Guest Editors:  

Prof. Om Prakash Dwivedi, Director, Faculty of Humanities and Liberal Arts, Chandigarh  University Uttar Pradesh, India 

Dr. Aditya Anshu, Chair, Department of Social Science, Faculty of International Relations,  Abu Dhabi University, U.A.E.  

Dr. Madhurima Nayak, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Humanities and Liberal Arts,  Chandigarh University Uttar Pradesh, India 

                                  National Identities (Taylor and Francis), Scopus Q1

Concept Note 

In the construction and formulation of any nation and subsequent national identities, memory  plays a central role, in that it is not only about the past as an event but also about the future as  a vision. In a way, memory can be seen as a cartography - a moral and affective mapping of  injury, responsibility and belonging, through which the nation delineates who is recognized as  a legitimate subject of suffering and who is rendered peripheral and disposable. Once the  cartography is ready, the idea of the nation and its affiliation is churned out in a way that retains,  appropriates, and disseminates specificities of such a memory culture. Subsequently, it also  leads to the creation and identification of certain groups as ‘out-groups,’ ‘push-out ones,’ or  the ‘other.’  

Zygmunt Bauman locates such an epistemic framing or conceptualisation of national  identities, based on the notion of collective victims and perpetrators within the idea of  “hereditary victimhood’ (2000). Nation, thus, attains the status of a machine of power, invested  with and driven by the blueprint of normativity, which forms the base of what Yim terms  “victimhood nationalism.” (2025) This special issue argues that victimhood narratives not only  structure and regulate national identities and forms of belonging but also actively sustains, what  we define as, ‘normative nationalism’. Normative nationalism is the process of valorizing and  identifying only selective ways of belonging, as if nationalism had a predefined syntax of DNA.  Normative nationalism operates by establishing authorized modes of belonging while  victimhood nationalism supplies the moral affect that renders such exclusions defensible. The  validation of the norm is derived through its appropriation and national validity. What was  supposed to be a temporal exercise is rendered a teleological process. No wonder, Lim avers,  “[V]ictimhood nationalism becomes increasingly persuasive when the top-down memory politics meet the vernacular and individual memories. Then, it becomes a key to the nation’s  ontological security” (8). In this sense, victimhood operates as the affective infrastructure  through which normative forms of national identity are eulogized and legitimized. 

Victimhood as a structuring discourse of national identity operates as much as a  memory regime as it is an ideological one. With the change of a certain ideological regime, the  idea of a nation also undergoes a change. Seen from the postcolonial perspective, it can be  argued that identity formation grounded in the idea of victimhood homogenises the idea of  suffering through the claim that every nation's suffering needs to be etched in the global  memory. Therefore, such an approach also runs the risk of losing the essence of a particular  nation's history when it is linked with global history. Seen from this perspective, it can be  pointed out that there is a conflict between the postcolonial emphasis on situated histories of  pain and Lim's global framework of victimhood as an identity paradigm. Nevertheless, as we  know, there are instances of several national memories in the postcolonial world, which were  already shaped by colonialism, empire, and global power systems; therefore, a fully "isolated"  memory is a myth in and of itself. Lim’s concept of “entangled memories” demonstrates that  no nation's memory is ever really sovereign. 

Lim’s framework attains an urgency within postcolonial studies also because he does  not downplay or blur the distinctiveness of national trauma or suffering. Rather, he offers a  broadside of how states employ trauma politically, changing it from a moral reflection to a  competing identity claim as an alibi for counter violence. This brings us to the second point,  which this special issue seeks to address: victimhood not as a passive memory of harm but as  a form of political and symbolic capital that circulates within national and global fields of  power, producing competitive hierarchies of suffering and moral entitlements. This  “asymmetry is political rather than psychological” (Fassin Humanitarian Reason 2012). When  victimhood or “compassion” for the victims “is exercised in the public space, it is always  directed from above to below, from the more powerful to the weaker, the more fragile, the more  vulnerable - those who can generally be constituted as victims of an overwhelming fate.” Read  from the perspective of victimhood as an organizing paradigm of national identity, or what  Fassin terms, “the politics of precarious lives,” victimhood becomes a regulated condition through which certain identities are rendered visible, worthy of care and politically legible  while others remain marginal or excluded. It emerges as a normative apparatus that authorises  power through the language of care, protection, and moral necessity. Nation and its prescribed  identity parameters assume the form of an apotheosis. It is for such reasons that Debjani Ganguly argues that “world systems are worlds in the sense they constitute a self-organizing,  self-referential totality” (2016). 

