This edited volume examines the relationship between the nation and the transnation, focusing on transnational communities in the Asia-Pacific region. Setting the book within a theoretical framework, the authors explore a range of themes such as migration, identity and citizenship in chapters on China, the Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam, Japan, Indonesia, Australia, Singapore and Cambodia.

Where do political identities come from, how do they change over time, and what is their impact on political life? This book explores these and related questions in a globalizing world where the nation state is being transformed, definitions of citizenship are evolving in unprecedented ways, and people's interests and identities are taking on new local, regional, transnational, cosmopolitan, and even imperial configurations. Pre-eminent scholars examine the changing character of identities, affiliations, and allegiances in a variety of contexts: the evolving character of the European Union and its member countries, the Balkans and other new democracies of the post-1989 world, and debates about citizenship and cultural identity in the modern West. These essays are essential reading for anyone interested in the political and intellectual ferment that surrounds debates about political membership and attachment, and will be of interest to students and scholars in the social sciences, humanities, and law.

Nations Unbound is a pioneering study of an increasing trend in migration-transnationalism. Immigrants are no longer rooted in one location. By building transnational social networks, economic alliances and political ideologies, they are able to cross the geographic and cultural boundaries of both their countries of origin and of settlement. Through ethnographic studies of immigrant populations, the authors demonstrate that transnationalism is something other than expanded nationalism. By placing immigrants in a limbo between settler and visitor, transnationalism challenges the concepts of citizenship and of nationhood itself.

Nations Unbound is a pioneering study of an increasing trend in migration-transnationalism. Immigrants are no longer rooted in one location. By building transnational social networks, economic alliances and political ideologies, they are able to cross the geographic and cultural boundaries of both their countries of origin and of settlement. Through ethnographic studies of immigrant populations, the authors demonstrate that transnationalism is something other than expanded nationalism. By placing immigrants in a limbo between settler and visitor, transnationalism challenges the concepts of citizenship and of nationhood itself.

An examination of nationalism and gender.

This book traces the impact of exile in the formation of independent republics in Chile and the Río de la Plata in the decades after independence. Exile was central to state and nation formation, playing a role in the emergence of territorial borders and Romantic notions of national difference, while creating a transnational political culture that spanned the new independent nations. Analyzing the mobility of a large cohort of largely elite political émigrés from Chile and the Río de la Plata across much of South America before 1862, Edward Blumenthal reinterprets the political thought of well-known figures in a transnational context of exile. As Blumenthal shows, exile was part of a reflexive process in which elites imagined the nation from abroad while gaining experience building the same state and civil society institutions they considered integral to their republican nation-building projects.

This book challenges existing accounts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in which political developments are explained in terms of the rise of the nation-state. While monarchies are often portrayed as old-fashioned – as things of the past – we argue that modern monarchies have been at the centre of nation-construction in many parts of the world. Today, roughly a quarter of states define themselves as monarchies as well as nation-states – they are Royal Nations. This is a global phenomenon. This volume interrogates the relationship between royals and ‘their’ nations with transnational case studies from Asia, Africa, Europe as well as South America. The seventeen contributors discuss concepts and structures, visual and performative representations, and memory cultures of modern monarchies in relation to rising nationalist movements. This book thereby analyses the worldwide significance of the Royal Nation.

Research articles on Indian diaspora.

The history of globalization is anything but a no-frills affair that moves smoothly along a clear-cut, unidirectional path of development, eventually leading to seamless global integration. Accordingly, scholarship in the social sciences has increasingly argued against equating the history of globalization processes and transcultural entanglements with the master narrative of the gradual homogenization of the world. Examining the shifting patterns of global connections has, therefore, become the main challenge for all those who seek to understand the past, the present and the future of modern societies. And this challenge includes finding a place for the nation state. The studies presented here argue that looking at the nation state from the perspective of global entanglements opens the door for its interpretation as a dynamic and multi-layered structure that takes part in globalization processes and plays various and at times even contradictory roles at the same time.

Blurred Borders