Postnational Identity

What happens to a sense of belonging when national and regional governments, religious organizations, community groups, political parties, and corporations become unstable and incoherent, as they have in these nationalist and postnationalist times? From a richly interdisciplinary perspective, the authors examine notions of citizenship and cultural hybridization, migration and other forms of mobility, displacements and ethnic cleansing, and the nature of national belonging in a world turning ever more fluid, aided by transnational flows of capital, information, people, and ideas.

This book examines concepts of travel in the autobiographies of leading Indian nationalists in order to show how nationalism is grounded in notions of individual selfhood, and how the writing of autobiography, fused with the genre of the travelogue, played a key role in formulating the complex tie between interiority and nationality in South Asia.

Contradictory interpretations have been applied to history-making events that led to the end of the cold war: Václav Havel, using Kierkegaardian terms, called the demise of totalitarianism in east-central Europe an "existential revolution"' (i.e. an awakening of human responsibility, spirit, and reason), while others hailed it as a victory for the "New World Order." Regardless of one's point of view, however, it is clear that the global landscape has been dramatically altered. Where once the competition between capitalism and communism provided a basis for establishing political- and self-identity, today, the destructive forces of nationalist identity and religious and secular fundamentalism are filling the void. In his timely and significant new work, Martin J. Matu¿tík synthesizes the critical social theory of J rgen Habermas with the existentialism of Havel and Søren Kierkegaard to present an alternative to the conceptualization of identity based on nationalism that is stoking the flames of civil wars in Europe and racial and ethnic tensions in eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and the United States. In so doing, he reinvigorates critical social theory, and points the way toward a multicultural, post-national identity and a democracy capable of resisting both imperial consensus and xenophobic backlash. Offering the most extensive examination of Habermas's and Kierkegaard's critiques of nationalist identity available, Postnational Identity dramatically confronts the traditional view of existential philosophy as antisocial and uncritical. This volume shows how Kierkegaardian theory and practice of radically honest communication allows us to rethink the existential in terms of Habermas's communicative action, and vice versa. As the author explains the foundations of his work in the Preface: Critical theory and existential philosophy, brought together in this book, engender two forms of suspicion of the present age. The critical theorist, such as J rgen Habermas, unmasks the forms in which social and cultural life become systematically distorted by the imperatives of political power and economic gain. The existential critic, like Søren Kierkegaard and Václav Havel, is suspicious of the various ways in which individuals deceive themselves or other people. This study aims to integrate Kierkegaard's and Havel's existential critique of motives informing human identity formation with Habermas's critique of the colonialization of fragmented, anomic modern life by systems of power and money....My argument is that existential critique and social critique complement each other and overcome their respective limitations. Organized into three distinct sections, the book begins with a study of individual and group identity in Habermas's work on communicative ethics. This section draws on Habermas's readings of Kant, Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, Mead, and Durkheim. Part Two uses Kierkegaard's existential ethics to broaden Habermas's notion of identity. The argument proceeds from the performative character of existential individuality to Kierkegaard's theory and practice of communication, and, finally, to the regulative community ideal projected in his critique of the present age. In the book's final section, the author addresses the question of identity to the nationalist strife of the present age. Overall, the book sets forth the argument that a move from fundamentalist constructions of identity to postnational, open, and multicultural identity is a critical ideal on which both the existential and socio-political suspicion of the present age converge. Postnational Identity is addressed to the three multicultural audiences that gave it shape: western Europe, eastern Europe, and the United States. One of the first works to treat seriously the existential thought of Václav Havel, the book will hold enormous appeal for students and professionals involved in existential philosophy, critical theory, philosophy, and, more generally, political science, literary theory, communications, and cultural studies.

Does a global economy render the traditional nation-state obsolete? Does globalization threaten democratic life, or offer it new forms of expression? What are the implications of globalization for our understanding of politics and of national and cultural identities? In The Postnational Constellation, the leading German philosopher and social theorist J?rgen Habermas addresses these and other questions. He explores topics such as the historical and political origins of national identity, the catastrophes and achievements of "the long twentieth century," the future of democracy in the wake of the era of the nation-state, the moral and political challenges facing the European Union, and the status of global human rights in the ongoing debate on the sources of cultural identity. In their scope, critical insight, and argumentative clarity, the essays in The Postnational Constellation present a powerful vision of the contemporary political scene and of the challenges and opportunities we face in the new millennium. Those unfamiliar with Habermas's theoretical work will find in this volume a lucid and engaging introduction to one of the world's most influential thinkers. For readers familiar with Habermas's writings, The Postnational Constellation provides an invaluable application of his social and political theories to current political realities.

