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Julian Go's 'Thinking Against Empire' identifies the corpus of 'anticolonial thought' as being instructive for a wider rethinking of how sociology might rally its key conceptualisations of social relations. He insightfully identifies the marginalisation of such thinking from Sociology as an institutionalised discipline. In our response we take up some of the warnings Go provides in the closing sections of his essay-which concern the expanse of intellectual engagement being currently bracketed under or connected to the 'anti-colonial', not least vis-à-vis the 'decolonising/decolonial' turn-to further unpack how the 'anti-colonial' might be adapted for thinking through contemporary socio-political dynamics. Offering, first, a precis of some particularities of British Sociology vis-a-vis the contributions of anticolonial social theory, this article then expands upon the dilemmas arising when anticolonial theory contemporaneous to the pre-decolonisation era is transposed to contingencies of the present 21 st century. Namely, whilst the anticolonial archive has proved invaluable to upending the omissions but also complicities of European social theory canons, allowing for a much more expansive sense of how the modern world and its violences were conjured and how we might accordingly escape its miseries, it is also clear that much of the postcolonial world has undergone sufficient shifts to warrant an adapted sense of how we consider the anti-colonial for our current politics. We suggest that the important deviations which anti-colonial theorisations might heed include the dangers of conflating the anticolonial with an affirmation of Global South, non-white nativist identity; the need to recognise some key conjunctural premises by which the anticolonial is no longer geographically indexed to a straightforward Global North-Global South distinction; and the need to acknowledge that, at its most radical, anticolonial thought is itself still invested in traversing both the dreams but also corruptions of those dreams as intrinsic to modernity., (© 2023 The Authors. The British Journal of Sociology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of London School of Economics and Political Science.)

Conversations surrounding decolonial humanistic sociology have been guided by a moral imperative--to advance a radical critique of society for the purpose of reducing inequality. Storytelling has been used by marginalized groups to advance decolonization. Exactly how can instructors use the power of storytelling and maps to facilitate the study of migration among students? We argue that narratives, maps, and museum-like exhibitions can be used to teach human migration in a way that moves beyond the dominant approach of push-pull nation-centered demography. This contribution describes how decolonial humanistic sociology informed the development of the Global Migrations Exhibit Assignment: a hands-on learning experience focused on translating students' learning into action. We outline learning outcomes, review a sample of students' work, and consider the limitations of the assignment. We also consider the hostile responses those who use the assignment may face and discuss the peril this poses to academic freedom and democracy.

Doctoral education is often lauded as a site of academic socialization and research training for nascent scholars. However, discussions of socialization seldom problematize the dangers of intellectual imperialism and methodological nationalism inherent in doctoral researcher socialization. As such, the traditional socialization practices for doctoral students in the United States (U.S.) must be interrogated and expanded to move towards equitable practices for research, especially for students conducting international research. Using social and spatial positioning as our conceptual framing, we problematize and question current approaches and practices to doctoral researcher training in the U.S. We use the academic hood, which is granted upon successful completion of doctoral studies, as a metaphor to reconsider how to reflect upon and navigate power dynamics and knowledge production within the U.S. academy.

The modern history of Nepal started after the Kingdom of Nepal was formed during the 1760s through a series of military battles, which is now known as a national unification campaign, led by Prithvi Narayan Shah. The history of mass education, however, started during the 1950s when a political uprising overthrew autocratic Rana regime that had ruled the country for more than a century. This paper aims to explore Nepal's educational history by analysing key educational policy documents produced by the Government of Nepal as well as its major donor the World Bank from 1950 to 2020. The paper uses international political economy as a theoretical framework and critical policy sociology as a methodological approach. The key argument of the paper is that, since some of the problematic assumptions of modernism, nationalism, and globalism have guided Nepal's policy agendas, its education system has not addressed multifarious challenges faced by its citizens. The theoretical and methodological approaches taken for exploring the interconnections between education, economy, and politics will be helpful for future researchers to understand the significance of education not only for economic development but also for the institutionalization of democracy in both developed and developing countries.

