Transnational Forms Research Articles

National, Transnational or Cosmopolitan? Local Immigrant Organisations

This article examines how features of theoretical perspectives on transnationalism and cosmopolitanism can be found in categories that immigrant organisations use to describe their own activities. The empirical basis is the written statutes of 133 local membership-based immigrant organisations in Oslo. The article finds that the organisations mainly use national categories and that national belonging is formulated in terms of cultural activities. The use of national categories is, however, combined with many organisations' aims to have transnational ties and activities along with features of cosmopolitan consciousness. Three main patterns emerge. Firstly, while all organisations aim to arrange cultural activities among their members living in Oslo, only a few organisations formulate aims of having a comprehensive transnational practice. Secondly, most organisations aim to combine either various forms of transnationalism and/or features of cosmopolitanism with efforts to integrate their members into Norwegian society, while there is hardly any local identity. Thirdly, the concept of cosmopolitanism is not mentioned by any organisation, although around 40 per cent of them refer to features of cosmopolitanism.

Economic Transnationalism and its Ambiguities: The Case of Romanian Migration to Italy

AbstractTaking the case of migratory flows between Romania and Italy as a case study, this article investigates the ways in which spaces of economic transnationalism emerge and are reproduced over time. While the article finds that the role of the state in regulating the flow of money, people and goods across borders remains significant, it nevertheless provides evidence that state authority is systematically challenged by private actors even in the case of migration phenomena with a remarkably short history such as that of Romanians in Italy. Particularly interesting in this respect are labor recruiting networks in which informal headhunter operations, public officials and mobile manufacturing firms interact in surprising ways. While economic forms of transnationalism are the main focus of this investigation, the ways in which transnational capital and labor flows facilitated the symbolic reaffirmation of social institutions in the sending locality are also investigated.

Benchmarking International, Transnational, and Private Governance in the Forest Sector

The question of how to overcome the democratic deficits of global forms of governance has led to a pretentious academic debate. To proceed in theory-building, we need to assign systematically the theory-driven assumptions on legitimate forms of governance beyond the nation-state with the various, already observable forms of global governance. Thereto, the paper is aiming at a systematic comparative appraisal of the legitimatory quality of different patterns of governance by applying suitable indicators for their measurement. The innovative potential of this paper is the application of a structured, focused comparison that interconnects a multi-dimensional concept of legitimacy (input-, throughput- and outputdimension) with the triad of international, transnational and private forms of governance. As far as the chosen indicators show a legitimizing effect, they should serve as a standard for upcoming research studies and, by this, contribute to further systematization of studies on global governance. At least, the analysis of the constitutive criteria of cross-border governance arrangements in a legitimacy-based theoretical perspective shall also help to identify their discrete potential for legitimacy and indicate ways for their institutional safeguard and transformation to other arrangements. The conceptual outline will be completed by a case study on forest governance.

Diasporic Politics, Transnational Media Circulation, and the Multifocality of Côte d'Ivoire

AbstractThis article proposes a framework of “multifocality” to think about the role of place within the national political cultures of postcolonies with active migrant and diasporic communities abroad. I build my argument on an ethnographic exploration of political activism among networks of Ivorians living in North America, Europe, and Africa during the last twelve years of civil strife in Côte d'Ivoire, West Africa. Tracing media circulation and political party organizing within and across several continents, I show how the political culture of the Ivorian nation arises, exists, and is negotiated within a number of non‐connected places (multiple foci) both within and beyond the official territory of the nation‐state. Activists and government officials travel to, live in, and shape sites within a number of nation‐state territories in order to be in the middle of Ivorian politics. My analysis underscores the need for more theoretical attention to the specific and often uneven ways in which the political structures of many postcolonies are being re‐territorialized through transnational forms of public culture. The recent conflict in Côte d'Ivoire—a conflict centered around questions of national belonging based on people's relationships with the national territory—offers a particularly interesting case study through which to think about relationships between national political communities and nation‐state territories. As participants mobilize resources in certain locations while dodging place‐based limitations of others, the multifocality of Ivorian political discourse emerges as key to its negotiation.

Public Debates, Integration Models, and Transnationalism in Western Europe

Do integration models exist beyond legal regulations? Do they shape public debates—or are these debates transnational in nature, and more influenced by international actors and liberal norms? To answer these questions, I investigated various political actors’ positions and arguments in the context of select issues related to integration and immigration. Quantitative media data spanning a period from 1999 to 2006 were used to analyze debates in six Western European countries. Results suggest that integration models do not substantively influence the national debates in question. No form of direct transnationalism is apparent, either; foreign and international actors play a negligible role in national debates. However, forms of indirect transnationalism can be observed; political actors frequently resort to moral-universalist arguments in order to back their positions.

Fishing in muddy waters: Exploring the conditions for effective governance of fisheries and aquaculture

Over the past fifteen years a number of transnational certification and labeling schemes have emerged with the aim to foster sustainable fisheries and aquaculture practices worldwide. Despite notable successes in the uptake and implementation of these standards, few measurable environmental improvements have been achieved on a global scale to date. This paper explores the conditions for effective governance taking into account external and internal attributes of the relevant rule-setting organizations. The analysis provided in this paper is situated in a broader debate regarding the effectiveness of transnational forms of governance and thereby contributes to recent efforts to build clearer theoretical propositions on the basis of more nuanced theoretically and empirically informed analyses.

