as a Research Fellow at LMU Munich and as Assistant Professor at Presidency University in Kolkata, India.
The book Transnational Histories of the ‘Royal Nation was published by Palgrave, 2017, as part of the Palgrave Studies in Modern Monarchy series.
For further information, please visit to the publisher’s website.