(Download) "Beyond a Postnationalist Imaginary: Grounding an Alternative Ethic (1) (Nationalism and Post-Nationalism)" by Arena Journal # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Beyond a Postnationalist Imaginary: Grounding an Alternative Ethic (1) (Nationalism and Post-Nationalism)
- Author : Arena Journal
- Release Date : January 22, 1999
- Genre: Religion & Spirituality,Books,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 235 KB
Description
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 modern boundaries of national identification. (2) 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. (3) It is the late-modern 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 postmodern theorists find it in the messy configurations of modern migrant consciousness, transnational religious revivals of tradition, and movements of postmodern 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 postnational movements, organizations, and spaces'. (4) For all the sympathy we may spontaneously have with such a view, (5) this article argues as its core proposition that without a thorough-going exploration of the principles of solidarity and community, advocating postnationalism amounts to little more than a postmodern passion for mobile openness on the one hand, or an ideologically insensitive support for 'banal' official nationalism and global capitalism on the other. (6) The second part of that proposition is counterintuitive, but it refers to the way in which nation-states at the centre of the global order, such as the United States, increasingly present themselves as postnational. Even as they maintain a modern defence of the national projection of globalizing power, the leading proponents of global capitalism no longer proclaim 'my country, right or wrong'. Instead, they invoke variants on the postnational language of 'my country as exemplary of the new openness to global mobility'. In doing so they mask the iniquitous nature of structural conditions that frame such words. Postcolonial advocates of postnationalism fail to see that they walk in the shadow of these quite differently motivated advocates of global mobility.
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