ABSTRACT A comparative, object-led study of contemporary artmakers examines how Portuguese identity is materialised in handicrafts across Timor-Leste, Goa and Macao. Rather than a fixed style, Portuguese-ness emerges as a set of visual and ritual elements. In Timor-Leste, it appears subtly within local weaving; in Goa, through adapted forms and decorative traditions; and in Macao, via graphic signs and bilingual motifs. Heritage institutions and tourism policies shape how these influences are seen or hidden. Ultimately, artisans actively reinterpret Portuguese elements, creating layered, creolized expressions tailored for local ritual, markets and memory.

ABSTRACT This article explores the birth of Turkism in Turkish literature, focusing on Mehmet Emin (Yurdakul). It delves into Mehmet Emin’s contribution as a poet and literary entrepreneur who played a pivotal role in propagating Turkism in his book Türkçe Şiirler (Turkish Poems), analyzing the discourses of ‘Turk’, ‘peasantism’, ‘homeland’, and ‘patriotism constructed in it’. Additionally, the article examines its reception. It thus offers insights into the interplay between poetry, nationalism, and peasantism, contributing to a deeper understanding of the sociocultural, linguistic, and historical contexts that laid the groundwork for the evolution of literary Turkism during the late Ottoman era.

ABSTRACT Gandhi did not develop a dedicated theory of national identity, nor do we find many clues in his comprehensive collection of his writings. But while fighting against British rule in India, he presented several programmes that provided insights into how he was trying to create a coherent and inclusive national identity for Indians. This article explains how Gandhi’s struggle against British rule, particularly through his emphasis on Khadi, Hindu-Muslim unity, and Hindi as the national language, is central to one of his goals– creating an all-inclusive national identity for Indians.

ABSTRACT This paper offers a conceptual analysis of Australia’s comparatively low diaspora ratio, theorising emigration ambivalence as a product of national identity, settler colonial permanence, economic affluence, and mobility regimes. Rather than attributing immobility to geography or prosperity alone, it reframes staying as a culturally and politically constructed ideal. Drawing on nationalism studies, migration theory, and Indigenous critique, the paper argues that settler imaginaries of territorial belonging produce a structural preference for domestic permanence and weak institutionalisation of outward mobility. While grounded in Australia, the analysis contributes broader insights into immobility, diaspora absence, and identity formation in affluent and settler colonial contexts.

ABSTRACT Bangla poetry about the Bangla language movement of 1952 in East Bengal (today’s Bangladesh), mostly written during the 1950s, contributed to the reawakening of the cultural identity of Bengalis, highlighting Bangla language as the basis of that identity. This article demonstrates how the poetry about the language movement, through its engagement with the questions of language, cultural identity, and nationalism, while resisting the nascent internal colonization of Pakistan and attempting to overcome the earlier effects of British colonization, shapes the national identity of the Bengalis of East Bengal, anticipating the emergence of Bangladesh as a nation-state.

ABSTRACT This article argues that Anderson’s idea of the national ‘meanwhile’ also requires a ‘whence’ in a temporal meaning to make nations imaginable in the capitalist temporal regime. Nationalism’s power lies in its ability to blur the boundaries between past and present by presenting national artefacts as quasi-eternal or immune to change. This point is illustrated via two case studies on ongoing linguistic controversies (Balto-Slavic and Croato-Serbian), in which linguists employ various narrative strategies to suspend time between the past and the present. The conclusions imply that critical scholarship on nationalism should explore temporalities that challenge homogenous time.

ABSTRACT This article examines the intersection of caste, xenophobia, and biopolitics in India through Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer and Bhimrao Ambedkar’s conception of the Broken Man. It argues that the cow’s sacralisation operates as a biopolitical instrument through which the state codifies Brahmanical hierarchy, criminalizes and targets Dalit and Muslim dietary practices, and legitimizes violence under the guise of ‘scientific’ governance in modern contexts. Situating the beef ban in North India as a case study, the article shows how juridical prohibitions transform caste into an instrument of sovereignty that renders marginalized groups into bare life. Bridging Agamben’s critique of law and Ambedkar’s account of caste, it demonstrates how religious morality and capitalist extraction converge to regulate life and death, exposing the paradox of a secular democracy that sacralises bovine life while abandoning human life to sanctioned disposability.

ABSTRACT M. Edith Durham’s Twenty Years of Balkan Tangle (1920) represents both a deeply personal travelogue and a significant document of historical consciousness, reflecting the intricate interplay between memory, identity, and historiography in the Balkans. This study examines Durham’s work through the lens of travel writing scholarship, acknowledging the genre’s inherent tensions between objectivity and subjectivity while exploring how her narrative contributes to the formation of historical consciousness in the region. Drawing on travel writing theory as developed by Carl Thompson and Casey Blanton, this analysis situates Durham’s work within broader Western discourses about the Balkans, engaging with Maria Todorova’s concept of ‘balkanism’, and related scholarship. The study addresses Durham’s position as both an observer and interpreter of history, considering how her British perspective shaped her representations of Balkan societies. While focusing primarily on Twenty Years of Balkan Tangle, this analysis also draws on Durham’s earlier travel works to provide context for her evolving understanding of the region. The methodology employed includes close textual analysis informed by travel writing scholarship, historical comparison with contemporary sources, and application of cultural memory theory as developed by Maurice Halbwachs, Pierre Nora, and Jörn Rüsen. By situating Durham’s work within these frameworks, the study aims to elucidate her complex role in both preserving and constructing historical memory, while acknowledging the limitations and biases inherent in travel writing as a genre.

ABSTRACT This paper attempts to explore a complex cultural interface between India and Britain through the analysis of the writings of the Indian travellers from 1794 to 1857. It focuses on Dean Mahomed, Abu Taleb and Lutfullah, whose passages from India to the West were a site of socio-cultural negotiation with the metropolitan centre. Venturing into a new ‘Contact Zone', the early Indian travellers embarked on their journeys with a critical indigenous gaze. The entry of the colonized subjects in the print culture fostered a space for making self-representations vis-à-vis the colonial discourse that foregrounded a self-proclaimed project of making the Other knowable through the European epistemology. The encounter with the West provided the early Indian travellers a scope to initiate a cultural dialogue that formed a dialectical pattern of the selective acceptance and rejection of the Western culture through ‘autoethnographic expressions’. Though they were enamoured by British science and technology, they were extremely protective of their representation of religion and women. The defiance to accept the West in every sphere shows that the early Indian travellers created a sense of nationalist self despite working within the cultural and political dynamics of the empire.