by David J. Lobina
Last time around I said I would bring this series on language and nationalism to an end by considering an actual example: the case of Catalan nationalism, a discussion likely to be testy. I still intend to do that, and to be a bit argumentative about it to boot; however, it has occurred to me in these last four weeks that the follow-up between the first three posts and the case study of Catalan nationalism is not as smooth as it should be. This is because of an issue I brought up in the last post, where I rather briefly mentioned that the Catalan case exemplified what is sometimes called a peripheral nationalist movement, in contrast to core nationalist movements. To this I should have added that in the case of peripheral nationalisms the historical process that turns a state or a country into a nation-state is slightly different to what is the case for core nationalisms – additional factors are involved – and this point deserves to be spelled out a little bit. I shall do just that this week, and I will come back to the Catalans, finally, in the next post.
As explained in the previous three posts, it is certainly noteworthy, though not at all surprising, that the word nation seems to have been initially used in history as a place name and only much later did the politically-laden term of nationalism actually appear. The feeling of belonging to a particular place, after all, has plausibly been a feature of human gatherings for centuries and it is not intrinsically tied to the concepts of “nation” or “nationalism” per se.
In medieval Europe at least, the village where a person was born was typically that person’s “country”, as the historian Henry Kamen has chronicled, and this sentiment was still present in many parts of the world well into the 20th century. For instance, the Belorussian-speaking people of Polesia, a historical region stretching from modern Poland to Russia, simply replied ‘from here’ when asked about their nationality in a 1919 census, and even as recently as the 1950s, we have the curious case of captured Egyptian soldiers during the second Arab-Israeli war who seemed to know very little about their own country, instead identifying more strongly with their local villages.[i] Read more »
The well-known counterintuitive Monty Hall problem continues to baffle people if the emails I receive are any indication. A meta-problem is to understand why so many people are unconvinced by the various solutions. Sometimes people even cite the large number of the unconvinced as proof that the solution is a matter of real controversy, just as in politics an inconvenient fact, such as the ubiquity of Covid-19, is obscured by fake controversies.
It had been a long time since I thought about lawns. I don’t mean in a grand philosophical sense, or the stoned contemplation of a single blade of grass. I mean thought about them at all. Before moving to Mississippi we had lived in Vancouver for 13 years, where we felt lucky to have a place to store our toothbrushes and maybe an extra pair of slacks; we really hit the jackpot when we acquired a postage-stamp-sized balcony on which we could murder tomato plants. Actual yards were out of the question for anyone who hadn’t bought a house on the west end of town 30 years ago; by the time we moved to Vancouver in 2006 as a tenure-track assistant professor and a trailing-spouse adjunct, it was already clear that we would never own a lawn.
Robert Dash. Flower Bud of the Arbequina Olive Tree (black olives).
What is it to be twenty? Forty? Sixty? Eighty? These points that mark the four quarters of a life — fifths if you’re lucky, larger portions if you’re not. 
1. The public library is holding a book or DVD for me.
At age twenty-three, after a brief stint of teaching at Calcutta University, I, accompanied by Kalpana, proceeded to Britain on a Commonwealth Scholarship. The Scholars from different parts of India were asked to assemble in Delhi, from where we were to take the international flight. The only experience I had of an air flight before was when I flew from Kolkata to Guwahati, representing Calcutta University in an inter-University debating competition. That flight experience had not been good, as our propeller-driven Dakota plane had hit a supposed ‘air pocket’. So I had some unnecessary trepidation for the long Delhi-London flight.
Almost every first draft (and third, and fifth) is overwritten. Maybe too much is happening, but usually it’s all the talk that bloats and clogs. Too much of anything at the outset can be helpful, though; every tailor knows it’s easier to cut cloth than to adhere it. But there is an art to cutting.
US-based Azra Raza, a respected oncologist of Pakistani origin, has been treating cancer patients for around two decades. Her grouse, articulated in her book, The First Cell, is that most new drugs add mere months to one’s life, that too at great physical, financial and emotional cost. In her telling, the reason the war on cancer has reached an impasse is because doctors are essentially trying to protect the last cell, instead of checking the disease at birth. This has to change, and now, Raza writes with an evangelist’s passion.
When the philosopher Amia Srinivasan’s essay “The Right to Sex” appeared in the London Review of Books, in 2018, it garnered a level of attention not usually paid to writing by academics. From the provocative title to the bracing clarity of the content (“Sex is not a sandwich,” Srinivasan wrote), the essay’s stylistic appeal was matched by a willingness to entertain positions that had long been off the table in both feminist and mainstream discussions of sex. The piece responded to the commentary surrounding Elliot Rodger, perhaps the most famous of the so-called incels, or involuntary celibates, who in 2014 killed six people after penning a 107,000-word manifesto that railed against the women who had deprived him of sex. Many feminists were quick to read Rodger as a case study in male sexual entitlement. Fewer wanted to broach one of the manifesto’s thornier claims: that Rodger, who was half white and half Malaysian Chinese, had been denied sex because of his race. Srinivasan took Rodger’s undesirability head-on: of course, no one has a right to be desired, she wrote. But we ought to acknowledge, as second-wave feminists more readily did, that who or what is desired is a political question, subject to scrutiny.