On Nationalism: Borders and Belonging

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On Nationalism: Borders and Belonging

February 2020

INTRODUCTION

In an era of resurgent and terrifying ethnic and racial nationalism around the world, how can contemporary writers, artists, and thinkers reimagine the concept of nation itself? What does it mean to belong?

Nations are imagined into existence with real-world consequences. As the scholar Hugh Seton-Watson once wrote, “a nation exists when a significant number of people in a community consider themselves to form a nation, or behave as if they formed one.” National sovereignty is a key component of struggles for self-determination around the world; but once embedded in existing nation-states, it can be warped into an ideology of borders, state repression, and racist, religious, and ethnocentric violence. At the present moment, we are facing what Trinh T. Minh-ha calls an “epoch of global fear”: the idea of a globally interconnected future of interchange and national coexistence, widely shared after the end of the Cold War, has given way to talk of walling off people, rights, and resources to reinforce existing allocations of power and privilege.

Is the proper response to this predicament an argument for open borders and the dismantling of the nation-state? A utopian or futurist aesthetic in which nations have ceased to exist in their present form? Or an aesthetic of decolonization, focused on what Viet Thanh Nguyen calls “abolishing the conditions of voicelessness through having the unheard own their share of the means of representation” in a dominant national culture? In 2020 the Racial Imaginary Institute will bring together participants from many fields to address these questions, and more, at events in New York City, Los Angeles, and other locations to be determined.

In an era of resurgent and terrifying ethnic and racial nationalism around the world, how can contemporary writers, artists, and thinkers reimagine the concept of nation itself? What does it mean to belong?

Nations are imagined into existence with real-world consequences. As the scholar Hugh Seton-Watson once wrote, “a nation exists when a significant number of people in a community consider themselves to form a nation, or behave as if they formed one.” National sovereignty is a key component of struggles for self-determination around the world; but once embedded in existing nation-states, it can be warped into an ideology of borders, state repression, and racist, religious, and ethnocentric violence. At the present moment, we are facing what Trinh T. Minh-ha calls an “epoch of global fear”: the idea of a globally interconnected future of interchange and national coexistence, widely shared after the end of the Cold War, has given way to talk of walling off people, rights, and resources to reinforce existing allocations of power and privilege.

Is the proper response to this predicament an argument for open borders and the dismantling of the nation-state? A utopian or futurist aesthetic in which nations have ceased to exist in their present form? Or an aesthetic of decolonization, focused on what Viet Thanh Nguyen calls “abolishing the conditions of voicelessness through having the unheard own their share of the means of representation” in a dominant national culture? In 2020 the Racial Imaginary Institute will bring together participants from many fields to address these questions, and more, at events in New York City, Los Angeles, and other locations to be determined.

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Emily Jacir

Ajay Kurian

Hafizah Geter

Mercedes Teixedo

Emily Jacir

Ajay Kurian

Hafizah Geter

Mercedes Teixedo

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Evie Shockley

Text

studies in antebellum literature, ch. 5
(or, topsy-turvy)

19th-century novels paint
quite the chromatic picture

of america—take the white
whale, say, or the scarlet

letter—but they aren’t
all tarred with the same

brush. for comic contrast
some give us black humor:

national relief projected
onto one dark little head,

in turn projecting, in all
directions, a local choler.

# # #

antebellum lit still tinges
tongues with shady tints.

our language is loaded,
packing heat, a weapon

concealed only, it seems,
from the blissful. who’d

say x used to be a small
college town, but then ten

years ago it just grew like
topsy? i’d say it grew like

kudzu, maybe. or like
wildfire. not like topsy.*

* things that just grew
like topsy: the middle

passage death toll.
the black prison

population. the crop
of negro spirituals. like

crazy. like a weed. like
a motherless child.

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About Evie Shockley

Evie Shockley is the author of several collections of poetry, including semiautomatic, a half-red sea and the new black. She has won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Poetry, the Holmes National Poetry Prize, and fellowships from Cave Canem, MacDowell, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library. She currently is an associate professor of English at Rutgers University New Brunswick.

CREDITS

from (semiautomatic, Wesleyan, 2017).
Used with permission of the author.

Jason Lipeles
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