Postnational Musical Identities gathers interdisciplinary essays that explore how music audiences and markets are imagined in a globalized scenario, how music reflects and reflects upon new understandings of citizenship beyond the nation-state, and how music works as a site of resistance against globalization. 'Hybridity,' 'postnationalism,' 'transnationalism,' 'globalization,' 'diaspora,' and similar buzzwords have not only informed scholarly discourse and analysis of music but also shaped the way musical productions have been marketed worldwide in recent times. While the construction of identities occupies a central position in this context, there are discrepancies between the conceptualization of music as an extremely fluid phenomenon and the traditionally monovalent notion of identity to which it has historically been incorporated. As such, music has always been linked to the construction of regional and national identities. The essays in this collection seek to explore the role of music, networks of music distribution, music markets, music consumption, music production, and music scholarship in the articulation of postnational sites of identification.

Master's Thesis from the year 2006 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Topic: European Union, grade: 1,5, Free University of Berlin, 69 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Globalization and in particular Europeanization have brought about several significant changes in the anarchical system of nation states. More and more non-state actors are entering the international arena and are influencing political outcomes in ways that were unthinkable a few years ago. Consequently the state has to cope with a rapid dissolution of its powers. The rules of state sovereignty, which went basically unchallenged from the 17thuntil the 20thcentury, are now put under great pressure. Traditional concepts of statehood and state sovereignty -that is, the final right of decision- are called into question. Telecommunication and media have long crossed borders, financial markets are globalized, and non-governmental organizations are influencing political agendas. Viewing states as the single most important actors in an anarchical international system today, as has been done in the field of International Relations by neorealists like Waltz in the 1970s and 1980s2, ignores the changes taking place all around us today. As state sovereignty in Europe is increasingly challenged it is perfectly legitimate to wonder about another phenomenon tightly connected to and almost as old as the nation state itself, that is nationalism. The end of nationalism has often been proclaimed alongside with the rise of globalization, transnational activities, multi-culturalism and cosmopolitan ways of life. In the years following the demise of the Nazi regime and then again after the breakup of the Soviet Union, nationalism was even considered a hazard to be avoided. Later, when the former Yugoslavia started to fall apart, this antinationalist discourse gained vehemence. Already in 1955 Erich Fromm said with regards to nationalism: This incestuous fixation not only poinsons the relationship of the individual to the stranger, but to the members of his own clan and to himself. The person who has not freed himself from the ties to blood and soil is not yet fully born as a human being...Nationalism is our form of incest [and] insanity...

The present collection aims at throwing light on transculturality and the identities and masks that people put on, in writing as much as in life, in an age of global levelling and the struggle for a particular place in a postcolonial world. Topics covered include: North African identity in France; cultural citizenship and the Asian diaspora; novels of beur self-identity by Maghrebi immigrants in France; Scottish fiction, Britain and Empire; memory, amnesia, and the re-invention of the past in South Africa, the Caribbean and elsewhere; borders, necrophilia and history in Southern African fiction; encodings of female control; spectating in black documentary cinema; theatre, performance, and the Western presence in Africa; masks, history, transtextuality, and other aspects of Irish poetry and drama; the masking and unmasking of identity in the African-American novel; violence and Titus Andronicus in black Nova Scotian poetry; notions of the national and of indigeneity in contemporary Canadian drama; Native Canadians, space, and the city. Authors and artists treated include: William Boyd; André Brink; George Elliott Clarke; David Dabydeen; Ralph Ellison; Bessie Head; Seamus Heaney; Tomson Highway; Isaac Julien; Daniel David Moses; Paul Muldoon; Albert Murray; Jean Rhys; Sir Walter Scott; Robert Louis Stevenson; Richard Wright; and W.B. Yeats.

Katherine Tonkiss offers a succinct account of constitutional patriotism theory, specifically arguing that it involves a commitment to free migration. She draws on qualitative research to explore the implications of this claim for the dynamics of post-national identity and belonging in local communities.