ABSTRACT
Chapter Three argues that melancholic sites disrupt not only national memory, but the nation itself. To make sense of what is at stake when the nation remembers its collective past, it delves into the historical construction of the nation through racialisation and empire-building, and the re-entrenchment of a Self/Other binary in the postcolonial era. Returning to the First World War centenary, the chapter argues that narratives of mourning and mobilisation created space for Muslim soldiers within the nation while strengthening the border between insiders and outsiders. Narratives of melancholia, however, unsettle the border between insiders and outsiders—and, by extension, the nation itself. In the present context of populist nationalism in both Britain and France, melancholic narratives of Muslims in the First World War challenge the premises of nationalism, revealing that even at the peak of their imperial power, in Britain and France, the global was and is inescapable.
