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Chattering Classes/Twittering Revolutionaries: Journalism, Social Media, And The Arab Spring, John C. Hawley

English

In Culture and Imperialism Edward Said discusses internationality and cosmopolitanism against the backdrop of the Gulf War, and Ree's view that the "nation-form is a kind of false consciousness", as if it were "an expression of popular subjective will" (Said, 1993: 10). But the monopolization of power by central national authorities results in a kind of façade, whereby "processes which are actually the effect of internationality are experienced as an expression of the natures of different nations and their individual members" (Said, 1993: 10, emphasis added). Yet nationalism sits uncomfortably in countries that, some might say, were in some cases …