The purpose of this study is to analyze of Eurasianism, which began during the Russian scientific and philosophical emigration and has generated sharp discussion over the last century. Within the framework of Eurasianism, extensive research has been conducted on a wide range of interrelated topics, much of whose theoretical and practical significance is just beginning to be realized. The main objective of the article is the identification of various aspects of the national question, and its many issues which form the basis of Eurasian ethnosociology. Eurasianism has re-examined, among other issues, the inequality of national communities and the ways to eliminate this inequality, the conditions for fruitful interaction between ethnic groups, the nature of nationalism, and many more. Eurasianists have proposed a systemic and holistic approach to the national question, as an alternative to the prevailing ideas of today and, in the authors' opinion, an appropriate heuristic, especially given the deepening of many national problems in the modern world.

This article introduces a collection of papers comprising the special issue, "Competing interests: Parents, Schools and Nation States." Drawing on the seven papers in the collection, and situating them in recent developments in the sociological field, the article discusses globally shifting relations between families, schools and the state across a range of nations in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries (Australia, Germany, India, Norway, Singapore, Sweden, USA). The article proposes that the school is a crucial site for relations between family and state, and argues that a significant focus of the material and occupational investment of contemporary parents is the formal education of their children, re-shaping not only the relationship between parents and schools but also the nature of parenthood itself. In the contemporary context of global neoliberal education reform, parents are analysed both as local actors in schools and as subjects of national and international policy regimes.

The Pakistani Hindu community inhabiting a camp in the city of New Delhi presents the most recent case of South-to-South migration. Migration into India for this community has been undertaken with an aim to achieve a better life, especially one characterized by better education for their children. Education for the families from this community is associated with progress, improvement, development of intellect, and a means to put an end to the families' endless roaming. However, the visions and aspirations for the future meet with difficulties stemming from the nature of their migration and the absence of any transactional relationship with the Indian state due to their lack of citizenship.

This article offers an example of a global approach to teaching the sociology of religion, a course that typically focuses on American religious phenomena. It builds on three interventions in the movement for a global sociology: connecting the local and global, moving beyond methodological nationalism, and developing an ethical orientation toward sociological questions. Such an approach encourages students to question taken-for-granted assumptions about religion and gain conceptual clarity. Specifically, the course goals are to challenge students' preconceptions about the global South as well as the global North and complicate and historicize the definition of religion. I describe class content and activities on five major themes, each carefully connected to globalization: defining religion, orthodox women, secularism, conversions and revivals, and violence. Assessment of student learning includes a compilation of student responses to final exam questions and their own final statements of what they learned.

The article looks at the experience of studying young people in today's Russia and the way the experience correlates with Western traditions of research. The analysis that is proposed is oriented toward understanding the analytical and empirical potential of the concept of solidarity applicable to the current agenda. [This article was translated by Kim Braithwaite.]

This article explores the possibilities of shifting ethnocentric bias in curricula and pupils' constructions of national and European identities using the concept of "Europe" as a tool. The European dimension was conceptualized as a subtle approach, within the deeply divided society of Cyprus, to alleviate the ethnocentrism of history and geography curricula and to shift pupils' extreme views. The study showed that there were slight yet important shifts which point towards the potential of education in providing children with a wider range of "tools" with which to construct their identities. It is argued that in a context where "Europe" is a "normativity" and the "Other = Turk" is polarized, the European dimension might be useful to hybridize a European identity so as to include the "Others". (Contains 3 tables and 9 notes.)

Discusses conditions in the Third World which prevent the development of a harmonious world society. The effects of nationalism, nuclear proliferation, racism, political and economic inequities, and social and religious conservatism on the growth of a global outlook are considered. (AM)

