Imagining the Modern

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 comparative research in both southern and northern Cyprus, the work demonstrates how the conflict emerged through Cypriots' 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. The book describes how Muslims and Christians in Cyprus were transformed into Turks and Greeks, and what it meant--epistemologically, ontologically, and politically--when they were.