What happens to the idea of a nation when people, money, media and cultural identities no longer remain neatly inside national borders?

Westwood and Phizacklea approach transnationalism as a problem of lived attachment: how people make homes, affiliations and political identities while moving between places and systems that continue to insist on national belonging.

Its case studies travel through Indigenous politics and popular culture in Latin America, Latino/a life in the United States, migration and diaspora, media circulation, and the global diamond trade between Britain, India and elsewhere. The authors are particularly interested in the tension between mobility and rootedness: borders become more permeable for capital, commodities and some people, while nationality, ethnicity and citizenship remain extremely consequential for others. Their idea of a “politics of belonging” is therefore not the cosy language the phrase can suggest; belonging is something produced, contested, represented and unequally granted. 

Published at the turn of the millennium, this sits in a particularly interesting moment in migration and cultural studies: globalisation had become the dominant explanatory frame, but before social media, platform economies and the contemporary border-security regime radically complicated what cross-border life looked like. It remains useful precisely because it asks what happens when the nation persists even as everyday life increasingly exceeds it.

Routledge, London, 2000. First edition. Paperback. 192 pages. Bibliographical references and index. Light shelf and edge wear to covers, with minor handling marks; internally clean and sound. Very good condition.