This article proposes the concept of ‘imperism’ as an analytical tool apt to describe political processes in Putin’s Russia and beyond. Imperism denotes an ontological orientation, or nomos (the term derives from theories of religion and politics by Berger and Schmitt), that undergirds a plurality of civic positions, informs policy, and fundamentally casts imperialness as a political entity’s normal, desirable state. Russia’s imperist nomos shall be explored in its key dimensions, including cosmology, authority, sociology, and aesthetics. However, imperism’s analytical purchase is not limited to the Russian case. In particular, this paper considers the merits of this category vis-à-vis an array of related but distinct concepts: imperialism, authoritarianism, fascism, nationalism, and irredentism. On those grounds, it will be argued that Putinist Russia’s military adventurism manifests a peculiar, imperist form of imperialism; that the Putin regime, albeit hard to categorise, appears to share an imperist nomos with historical fascisms; and that imperism’s ultimate scope exceeds that of nationalist irredentism. The paper ends with a reflection on the advantageous epistemological potentialities of imperism as a category. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ali Meghji's A Critical Synergy provides a thought-provoking framework for putting two bodies of thought in conversation with one another. Doing so advances the project of imagining alternative, anti-racist futures. I reflect on the central argument of the book within the context of contemporary sociology. I then engage with three themes of the book: ways of knowing and being, methodological nationalism, and postcolonial melancholia. I approach each theme from my vantage point as a scholar of decolonial (and postcolonial) thought, taking up Meghji's invitation to engage with critical race theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How has the Europeanisation of football at the level of governance (due to for example the effects of the Bosman ruling and the formation of the UEFA Champions League) – influenced the identities of football fans? This paper explores how such structural Europeanisation in football is influencing identifications among fans. Based on an analysis of articulations in selected online message boards, we distil the positioning of fans towards 'Europe' in football, and the factors which shape it. We control for three main avenues of impact: the club level, the league level, and the societal context. Our inquiry is based on a set of paired comparisons of fan scenes for football clubs in four different European countries. Results show that the factor carrying the most explanatory power is the club's participation in European-level competition. Although this broadly confirms a 'contact hypothesis' – according to which the more fans are exposed to cross-border contacts, the less relevance they attribute to aspects of national belonging – significant variations of how frequent exposure to European-level competition translates into more Europeanised perceptions do exist. For European identity studies, the work corroborates that a lifeworld arena such as football can foster Europeanised identifications, albeit not in a uniform manner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I discuss Lithuanian LGBQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual and queer) people's views on belonging to the West/EUrope. I will argue that the research participants' age group, location of residence, their (not)involvement with LGBTQ+ leisure culture and/or their migrant status made a significant impact towards forming their subjective sense of (not) belonging to the West, when they discussed their personal experiences of spending time abroad. When belonging to the West/EUrope was discussed against the backdrop of national belonging, the research participants syncretised the elements of the dominant nationalistic narrative, and the Rainbow Europe narrative in order to homosexualise the national canon and to construct an accommodating version of Lithuania as the Rainbow Nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cross-border regions are often deemed laboratories for initiatives to increase Europeanization. Our paper examines the German-speaking Community of Belgium in the Euregio Maas-Rhine to assess the relevance of everyday cross-border activities to the perception that living in a border region presents a unique opportunity to feel and think as a European. Departing from the assumptions of both Deutsch's transaction theory and Allport's contact hypothesis, we analyze Eurobarometer data (population-level surveys) and use data from focus groups with regional MPs. Results from quantitative data analysis suggest that perceptions of life in cross-border regions are positively influenced by frequent cross-border movement (functional dimension) as well as general trust in other people (emotional dimension). Our qualitative data from focus groups support the findings from the quantitative analysis and demonstrate further that it is not merely the quantity but the quality of contacts that contribute to a gradual 'growing together'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, scholarship on postfunctionalism in European integration has drawn attention to how processes of Europeanisation are not restricted to policymakers, but exist equally (if not more significantly) in the quotidian. The 2016–2020 Brexit process and debates on the relationship between national identity and 'Europeanness' urge a new consideration of how Europeanisation is narrated in everyday discourses. This paper analyses British fictional portrayals of the EEC and EU and posits a new theoretical framework of 'Imperial Gothic 2.0'. Pre-2016 representations of the EU were entirely dystopian. But post-2016, Brex-Lit fiction has reversed this trend and the EU now appears as a flawless utopia. Early twentieth-century 'Imperial Gothic' saw popular fiction defined by themes of British decline and oppression by foreign powers; a century later, Brex-Lit has resurrected these themes by narrating Britain in terminal decline, reflecting cultural anxieties, a reversal of Self and Other, and a loss of identities. This 'Imperial Gothic 2.0' reveals anxieties which reflect and influence political action, and reveals the extent to which imaginations and narratives of the EU have transformed from depictions of a distant, technocratic entity used for comedy or conspiracy, into a site of intense emotional affiliation, nostalgia, anticipation, and regret. