National Global Imaginaries

Orientalism, as Edward Said used the term, can be defined as an ideology which promotes the 'West-and-Islam' dualism and the idea that 'Others are less human'. Since Said first published his ideas in 1978, however, the world seems to have become much more interdependent and political interrelations between the West and Islam have changed dramatically. Consequently this dualism, though more or less in place, has been influenced by escalating waves of globalisation and redistributed and reshaped in a different form. Some promising changes, as well as some additional dualistic tendencies, that can define neo-Orientalism are found in this new era. This paper attempts to analyse elements of change in traditional Orientalism. To portray a better future for our interdependent world some new approaches to identity, global ethics and global civil society are suggested. Eradicating the roots of Orientalism and Occidentalism alike and accepting, protecting and even promoting diversity are first steps towards countering the devastating threats that endanger humankind as a whole.

In February 2008, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologised to Indigenous Australians for past injustices. The apology was presented as a turning point in the history of the nation. According to Rudd, 'there comes a time in the history of a nation when peoples must become fully reconciled to their past if they are to go forward with confidence to embrace their future'. The apology marked a new step in the reconciliation process in Australia, but as this article argues, the treaty issue - another controversial aspect of reconciliation - remains a major challenge to the Australian nation.

Diversity has become a key factor of societal transformation during the last couple of decades. It has challenged the notion of the nation and its traditional representation as one community of people sharing the same 'national values' (eg. Goldberg, 2002). Diversity raises the question how we can, as people with all our mutual differences of, amongst others, sexuality, race and religion, form a community that enables its members to develop themselves, to flourish and prosper. Migration, especially, has had a considerable bearing on the idea of pluralism and its implication for social and political processes of inclusion or exclusion in contemporary societies. Migration has entailed an increasing awareness of diversity within each nation and national community (Heerma van Voss & van der Linden, 2002; Horton, 1995). This special issue of National Identities assembles articles from different disciplines that try to understand what it means for people, around the world, to be citizens in rapidly changing national, social and political landscapes.

Inequality is far from being an unequivocal expression. Although one may say that the various meanings of the concept were somehow always present because of the link between equality and justice, modernity and its natural rights doctrine expanded its reach. Inequality became ultimately related to the material level of an unequal distribution of goods. Nowadays, this is not to be taken for granted anymore. The word "inequality" may be found applied not only to political or moral issues, but also to culture, gender, environment, education, race, or social esteem, to mention but a few. The sort of unifying substratum once given by the material background of the concept is now largely considered to be just one among many other components of inequality, so that when referred to, this type of inequality receives the specific label of "economic income inequality."

This article examines the politics of the majoritarian binary, 'The West and the Rest', and more specifically, 'Western Theory, Asian Reality', as a politics of power that serves specific interests ranging from imperialism and nationalism to the suppression of heterogeneity in languages, ethnicities, and cultures. The Sinophone is posited here as a presence, literary and otherwise, that interrupts this majoritarian binary by challenging the chain of equivalence among ethnicity, language, and nationality.

What can an Asian theory be? Is the question a blatant oxymoron, or some intellectual anomaly? What is at stake in this enquiry is not the character of Asia at all. On the contrary, what makes the pairing of Asia and theory somewhat strange is our presumption that theory is something we normally expect of Europe or the West. (Europe and the West must be differentiated historically and geopolitically, but for reasons of space the two designations are treated almost interchangeably in this article.)

In the last two decades, we have witnessed dramatic developments in the production of media cultures and their transnational circulation in non-Western regions. East Asia is one of the key regions in which these alternative cultural expressions flourish, in which cultural mixing and corporate collaboration intensify, and in which intra-regional consumption is set in motion. These developments have posed serious questions about the continuing plausibility of Euro-American cultural domination, and they necessitate the de-Westernization of the study of media and cultural globalization. Yet the degree to which the rise of East Asian media culture challenges West-centred power configurations remains a matter of debate-especially as new configurations of global governance in media culture have emerged which are subtly superseding the East-West binary, and permeating both Western and non-Western regions. This article analyses the rise of East Asian media cultures in terms of the governance of global media culture connectivity, with a particular focus on how the growing regional circulation of media products has promoted dialogic cross-border linkages.

It will be my purpose to show that the examples of alternative modernities we have before us today ultimately remained captive to the cycle of representation and to a logic of the same, despite their heroic efforts to break with both. Where all these alternative and multiple modernities-from the pre-war Japanese effort to 'overcome the modern' to more recent attempts to imagine a post-colonial condition-fail to offer a genuinely different conception free from the imposed constraints of a Western model founded on progressive development and achievement is in a reliance on timeless cultural residues. Thus, according to some, they are cultural, not structural, formations, which seek to differentiate received values, timeless and unchanging, from broader social, political and economic systems, which have substituted memory and nostalgia for the historical present. Because they are reflections of national cultures-fixed for all times, invariably derived from irreducible origins-they constitute styles of life identified with the nation-form that can have no universal applicability. In any case, this transmutation of qualitative into quantitative time as the privileged component in a comparative method permits the comprehensive 'treatment of human culture in all times and places'.

