Tyler S. Talbott

“Plotting Ethnonationalism” recovers a dialogue between nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers and filmmakers to foreground how their heterogeneous experiments in narrative form can help rewrite the histories and politics of the nation-state in another moment of revanchist far-right cultural nationalism. The project revisits nineteenth-century high nationalism and twentieth-century neonationalism when complementary ethnic nationalist politics and globalization policies enabled similar aesthetic responses to the “Condition-of-England” question in nationally representative novels and films. It argues that cultural workers in both eras staged the difficulty of disentangling modes of affiliation (“the people”) and filiation (“our people”) to underline the limits of nationalist thinking.