Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
Democracy, Journalism, and Monopoly: How to Fund Independent News Media in the 21st Century
Reggie James • The Heart of a Nation
"We are citizens of the most powerful country in the world, and it is a country that stands upon the wrong side of every liberation struggle on earth. I want you to feel what that means."
Substack • Practicing a practice is a practice
NAPO was a coming together of different communities in the New Afrikan Independence Movement. The Republic of New Afrika was imagined in 1968 as an independent Black-majority nation in the Southeastern United States. The first vision was articulated at a meeting of the Malcolm X Society in Detroit. The states they imagined as being part of this new
... See moreImani Perry • South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation
Still, today, modern nations are principally defined by the stories we tell about our collective selves:
Will Storr • The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human and How to Tell Them Better
nation is defined by its inherent virtue rather than by its future potential, politics becomes a discussion of good and evil rather than a discussion of possible solutions to real problems.
Timothy Snyder • On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
The equation nation = state = people, and especially sovereign people, undoubtedly linked nation to territory, since structure and definition of states were now essentially territorial. It also implied a multiplicity of nation-states so constituted, and this was indeed a necessary consequence of popular self-determination. As the French Declaration
... See moreE. J. Hobsbawm • Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Canto Classics)
The nation does its best to hide its imagined character. Most nations argue that they are a natural and eternal entity, created in some primordial epoch by mixing the soil of the motherland with the blood of the people.