Explores the political and textual interrelations which linked anti-colonialists, nationalists, and modernists in the years 1890-1920. This book focuses on both canonical and less well-known figures, and interconnecting Europe, India, and South Africa. It considers how resistance to domination and nationalist processes of 'making new' emerged.

1. ANTI-IMPERIAL INTERACTION ACROSS THE COLONIAL BORDERLINE ; Introduction ; Cross-national Intertextuality ; Networks of Resistance ; The Irish Boer War and The United Irishman ; 2. INDIA THE STARTING POINT: CROSS-NATIONAL SELF-TRANSLATION IN 1900S CALCUTTA ; 'From all points do the paths converge': A Unique Encounter ; A Warlike Spirituality ; The Cross-Meshed Calcutta Context ; Interdiscursivity: Of Kali and the Gita ; 'She is in me as she is in you': Nivedita's Kali-Worship ; 3. 'BUT TRANSMITTERS'?: THE INTERDISCURSIVE ALLIANCE OF AUROBINDO GHOSE AND SISTER NIVEDITA ; Aurobindo Ghose in England: 'the spirit alone that saves' ; The Young Margaret Noble: 'the ocean through an empty shell' ; A Joint 'Cry for Battle' ; 'To assail and crush the assailant': Intertextual Links ; 4. 'ABLE TO SING THEIR SONGS': SOLOMON PLAATJE'S MANY-TONGUED NATIONALISM ; A Barolong, a Gentleman: An Exemplary Career ; Nationalism and the Transatlantic 'People's Friend' ; 5. 'IMMEASURABLE STRANGENESS' BETWEEN EMPIRE AND MODERNISM: W. B. YEATS AND RABINDRANATH TAGORE, AND LEONARD WOOLF ; Towards a Theory of Modernism in the Imperial World ; Leonard Woolf: Reluctant Imperialism ; The Cultural Nationalist as Modernist ; Conclusion: A Narrative Claim upon the Jungle

`Review from previous edition This formidably well-researched and carefully documented book demonstrates the strengths of a complex comparative methodology in postcolonial studies.' The Yearbook of English Studies `Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial strikes an excellent balance between theory and historical documentation. Boehmer analyses new materials alongside canonical texts, making it a very original contribution to the postcolonial field. Most importantly, it decentres the monologic narrative of imperialism, whose success greatly depended upon imposing a framework of binary opposition between the centre and its peripheries. . . . The book provides us with a fresh alternative, and a possibility of reading resistance between the margins.' Wasafiri `This book is infinitely rich in detail, but sustains it with a broad and challenging thesis. It invites us to begin to think about the Empire not only as a discrete series of colonial events linked only through their common resistance to the imperial center, but also as a network of interacting nodes in a living and shifting historical and cultural exchange with multiple routings and dimensions.' Interventions `Boehmer's most challenging and rewarding book to date. Her encyclopaedic knowledge and sensitivity to textual detail . . . combine excitingly with her impressive theoretical dexterity and ambition.' Journal of Southern African Studies

Elleke Boehmer is the Chair of Colonial and Postcolonial Studies in the Department of English and Media at Nottingham Trent University, and Director of the NTU Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies. She has published Empire Writing (Oxford World's Classics, 1998), Empire, the National and the Postcolonial 1890-1920 (2002), and critical editions of Robert Baden-Powell's Scouting for Boys (2004) and Cornelia Sorabji's India Calling (2004). She is also the author of short stories and three novels, most recently Bloodlines.