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of growing nationalisms and Euroscepticism, this paper develops the original concept of 'Everyday Europeanhood' on a theoretical level, building on related concepts, such as Skey and Antonsich's 'Everyday Nationhood', Billig's 'Banal Nationalism', Anderson's 'Imagined Communities' and Beck's 'Cosmopolitan Vision'. It applies the concept to the European Universities Initiative (EUI), seen as a tool to promote European identity, based on a common sense of belonging conveyed through everyday practice, among students and staff in European University Alliances. It is argued that, in the light of previous top-down European initiatives designed to symbolically reinforce a sense of shared European identity, the EUI seems more in phase with bottom-up 'everyday' processes of identity development. Taking the European University Alliance 'FORTHEM' as an example, core features, aspects, actions and outputs achieved so far within this alliance are categorised in the light of four dimensions of 'Everyday Europeanhood': 'Talking Europe', 'Choosing Europe', 'Performing Europe' and 'Consuming Europe'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The aim of this article is to characterize the culturalist theory of the nation by Florian Znaniecki. Opposing the sociological theory dominated by Western, particularly Anglo-Saxon, thinkers, Znaniecki rejected the view of the nation as a state society. He believed that the nation is a type of community constituted by a specific culture that is created by its intellectual leaders. To derive his findings, he used the knowledge gained from the experiences of the nations of Central and Eastern Europe. He believed that their specific history required the development of a sociological theory that was adequate for such research, not dominated by the findings of Western sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A prominent figure in the social sciences in Brazil and Latin America, Renato Ortiz is invited in this interview to reflect on his intellectual and academic trajectory, whose (re) beginning goes back to France in the 1970s. Professor at the Campinas State University since 1988, he addresses here the main concepts and references that make up his vast work, situated at the intersections between sociology and anthropology. The conversation begins by addressing the issue of his university education and insertion in the Brazilian academic field and develops through the following topics: religion and popular culture, national identity and modernity, mundialization and globalization, the market of symbolic goods and the luxury universe. Finally, he focuses on the dilemma of intellectual work in the social sciences amidst the adversities of the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an analysis of the Danish documentary series, Slaves in the Family. It demonstrates how an analytics of hybridity can unpack the naturalizations and denaturalizations of categories of purity, arguing that it is vital to capture the unstable tension between understanding "hybridity" as a mixing of elements on the one hand, and as a displacement of categories on the other. Slaves in the Family criticizes and destabilizes ideas of purity by rearticulating the story of Danish colonial history and of Danish national identity. However, the articleargues that the series' narrative about family and race is uneasily situated between the two conceptions of hybridity. Consequently, notions of purity are reinstalled by the way the series articulates "kinship" as the basis of true relations and authentic identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review essay explores a number of key books published in transnational feminist sociology over the last 20 years, including Kamala Kempadoo's (2004) Sexing the Caribbean, Pei-Chia Lan's (2006) Global Cinderellas, Smitha Radhakrishnan's (2011) Appropriately Indian, Héctor Carrillo's (2018) Pathways of Desire, Oluwakemi Balogun's (2020) Beauty Diplomacy, and Rhacel Parreñas' (2021) Unfree. The review analyzes three key themes found in transnational feminist sociology: migrant domestic work, sexuality and migration, and gender and nationalism. It also points to the important contributions transnational feminist research makes to sociology through its focus on global-local processes, intersectional inequalities, and the relationship between structure and agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electoral politics is strongly influenced by unfolding events, some of them leading to major shifts in alignment. There has been renewed interest in the 'floating voter' in contemporary Europe, not least because of increased electoral support for right-wing political parties. In Scotland, however, the clearest example of realignment is to be found not so much in support for specific political parties, although that should not be ignored, but rather in a shift of sections of the population from UK unionism towards support for Scottish independence, despite the result of the 2014 Scottish independence referendum. We explore past contentions from certain authors that the ethno-religious, socio-economic and political stratification of supporters of the two largest football clubs in Scotland, Celtic and Rangers, may be linked to their personal voting dispositions with regards to the issue of Scottish independence. These past findings are discussed in light of our interviews with fans of Scottish football teams which explore their perceptions of the interconnection between football club support, nationalism, unionism, and political voting in contemporary Scotland. Our interviewees suggest that the shifting dynamics of contemporary Scottish politics in an era of constitutional evolution has been reflected in shifting political and social affiliations of Scottish football clubs: although the traditional political allegiances of Celtic and Rangers were argued to persist to a degree, consensus emerged that these traditional allegiances have been destabilised by broader political, socio-economic and ideological developments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to problematize some of the common assumptions within the dominant discourse on statelessness, such as the hegemonic framework of the international state system and the conceptualization of the state as an emancipatory actor, by using sociological notions of citizenship and nationalism to provide a more nuanced framework of understanding. Through a sociological lens, citizenship is considered a concept beyond formal legal status and as one heavily intertwined with notions of nationhood, and as a concept which can be utilized as a political tool. The paper argues that it is necessary to consider a sociological understanding of statelessness alongside a legal understanding of the issue in order to be able to address the complexities of statelessness.

