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This chapter analyzes American responses to Britain’s nation-building policies in Malaya during the British campaign against the Malayan Communist Party (MCP), a struggle that London dubbed the Malayan Emergency. It shows that as U.S. policymakers cast about for how to deal with the challenges of decolonization and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, they drew special inspiration from the British nation-building colonialism. To preserve its imperial influence in Southeast Asia, Britain had cultivated Malaya’s anticommunist nationalists and together they forged a popular multiracial political alliance that undermined the mostly Chinese MCP’s appeal to Malaya’s hundreds and thousands of ethnic Chinese. When Malaya gained independence in 1957, its relative stability and leaders’ determination to side with the West was received by U.S. leaders as a notch on the belt.

This Introduction offers a critical political and social context for Algeria 1988-2015. It makes the case for thinking about the idea of Algeria and to its contemporary realities and the need to do so through a range of methodological approaches that are attentive to the weft and warp of everyday cultural production and political action. It argues for the need to read contemporary cultural production in Algeria not as determined indices of a specific place and time (1988–2015) but as interrogations and explorations of that period and of the relationship between nation and culture. Reviewing the chapters that compose the volume it makes the case for a form of enquiry that offers historical moments, multiple contexts, hybrid forms, voices and experiences of the everyday that will prompt nuance in our approach to understanding contemporary Algeria. In particular, it makes the case for the existence of a variety of cultural public spheres in Algeria and their importance to the country’s transition.

Chapter One, entitled “The Trials and Tribulations of Nation Building” analyses long and complex nation building process in North Africa. It emphasizes the extent to which national cohesion was, right from independence, a major concern for the countries’ rulers, whose ambition was to build strong states capable of controlling their populations.

This chapter explores the ways in which contemporary political subjectivities in Algeria are articulated through socially held perceptions of the recent past, specifically during the much under-researched period of nation-building in the 1970s. This period represents the longest period of stability since independence and was characterised by authoritarian state-led development and considerable regime legitimacy. The chapter posits that the emancipatory promises made by postcolonial nationalism in Algeria during the 1970s are just as important as the decolonisation struggle in understanding shifting constructions of national consciousness and state-society relationships in the present. In addition, this chapter unpicks how this period is viewed through the identity politics of the 1980s, the violence of the 1990s and the neoliberal economics and reinforced state power of the 2000s, as well as through generational change. The chapter draws on a year’s urban ethnographic fieldwork in the working-class Algiers neighbourhood of Bab el-Oued — where many changes in social discourse in Algeria have been definitively inscribed on the urban landscape and uses of urban space. Widespread depictions of past-present disjuncture express past emotional investments in the future and have multiple meanings in the present for different generations. Such practices may be politically neutral but may be utilised by political agendas to articulate criticism of present politics or bolster political legitimacy.

In the late 1860s, Mormons began knocking at the doors of American colleges and universities. Reversing the course of the westward-bound pioneer ancestors, these academic emigrants sought to retrieve what their forerunners had left behind, by force or by choice: their access to higher education. In the earliest cases, church leaders like Brigham Young sent the students as missionaries, but not to proselytize. Rather, they tapped these women and men for specialized training in professions ranging from law, medicine, and engineering to education. Mormons saw education in "Gentile" universities as a means to realize a corporate hope: a kingdom of God in the Mountain West. The goal was, in the words fo Brigham Young, to gather the world's knowledge to Zion, to help build the perfect society in the "latter days" before God's millennial reign. Unwittingly, church leaders had helped set the stage for American universities to become sites of a profound transformation of Mormon consciousness and identity.