Within postcolonial studies, the nation has assumed a form of a predefined template  with a tug of war ongoing to turn certain memories as an institution, prescribing conducts and  ideologies to flourish or to be suppressed. Arjun Appadurai links such conduct with the  “anxiety of numbers” (2006), the task of which is to synchronise suffering with a certain  statistic, thus asking us questions: who the bigger victim is? Who deserves more sympathy?  That is why Benedict Anderson posits that nationalism can also be seen as “community of fate  perpetuated since the time immemorial past.” (1990) Or as argued by Lim, “when the official  memory of the state, vernacular memories of the civil society, and personal memories of  individuals are resonant, victimhood nationalism becomes a material power beyond the abstract  idea.” (8) These tendencies raise questions such as: How does memory formation based on  victimhood nationality engage with those based on other dimensions of diversity? In what ways  do the dynamics of diversity itself become a xenophobic presence in nationalist discourse? Or,  for that matter, can there be ways of churning out a global memory of suffering, not limited to  any nationality, but to the regimes of violence, ideologies, and power? 

Pitted against the sloganeering of victimization, this special issue suggests an ethical  alternative: the need to embrace and promote “dialogical victimhood,” which opens possible  apertures and makes us see that suffering can be relational, not specific. Such a view provides  us with epistemes of forging “affective communities” – to borrow a term from Leela Gandhi  (2005). It makes a clarion call that suffering is not an enclosed national wound/trauma but  needs to be identified as a shared ethical vocabulary, thus shedding light on the need for  promoting and institutionalising cultures of transnational empathy. Such epistemological  framing invests us with affective ways of (re)cognition of the entanglements of suffering, of  the empire and the nation, and globalization and nationalism, the colonial genocide of  indigenous people worldwide, the horrendous Holocaust, the Armenian genocide, the Vietnam  War, the Rwanda genocide, the African American slavery, ethnic genocide in the Balkans,  “forced sexual labour in the Nazi concentration camps, gendered violence during the Yugoslav  Wars, the Stalinist Gulag regime, the political genocide of the communist and developmental  dictatorships in the global Cold War era, etc” (8, 2025) . 

Focusing the analytical gaze on literary, media, and film studies, this special issue is  aimed at addressing the following themes, but not limited to:

● Literary and Cinematic Constructions of Victimhood: Literary and film  adaptations of national victim identities.  

● Normative Nationalism and Memory Regimes: Memory, trauma, and  nationalism; Victimhood and postcolonial nationalism; Partition memories;  Theorising victimhood nationalism  

● Competing Victimhoods and the Political Economy of Suffering: Competing  victimhoods in global history; Transnational memory of suffering; Victimhood,  apology, and reparation; Gendered victimhood and feminist critique of nationalist  memories; Affective politics of suffering 

● Violence, Solidarity and Mutual Recognition: The new xenophobia and global  history of violence; Global memory and transnational solidarity; Affective  communities; Mutual recognition of suffering. 

Important Deadlines 

Abstract submission: 150-200 words by 10th April 2026; 5-7 keywords. Notification of acceptance: 30th April 2026.  

Full article Submission: 31st December 2026. 

Publication: 2027 

Email: victimhoodnationalism@gmail.com 

For further details related to submission of full articles, please visit: https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?show=instructions&jo...