In this essay, I will reflect upon what has been sociology's contribution to understanding the emergence and development of nationalism and how sociology can contribute to understanding nationalism's present and future through a property rights perspective. The essay will discuss, in particular, how historical sociological analysis of property rights and property rights regimes may be central to understanding nationalism past and future. After a general and brief discussion on the current, so‐called return of nationalism, the essay starts with discussion of some late enlightenment proto‐sociologists, suggesting that these writers actually analysed some crucial early dynamics of property and sovereignty which is central to understanding nationalism. The essay then moves on to suggests why a property rights focus might be a useful perspective to understanding nationalism in the 21st century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to question the modernist common sense of mainstream sociology, epitomised today by the charge of methodological nationalism, this article offers an overall reading of Marcel Mauss's The Nation. Conceived during the Great War and written mainly in 1920, Mauss's work radically re-examined both the nation and nationalism from a regenerated sociological viewpoint centered on the relations between societies. Distinguishing between partial relations of exchange and total relations of encounter, Mauss came to discover the gift as a total social fact, seeing it as the traditional unconscious spring of the federative dynamics that had to be reactivated in Europe to associate its nations in a great 'Inter-nation' and avoid the risk of a new total war. The Nation, by reviving the original ambition of Émile Durkheim's sociology to be a way rethinking and reshaping the concepts and institutions of modernity, helps us explore the contradictions and pathologies involved in the concept and history of the nation, in a situation currently marked by the return of nationalism and the quest for a social Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At a time when nationalist sentiment is on the rise, this special issue takes stock of how sociology can contribute to understanding the past, present and future of nationalism. In contrast to declarations of 'the end of history', which was also meant to herald increasing integration due to a lowering of cultural and national barriers, nationalism never went away. The articles in this collection engage with the question of nationalism at a theoretical and empirical level and in different regional contexts, assessing how national boundaries are drawn and policed, how national identities are formed and the myriad political and everyday consequences of nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses how to explain the rise of a new nationalism in Europe. It begins by problematizing the inconsistencies in the current culturalist, socio-economic, and socio-political approaches. It then makes Pierre Bourdieu's theory of social space fruitful for a sociological explanation of neonationalism by removing it from the conceptional framework of national container societies. It finally shows that the transnational opening of national societies is accompanied by profound processes of symbolic appreciation and depreciation of economic, cultural, and social 'capital' that the inhabitants of the national container possess. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers Charles Tilly as an important but underappreciated theorist of nationalism. Tilly’s theory of nationalism emerged from the “bellicist” strand of his earlier work on state-formation and later incorporated a concern with performance, stories, and cultural modeling. Yet despite the turn to culture in Tilly’s later work, his theory of nationalism remained state-centered, materialist, and instrumentalist—a source of both its power and its limitations.

