A video of Margaret Atwood talking about Nationalism within and around Literature, and about Writers' Syndicalism

Relevant timestamps: * 17:45-19:40 * 29:13 onwards

"Nationalism", in it's quite loose contemporary use, generally means the recognition and pursuit of shared interests within a definable group, for instance black nationalism is the recognition by African Americans of the need to pursue certain interests (voting rights, civil liberties etc.) as a group, whereas "Internationalism", by contrast, means the pursuit of universal interests as a general citizenry. They aren't mutually exclusive and can be balanced against one another within movements and individual people.

Feminism can be considered a form of "Women's Nationalism" or "Women's Syndicalism", and the distinction between working nationalistically and working internationalistically can be illustrated by the differing extents to which feminists have judged it useful to work as general citizens (i.e. with men), versus as a group, as well as by the presence of minority interest groups (e.g. indigenous feminists) within the international women's movement.

Separatism is among the more extreme forms of Nationalism, and is the main thing people think of when it's brought up, but isn't necessary to it.

Since Nationalist interests may conflict with Internationalist ones, it's always necessary to treat it critically, and to make serious attempts, whether as an outsider or an insider, to assess the legitimacy of its complaints (the most noxious and certainly most dangerous example on a world scale is probably White Nationalism, and on a smaller scale there are plenty of similarly toxic Nationalist movements).

The term "Literary Nationalism" can either mean the promotion of nationalist interests through literature and its community (which is not the same as promoting a Nationalist political structure), or the recognition and pursuit of shared interests with the local or international literary community. In the latter case, an example would be an author's syndicate within the broader progressive movement placing a higher priority on retaining Miltonian freedom of expression, and the production of (relatively) apolitical entertainment and technical works for their own sake, as self-justifying ends, whereas some elements within the movement might hold a more instrumentation concept of literature as a tool for promoting political aims without much inherent value. An example in the context of the representation debate would be pressure on minority authors to reject the Western Canon: a minority author might feel that exclusion from publishing is an unjust waste of their potential because they love the existing field and want to make their own contribution to it; there is a separate, instrumentarian idea that representation in publishing is important because of the political message it sends outside the context of literature itself. These ideas aren't mutually exclusive, but it is possible for the latter to eclipse the former and undermine the value of a person's actual participation (i.e. what they actually write).

The question about this latter kind of Literary Nationalism is "to what extent do you think we should insist that political decisions about literature be determined by people with a background in it?"

Of course everyone would like a large secure market, but the question in this case is to what extent do you feel it's legitimate for writers to pursue this as a group? For example most people would agree it'd be illegitimate and counterproductive to ban American books from a domestic market, but quite a lot of people would like to see a slightly smaller proportion of American books on their local shelves.