Anderson, Kay postnationality

Anderson, Thinking Post nationally

Anderson´s aim is not to understand cosmopolitan identity within a phrame of pure identity and place but rather to undo nationalistic frames and the imagination of minoritarian groups to understand the plural satates of British Colony. To do this the author puts into question the categories of: national settler, migrants and indigenous. The epistemological and identity implications of this separatist categorizations has generated social tensions along the British common-wealth. In all this cases Native populations were mostly erased form national narratives as challenging categories of the nativeness of national identity, especially when this logic is embraced to distinguish the national citizens from the migrants, who are considered as a force putting the body of the nation in a state of siege. The author argues this process is more a tension within a nation building process than as the production of racial formations, it is necessary to consider then both the colonial nation building process along with the contemporary “threats” to national ideals that transnationalism poses. Struggles for representation emerge from the processes of imposition of a model of the nation state into the colonies, in which culture, nation and state do not follow a unified path. State sovereignty based on the idea of a homogeneous national population and citizenship is further made relative with the transnational identities of many of its inhabitants.
Neither multiculturalism no race are enough to address the crisis of sovereignty, as race theory does not allow to highlight the national configurations of racial exclusion through territorial – spatial forms that strengthens the formation of minorities, that is being undertake by those who regard themselves as guardians of national space. We can then talk about a postnational imaginary that pushes to undo the national categories, “without erasing the nation-state efficacy in shaping contested geographies of belonging within such societies” (384).
The discourses of colonial nationalism have justified violent colonization and segregation within the new nation states. Australia became a nation of white Anglo-Saxon majority, a premise that was embraced with multiculturalist cultural policies.
Not just the questioning of the nativeness of this white majority, done by Australian indigenous peoples but also the movement of capital and people is other factor affecting the stability of national delimitations (ie circular migrations of male Hong Kongese, working in hk and having their families in Australia). Movements are not random, they invite to rethink migration in its relation to colonial legacies, and the class formations configured in space. “Indeed for ongoing streams of working class, unskilled immigrants from Asia to Australia, constraint and confinement are more relevant images than fluidity and flow.” (385) [cfr. Appadurai notion of incarceration of “ethnographic” societies that are always located for the traveling ethnographer who goes there to study them]. Old bases of power relations are reinscribed in new configurations that challenge any notion of multiculturalism as emerging multivoiced [“democratic”] cosmopolitanism. The state mediates the flows as it mediates the claims of indigenous people and minorities. Thus the state is not erased but rather reconfigured, it still remains in the central position producing discourses of race, ethnicity and locality. The concept of difference itself only becomes meaningful in the light of national production of an homogeneous totality [but is it so? Is it only the national “community” or are there other forces shaping identity / difference?]. Post national thinking as imagining and feeling a connection to social formations outside the nation, does not imply the nation’s negation.
Critical race theory focuses too much in the minorities and does not allow for an analysis of the production of whiteness, nor the terms of the construction of inequality. To analyze the nation building problem let us see how even multiculturalism erase conflicts by making them domestic issues and interpreting them as minority /majority tensions, when if we analyze the configuration of the “nation” this is a complex history of diasporas, indigenous peoples, transmigration, coloniality and the making of world system circuits. This perspective then enlarges the epistemic frame of critical analysis. In this process nation building is created as much in the local space of lived experience (material dimension of citizenship)as it is in the discourses of national and transnational politics (symbolic dimension of citizenship). It is in practice in which national belonging is grounded through qualitative determinations.
Among these locale the urban settings are crucial in the production of difference. In it spatial struggles over the creating belonging to particular areas unfold, struggles in which there is never a equal power to shape the urban landscape.