East Asian theory: around the corner or already arrived? It is precisely a growing awareness of these shortcomings that has sparked interest in 'hybrid', 'local', or what, for the sake of simplicity, I will call 'East Asian' theory, both in the region itself and across the Western academy over the last few years. This recognition that East Asian contexts act transformatively upon Western theory, that these sites are not just the destination but also the origin of pertinent theoretical thinking, and that the interventions they produce constitute a body of thought in their own right has-as it were-established itself as a kind of 'theory' within East Asian studies, a concept to which many either nominally or concretely subscribe. Up to a certain point, this 'theory' has made its way into praxis, a process to which I will return in due course. But my basic point in the pages that follow is that this praxis is at best still a fledgeling one, and that there is a great deal more to be done if East Asian theory is to become a redoubtable nexus of intellectual resources. Part of the problem, perhaps, lies in the fact that there is a subtle sense of deferral in some quarters about the 'when' of East Asian theory. Hauling East Asian studies out of the mire of geopolitically-driven area studies-replacing what we might call 'espionage empiricism' about our 'others in Asia' with more self-reflexive and less positivistic work-has been a job enough in itself. East Asian theory, by these lights, is on its way, just around the post-Cold War corner.

This essay argues that the failures of U.S. immigration enforcement institutions functioned as a strategic policy from 2003 to 2010, when the undocumented population in the United States reached an unprecedented twelve million people. The author examines how the so-called broken immigration system installed a repressive form of governmentality based in failure. While deferring any legalization, federal and state authorities fostered a regime of exclusion and removal that constituted a class of minimal subjects, those of unauthorized migrants and their kin who would effectively exist outside the community of rights. During this period, immigration arrests and deportations reached unprecedented levels, at a moment when the majority of the undocumented remained an irredeemably criminalized status. By disavowing any intention to conduct mass deportations, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents gained sanction for more targeted campaigns of militarized raids, racial profiling, and detentions. The author argues that heightened enforcement, including the 287g program, created dangerous opportunities for government agents to suspend basic democratic restraints on state power, often for interests of racial and class antagonism that exceeded the bounds of immigration enforcement-with severe consequences for Latino communities. By mobilizing a social imaginary predicated on the necessity of uprooting the undocumented, federal, state, and local officials committed themselves to the actions of a police state and sanctioned a system of apartheid governance within the boundaries of the United States.

This essay attempts to make more pliable three overly rigid claims persistent in the diaspora literature: that diaspora members' imaginations of the homeland are either beautifying/idealizing or unequivocally inimical; that their relations with the host country are inherently distant - they are in it but not of it; and that diasporism and (im)migrant transnationalism constitute two distinct phenomena. It also aims at genderizing the stubbornly genderless study of diasporas. The empirical analysis compares representations of the homeland among turn-of-the-twentieth-century and present-day lower-class Polish migrs in the United States and the United Kingdom, first-wave (1959-61) Cuban refugees in Miami and 1956 Hungarian political refugees dispersed into different west European countries, and contemporary Mexican men and women migrants in the American Southwest. On the basis of these comparative assessments, the author identifies the major circumstances that shape diaspora members' portrayals of the homeland.

In several respects, the European Union (EU) represents both a novel system of quasi-supranational governance and a novel form of political community or polity. But it is also a relatively fragile construction: it remains a community still in the making with an incipient sense of identity, within which powerful forces are at work. This article has three main aims. Firstly, to analyse the reasons and key ideas that prompted a selected elite to construct a set of institutions and treaties destined to unite European nations in such a way that the mere idea of a 'civil war' among them would become impossible. Secondly, to examine the specific top-down processes that led to the emergence of a united Europe and the subsequent emergence of the EU, thus emphasising the constant distance between the elites and the masses in the development of the European project. Finally, to explain why the EU has generated what I call a 'non-emotional' identity, radically different from the emotionally charged and still prevailing national identities present in its member states.

Intellectuals were important to the spread of nationalist ideology in nineteenth-century Europe for a variety of reasons. Firstly, their works facilitated the international spread of the discourse of nationalism; secondly, they mediated between the fields of political institutions and cultural reflection. This article looks at the international mobility and networks of romantic-nationalist intellectuals, and uses the case of August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben (1798-1874) as an example.

