Imagining the Modern: The Cultures of Nationalism in Cyprus [Paperback]

This book argues that two conflicting styles of nationalist imagination led to the violent rending of Cyprus in 1974 and sustained that division over decades. Based on research in both southern and northern Cyprus, the work demonstrates how the conflict emerged through the Cypriot's encounters with modernity under British colonialism, and through a consequent re-imagining of the body politic in a new world in which Cypriots were defined as part of a European periphery. Rebecca Bryant demonstrates how Muslims and Christians were transformed into Turks and Greeks, and what it meant epistemologically, ontollogically and politically when they were.Rebecca Bryant was most recently Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University and is engaged in research on place and memory in Cyprus.