(University Honors College, Middle Tennessee State University, 2016-12)
Turner, Carson
The nationalist theories of Benedict Anderson, Rogers Brubaker, Hugh
Seton-Watson and others suppose that nationalist politics are a response to
environmental adversity and that nationalist discourses are subject to
construction and negotiation within media such as journalism and literature. This
paper 1) Supposes a set of hypotheses on nationalism stemming from the work of
Anderson, Seton-Watson, and Brubaker, and 2) Examines the emergence of
nationalist discourse and political negotiation in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man as
evidence of this process of imagining and directing the nation in the context of the
development of civil and legal equality for black Americans.