This article presents an innovative sociological framework to discuss recent social, ideological, and religious trends within the Religious-Zionist sector in Israel. The article challenges the prevalent conceptualization of Religious-Zionism as a sui generis ideology. Contrary to researchers who emphasize the synthesis of religion and Zionism in the Religious-Zionist ideology, the author argues that the Religious-Zionist identity is based primarily on social connections (kinship, geographical, institutional) between the members of the group. The author uses this approach to make sense of recent Religious-Zionist trends: post-Zionism, the 'religious-lite', Orthodox feminism, and neo-liberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this scholarly panel, Guido Franzinetti, John Breuilly, Béatrice von Hirschhausen, and Sabine Rutar discuss Diana Mishkova's monograph Beyond Balkanism. The Scholarly Politics of Region Making, published in the Routledge Borderland Studies series (2018; paperback edition 2020). The panel focuses, from various angles, precisely on how 'region making' has been influenced by scholarly politics and other kinds of policy discourses. The take of each author is conditioned by their respective expertise in European and global area studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors analyze the changes in value patterns—patriarchy, authoritarianism and nationalism—in Serbia in the context of the social changes that have marked the postsocialist transformation period. They focus on the extent and intensity of two sub-patterns within each of these three basic value patterns: private and public patriarchy, general and specific authoritarianism, organic (natural) and ethnic nationalism. The conclusions about changes in these value patterns are drawn on the basis of three empirical studies conducted in 2003, 2012, and 2018. They show the prevalence of private patriarchy, general authoritarianism, and organic (natural) nationalism over their counterparts. Private patriarchy has weakened, which is largely to be explained by the significant structural changes in Serbia. On the other hand, support of general authoritarianism and organic (natural) nationalism has been on the rise, which clearly mirrors the unfavorable economic and political situation in the country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the theoretical and empirical contributions of the interdisciplinary field of memory studies for a comparative sociology of collective memory and politics. We identify three major empirical foci that have structured the scholarship: the role of collective memory in the creation, legitimation, and maintenance of national identities and nation-states; political reckoning with the memory of difficult and violent pasts; and the ongoing transnationalization of collective memory. We conclude with suggestions for future research on the politics of memory given the rise of populism and so-called fake news. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The cosmopolitan sociology of Ulrich Beck has been widely recognized as making vital contributions to crosscutting conversations on globalization and transnational studies, including these debates that are being played out on the pages of Global Networks. Beck's impassioned critique of 'methodological nationalism' in his own discipline of sociology, in particular, has often served as a springboard for programmatic calls to attend more closely to transnational actors, issues, and processes. However, beyond the occasional acknowledgement, comparatively less attention has been paid so far to the potentialities, specificities, and practicalities of Beck's affirmative alternative vision for the socio‐cultural sciences, that of 'methodological cosmopolitanism'. Building on and extending out from research experiences obtained in Beck's East Asia and Europe‐focused Cosmopolitan Climate Change (Cosmo‐Climate) project, this special theme brings together experts from across a range of socio‐cultural research fields to discuss and critically interrogate the challenges and capacities of doing methodological cosmopolitanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the poetry of Qu Xuanying, a literatus who remained in the city of Beiping (now Beijing) following its occupation by the Japanese in 1937. Through historical allusions in his poetry, Qu communicated with friends about the ethical dilemmas that he faced under occupation, and reflected upon the choices that literati in earlier eras had made when facing dynastic transitions and foreign conquest. Qu's 'esoteric writing' during the occupation contained a complex set of historical allusions which referenced various points in the Chinese past. Since Qu served in the collaborationist north China regime, he has often been perceived as a 'traitor' or a 'collaborator'. Through this in-depth analysis of his literary works, however, this paper seeks to reveal the special exegetical strategies adopted by literati such as Qu under occupation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the construction of lyric identities by Li Xuanti, a classical-style poet, cultural celebrity and prominent civil servant in collaborationist regimes based in Nanjing during the Second Sino-Japanese War. It argues that Li used his poetry to explore the confusion, ambivalence and sense of cultural pride while living with the occupiers. Despite his collaboration, a frequent identity that appears in Li's poetry is that of a yimin (loyalist), who has retreated to the inner world of reclusion. With the progress of the war, however, another identity eventually emerged in Li's poetry, namely that of a patriot. Historical allusions in Li's poems thus acquire double-entendre, expressing his ambivalent loyalty. Li was also at the social centre of a group of like-minded collaborators and accommodators in Nanjing, bound by their common practice of classical-style poetry and arts. Their community thus becomes a special case of study for the sociology of survival under the Japanese occupation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]