The Bivocal Nation, Softcover reprint of the original 1st ed. 2018
Memory and Identity on the Edge of Empire

This book is about a divided nation and polarized nationhood. Its principal purpose is to examine division and polarization as forms of imagining that are configured within culture and framed by history. This is what bivocality signifies?two distinct discursive voices through which nationhood is articulated; voices that are nonetheless grounded in a culturally common symbolic field. The volume offers an ethnographically centered analysis of the ways in which Georgians make use of these voices in critical discourses of nationhood. By illuminating the cultural semantics behind these discourses, Nutsa Batiashvili offers a new constellation of conceptual terms for understanding modern forms of nationalism and nation-building in the marginal or liminal landscapes between the Orient and the Occident.

1. Introduction: What Kind of Imagined Community? A Community of Voices 

Part I: Voice

2. We, Us, Ourselves and Our Others

3. We Were Always United, Except When We Were Not

Part II: Dialogism 

4. Things Coded in Our Genetic Memory 

5. Horizons, Margins and Centers of Nation-Making in the 19th Century Georgia

Part III: Memory Game 

6. "It’s a Poor Sort of Memory that Only Works Backwards"

7. Libri Magni or the Book that will Stop the War 

8. Conclusion: Catch '83: Two Faces of the King and The Bivocal Nation 

Nutsa Batiashvili is Assistant Professor at the Free University of Tbilisi, Georgia.