In both popular discourse and many academic works, the existence of national identity is largely taken as given. Although researchers disagree on whether national identities are modern or perennial, and how best to gauge the intensity of identification with a particular nation, there is near unanimity on the view that national identities are real and perceptible entities. In contrast to this view I argue not only that there was no national identity before modernity but also that there is little empirical evidence for the existence of national identities in the modern age either. While it is obvious that many individuals show great affinity for their nations and often express sincere devotion to the 'national cause', none of these are reliable indicators of the existence of a durable, continuous, stable and monolithic entity called 'national identity'. To fully understand the character of popular mobilisation in modernity it is paramount to refocus our attention from the slippery and non-analytical idiom of 'identity' towards well-established sociological concepts such as 'ideology' and 'solidarity'. In particular, the central object of this research becomes the processes through which large-scale social organisations successfully transform earnest micro-solidarity into an all-encompassing nationalist ideology.

Much educational research on globalization aims to prepare students to be successful citizens in a global society. We propose a set of three concepts, drawing on systems theory (Nassehi, Stichweh) and theories of the subject (Butler, Foucault), to think the global which enables educational research to step back from hegemonic discourses and reflect on current practices. Globalization is understood in this approach as referring to: (1) a cognitive shift; (2) expanding relevancy spaces; and (3) new forms of subjectivation. The framework is illustrated with examples from educational policy and learning materials, with an extended look at how globalization is articulated in recent shifts in Holocaust education.

Although the Korean developmental state has been heavily discussed in various disciplines and across diverse political spectrums, the statist notion that the developmental state is autonomous from and disciplines society, and is therefore effective in achieving 'national development', has more often been taken for granted than problematised. Statism is also pervasive in institutionalism that emphasises the linkages rather than dichotomies between state and market and in the recent discussions on the transformation of the developmental state. This article proposes an alternative conceptual framework by reformulating 'the form critique of the state' pioneered by Evgeny Pashukanis and further developed in the 'German state derivation debate' on the one hand, and 'world system analysis' on the other. Extending the Marxist critique of 'commodity fetishism' to the theorisation of the developmental state, it inquires into the origins of statism and argues that it is the uneven dynamics of capitalism as a global system that give rise to statism in the first place.

Amartya Sen's enlarged conception of freedom has augmented the scope of economic analysis but it also has had the surprising effect of being more supportive of the free market than conventional welfare economics. It is argued here that a comparison of Sen's position with that of the American institutionalist, J R Commons, highlights some problems with Sen's approach and points to possible ways in which they might be addressed.

Although Karl Polanyi Studied a different epoch and focused on Europe, his ideas have inspired an outpouring of studies on contemporary problems and prospects in the neoliberal era. The bulk of these studies pertain to industrial countries or global economic issues. However, the human, environmental and financial impact of market deregulation is arguably more devastating in the 'developing' countries than in the core. A question thus arises: do Polanyi's reflections on progressive alternatives to liberalism clarify contemporary debates on development alternatives in the Global South? I contend that democratic socialism - Polanyi's preferred remedy to the 'demolition' of society and nature occasioned by market civilisation - is problematical in light of what we have learned from the twentieth century, but his framework for evaluating alternatives - featuring the re-embedding of economy in society - remains as powerful as ever, I support this argument with an exploration of socialism and social democracy - as well as community - based alternatives arising from 'reciprocity'. Each possibility raises distinctive dilemmas, as an analysis of cases reveals.

Much research in international political economy (IPE) has been criticised for focussing on large and powerful actors in post-industrial countries, to the neglect of sites, processes and actors in the global South. This article offers a corrective to this bias in two ways: by locating the analysis in two rural Central American communities; and by exploring the social relations of consumption in these communities. In doing this, I challenge assumptions about rural places being excluded from global processes and explore the complexities and contradictions of how such communities are inserted into global circuits of production and consumption.

Jamaica Kincaid's compact and succinct story "Girl," the lead story in the collection At the Bottom of the River (1983), has been lauded as one of the premier works in Kincaid's corpus, particularly her discourse on the making of "woman" in postcolonial Caribbean contexts. The text is essentially a set of instructions offered by an adult (assumed to be a mother), laying out the script for the performance of womanhood in the fictional society in which the female child is expected to live and perform her gender. "Girl"'s emphasis on performative acts reiterates the inextricable link between gender and performance. Undoubtedly, this landmark Kincaid story is in dialogue with Butler's theorization of the centrality of stylized acts in the creating and crafting of gendered selves. Less well known is Oonya Kempadoo's debut novel Buxton Spice (1999). Buxton Spice chronicles the experiences of four pubescent girls in 1970s Guyana as they learn about, participate in, and challenge some gender expectations of their immediate and wider communities. The story is told from the point of view of Lula, who keenly observes the ways in which gender roles are enacted and how these roles may be re-enacted. Her observations alert the reader to the novel's preoccupation with uncovering, or perhaps reconfiguring, how gender roles might be at once imagined and played out in contemporary Caribbean societies. Both texts illustrate how the tensions and contradictions surrounding the constructions of womanhood, and in Buxton Spice, manhood, are engaged through performative acts, some of which ostensibly conform to prescribed gender roles but that actually undermine them.