Modernity and postcolonial nationhood Revisiting Mahatma Gandhi and Sun Yat-sen a century later

Mahatma Gandhi and Sun Yat-sen are regarded as the respective founding fathers of modern India and China. Given this shared significance, their writings ought to be duly considered as the basis for comparative thought on postcolonial nation-building. Yet a survey of the literature points to the pauc...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published inPhilosophy & social criticism Vol. 41; no. 2; pp. 131 - 158
Main Author Lee, Theresa Man Ling
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published London, England SAGE Publications 01.02.2015
Subjects
China
Civilization
Comparative Analysis
Decolonization
Development
Fathers
Gandhi, Mohandas K
Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand
India
Modernity
Modernization
Nation building
Peoples Republic of China
Political Development
Postcolonialism
Sun, Yat-sen
modernization
Mahatma Gandhi
Hind Swaraj
modernity
Development
Sun Yat-sen
The Three Principles of the People
postcolonial nationhood
Online AccessGet full text
ISSN0191-4537
1461-734X
DOI10.1177/0191453714554025

Cover

More Information
Summary:Mahatma Gandhi and Sun Yat-sen are regarded as the respective founding fathers of modern India and China. Given this shared significance, their writings ought to be duly considered as the basis for comparative thought on postcolonial nation-building. Yet a survey of the literature points to the paucity of such study. The article is therefore an attempt to fill in this gap by juxtaposing Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj and Sun’s San Min Chu I as treatises on postcolonial nation-building. Such juxtaposition yields important contrasts between the two regarding postcolonial nationhood at the crossroad of non-western civilization and modernity. Beyond identifying these differences, the author uses the lack of comparative study on the subject as an occasion for pondering over the contrasting contemporary global legacy of the two figures. At stake are two visions of postcolonial nationhood that are lost to the ubiquity of global development.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-1
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-2
content type line 23
ISSN:0191-4537
1461-734X
DOI:10.1177/0191453714554025