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People and publics in the spaces of anticolonial nationalism
| As commentators such as George Mosse have noted, there is an interesting co-production of bourgeois nationalism and notions of the public sphere. Jurgen Habermas argues that the public sphere is a crucial support of citizenship and democracy. Further, Habermas treats newspapers as playing an important role in creating this public sphere. Anthony Smith, Ernst Gellner and others have seen European nationalisms of the nineteenth century as important in creating a model of demotic nationalism that treats the nation as the expression of a distinct ethnic group. There is a sense in which bourgeois nationalism defined a narrow 'public' and ethnic nationalism appealed to a broader 'people'. However, the particular ways that nationalism developed within imperial spaces makes this distinction unstable. Anticolonial nationalisms must hold together both a public and a people to create a space for utopian projects of post-colonial governance and society. This paper examines the tensions between and fruitful indeterminacy of people and public in nineteenth-century Irish nationalism.
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