32 Introduction
(via the state, but not only the state) a historical perspective is partic-
ularly important. Kırlı discusses the beginnings of the formation of
an Ottoman public, and argues that surveillance, the notion of public
opinion and the growing proximity of state and society were all signs of
modernity. Campos, interestingly, talks of another Ottoman public, one
that was aborted by the ascendancy of the national politics of exclusion
over the Imperial politics of inclusion. And Khan describes the role of
students from the colonies in creating overlapping publics that coalesced
and diverged in the metropolitan capitals and worked to create an array
of nations.
e “nation” is the primary locus of the public and the unit of Th
analysis for Habermas. As Calhoun points out, however, the nation itself
should be seen as a political community constructed through identity
politics and “is a product, not simply a precondition, of the activity of the
public sphere of civil society.”^12 The naturalized notion of nation has been
exploded through a variety of interpretive devices, from conceptualizing
it as “imagined” to investigating national rituals and commemorations
as “invention of tradition.” Another way to simultaneously think about
nation and about hierarchy, power and difference is by seeing difference
as manifested through a series of publics (which may overlap, intersect
or compete). This recognizes the social facticity of the ethnicities, races,
classes, genders, ages, legal statuses, etc. that make up a national entity,
while keeping the analytical focus on the question of how, and if, these
differences produce political communities that partake in imagining and
making the nation through interaction in a variety of public spheres.
Examining the construction of different types of identities as “public”
processes usefully questions the very notion of public/private spheres
as dichotomous or bounded and brings us to the question of who and
what constitutes the “public” in public spheres. This, in turn, leads us to
“democratic inclusiveness” or “how the public sphere incorporates and
recognizes the diversity of identities people bring to it from their mani-
fold involvements in civil society.”^13
istorical research demonstrates that, rather than H one (bourgeois)
public sphere or one form of participation in political life, there have
always been “a variety of ways of accessing public life and a multiplicity
of public arenas.”^14 Therefore, analysis now focuses on the multiplicity of