Abstract
In an understandable disillusion with the limitations of the national liberation movements, particularly as the movements harden into advocating conventional nation-state politics, critics are beginning to put their faith in the new possibilities of postnationalism. This form of subjectivity can be defined as a discursive 'attachment' to others who have been lifted out of the modem boundaries of national identification.' In this definition, postnationalism is a subjectivity abstracted from and therefore only residually beholden to imagined past forms of national identification such as ethnicity, felt common history or bounded territory.2 It is the late-modem subjectivity of the mobile person in a world of traversed spaces. Some theorists go so far as to suggest that it is possible to discern the beginnings of a 'postnational imaginary'. These postmodem theorists find it in the messy configurations of modem migrant consciousness, transnational religious revivals of tradition, and movements of postmodem diasporic hybridity. It is treated as an incipient development: both good and bad in the short term, but with positive, almost Utopian, possibilities in the long term as the nation-state ceases to enthral and enrage. For example, Arjun Appadurai writes that 'These elements for those who wish to hasten the demise of the nation-state, for all their contradictions, require both nurture and critique. In this way, transnational social forms may generate not only postnational yearnings, but also actually existing posmational movements, organizations, and spaces'.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Globalization and Politics. Vol. 4: Political Philosophies of the Global |
Editors | Paul James |
Place of Publication | U.K. |
Publisher | Sage |
Pages | 431-450 |
Number of pages | 20 |
ISBN (Print) | 9781412919555 |
Publication status | Published - 2014 |
Keywords
- ethics
- liberation
- movements