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Call for Publications
Theme: Postnationalisms
Publication: Collection edited by Kevin Concannon (Texas A&M-Corpus
Christi) and Pedro Garca-Caro (University of Oregon)
Deadline: 15.8.2012
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Recent critical attention to the transnational, the hemispheric, the
global and the postnational has created the sense that the nation as
a critical category has outlived its usefulness. This sense, of
course, belies the nations continuing political importance. The
nation becomes understood as a limiting critical category in these
recent discussions even as narratives of the nation continue to
orient individual understandings of belonging and identity. This
seeming contradiction emphasizes how hemispheric or global
understandings struggle to shake the nations continuing importance.
This doubleness is reflected in the currency of such terms as the
transnational or the postnational, where the crossings that define
these terms cannot escape the nation that remains at their root.
This collection seeks to explore this paradox, by asking what it
means to construct a postnational spaciousness. Can the postnational
exist within the nation or must it always be considered beyond it?
How might the postnational be constructed? Could the postnational, in
fact, precede or participate in the development of the nation? This
collection will be interested in exploring the importance of this
temporality, asking specifically whether this time after actually
means the end of the nation. As Jacques Derrida shows in The Post
Card (1987) one of the many meanings of the prefix post has to do
with mail and its delivery, and as a result with everyday concerns
over delayed mail, lost mail and mail that is changed or marked by
the act of delivery itself. Rather than being only understood as a
prefix referring to what comes after, such as after the nation, post
to Derrida carries with it the challenge of ever getting to this
after point, an arrival that forever refers back and is unalterably
changed by its very process. The post in this sense never arrives,
and as such emphasizes not only the challenge of equating the
postnational with being beyond the nation but also emphasizes the
different temporal dimensions within the nation itself. Much as
different nations can exist within the Nation, the collection will
recognize the temporal fragmentation within the nation as well. The
fact that individuals and communities develop within different
representations of time emphasizes the different representations of
postnational identity.
This fragmented understanding of the nation is reflected by our
conceiving of the postnational in fragmented terms. The plurality of
our title recognizes the ways in which race, ethnicity and gender
participate in different ways in the construction of (post)national
identity. This plurality, moreover, challenges any understanding of
the postnational as better than the nation, by focusing instead on
constructions of difference. In many ways, to see the postnational in
singular terms means to understand it in terms of a national
rhetoric, constructing this sense of postness in unified,
individuated terms. Our collection seeks to complicate this approach
by broadening our focus through a comparative approach that
challenges potentially unifying categories, such as the hemispheric
or the Black Atlantic.
Contributors may want to consider one or more of the following
questions:
1) In what ways does the postnational differ from the nation? Does
the term post imply a time after the nation, or, more importantly,
better than the nation? How, in other words, does one define the
relationship between the two terms?
2) If national borders are understood as porous, how does this impact
our understanding of language and belonging? In other words, in what
way does the mixture of languages and cultures complicate the
possibility of a national identity? And how do texts use mixture as a
means of identifying an audience that extends beyond a national
audience?
3) In what ways have traditional models of im/migration been
complicated by the porousness of geographic conceptualizations of
nation, as well as by the globalization of economics and culture?
4) How is neoliberal globalization related to the concept of a
postnational space-time? Are there alternative postnational forms,
institutions, networks and cultural formations that reclaim, mourn or
evoke in any way the internationalist utopias of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries? Is the contemporary form of postnationalism only
one possible - deficient, predatory, neocolonial - version of
internationalist postnationalism?
5) Cosmopolitanism appears to be a satisfactory term to do away with
the idea of the nation without necessitating or alluding to its
lexical roots. But how are issues of race, gender, class and
ethnicity determining factors in the construction of a cosmopolitan
cultural agenda? Is there indeed an emerging cosmopolitan culture?
What are its defining modes of production? How do race/class
relations, for instance, and in particular those generated by the
geopolitical divisions between the Global North and the Global South
limit or impinge on the feasibility of a cosmopolitan culture?
6) Is the classical Marxist division between a nationalism of the
oppressed and a nationalism of the oppressors still a valid
opposition to imagine contrasting forms of postnationalism?
Besides these questions here is a provisional list of possible terms
and issues that will be addressed by the essay collection:
1. National nostalgia and national kitsch as forms of postnationalism.
2. Satires and parodies of national epics.
3. Transnationalism, globalization, and cultural attrition.
4. Cosmopolis and cosmopolitanism.
5. Internationalism, transnationalism: postnationalism as utopia or
as dystopia.
6. Migrant subjectivities and migrant cultures.
7. Neocolonialism, (post)national formations in the postcolonial
world.
8. Globalization and cultural formations.
9. Nation-states and stateless nations in a postnational setting.
10. Essentialism versus hybridity: identity formation, ethnic
definitions beyond the nation-state.
11. Social justice and the post-national state.
E-mail one to two-page abstracts to Kevin Concannon
([email protected]) or Pedro Garca-Caro ([email protected])
by August 15, 2012.
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