Introduction: the Olympic Flame Relay. Local knowledges of a global ritual form

This article introduces and contextualizes an anthropological study of the Olympic Flame Relay across 25 years, from Los Angeles 1984 through the aftermath of Beijing, punctuated by the announcement by the International Olympic Committee Executive Board in March 2009, that there would be no more global relays. This extended ethnological research offers a rare case study of continuity and change in a leading transnational and transcultural ritual form. It also further exposes the managerial revolution, with its characteristic language of ‘world's best practice,’ that has succeeded the commercial revolution in international Olympic affairs. Analysis of the transnational flow of Olympic operations management offers important corrections to much existing globalization theory, demonstrating both how powerful and how culturally and politically parochial world's best practices can turn out to be. Finally, this extended case study offers a further development of the author's theoretical work on complex cultural performance systems, in particular the dialectic between the performative genres of ritual and spectacle that indexes the wider Olympic Movement's struggle to preserve itself from the successes of the Olympic sports industry.

Human rights and the Beijing Olympics: imagined global community and the transnational public sphere1

The Olympic Games are increasingly used by non-governmental organizations to demand transnational forms of accountability from public authorities. This article assesses the effectiveness of transnational public opinion surrounding the Beijing 2008 Olympics, when the pressure of Western public opinion was exerted upon the government of the world's most populous non-Western nation to improve its human rights record. Utilizing the concepts of 'imagined global community' and 'transnational public sphere', it finds that the Olympic Games had helped to call into existence a transnational public that ran up against the obstacle posed by the incomplete formation of supra-national forms of governance. The International Olympic Committee, a non-governmental organization, was a weak substitute. Because of the strong desire of Chinese people to take part in transnational deliberations, the article concludes with optimism about the potential of transnational public spheres that include Chinese people to develop toward more effective forms of transnational governance. But the IOC must strengthen the voice of its non-Western members, and Western interlocutors, including the media, must accept their share of the responsibility for creating the conditions for egalitarian dialogue.

Other Atlantics:

Other Atlantics:

Adolescent Literacy: Looking Back and Moving Forward in the Global Flow

AbstractAwaiting abstract

Nations of Nothing But Poetry: Modernism, Transnationalism, and Synthetic Vernacular Writing (review)

Matthew Hart. 2010. Nations of Nothing But Poetry: Modernism, Transnationalism, and Synthetic Vernacular Writing. New York: Oxford University Press. $55.00 hc. 256 pp.Matthew Hart's Nations of Nothing But Poetry is first volume in new Oxford series Literature and Culture to focus primarily on poetry and to engage with issues of transnationalism. Hart's book, and Oxford series more generally, are representative of what Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz have called the New Modernist Studies. Two of most distinctive features of this methodological shiftin study of modernism are an emphasis on approaching literary objects and languages from beyond confines of nation state and a new openness to literature's engagement with mass media. Much of intellectual energy of Hart's book derives from ambitious and elegant way it conceives of modernism as a transnational formation. Hart's specific intervention in field rests on his claim that modernist vernacular poetry-often associated with regional or local-is in fact deeply aware of its position within multinational and global networks of language, culture, and political power.In terms of its desire to sustain a rigorously comparative angle of vision, Hart's book succeeds at almost every turn. Hart builds on work of Anita Patterson, Brent Hayes Edwards, and Charles Pollard to call our attention to a unique constellation of vernacular poets from Scotland, United States, Africa, and Caribbean who are nonetheless engaged in a common intellectual project. The central figures discussed in Nations of Nothing But Poetry are Hugh MacDiarmid, Basil Bunting, Kamau Brathwaite, Melvin B. Tolson, Harryette Mullen, and Mina Loy, though W. H. Auden, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot also make significant cameos. Such an eclectic list of poets indicates synoptic nature of Hart's interests and surprising nature of his claims about relationships across national and temporal boundaries. His ambition is nothing less than an account of twentieth-century vernacular poetry as a social force across globe.Fittingly enough for a book concerned with acts of synthesis, Nations of Nothing But Poetry fuses theoretical models from across several disciplines. Hart draws upon major currents in modernist and postcolonial studies: theories of vernacular and minor literature, Afro-modernity, and arguments about diasporic and world literature. The writings of philosophical critics of political power-Giorgio Agamben, Etienne Balibar, Michel Foucault, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, David Harvey, Fredric Jameson-as well as leading theorists of postcolonial and diasporic thought-K. Anthony Appiah, Homi Bhabha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Frantz Fanon, Dilip Gaonkar, Simon Gikandi, Paul Gilroy, Edouard Glissant, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak-are cited frequently and with great precision in this book. Unlike some academic studies with a prominent theoretical armature, Hart also has a good ear for vernacular. He is a careful close reader, offering nuanced and pointed remarks about lexical and formal elements of individual lines of poetry. His discussion of Pound's translation of Women of Trachis and Mullen's Muse & Drudge were particularly insightful to this reader, casting those works in an entirely new light.While attentive to details of poetic form, Nations of Nothing But Poetry persistently focuses its attention on relation between different scales and temporalities of social analysis. Hart conceives this book not as a series of commentaries on diverse poets across globe, but rather as a justification for fresh conceptual frameworks that can attend to experience of 'alternative modernities.' He argues that uneven economic, spatial, and temporal developments of modern life must be understood without reference to a single norm (historically derived from West). For this reason, category of 'nation' receives extended critical treatment in Hart's analysis. …

Comparison and connection in the study of Afro-Latin America

This essay examines the relationship between comparison – as a scholarly method and social practice – and the study of transnationalism and diaspora. Attention to transnational and diasporic processes forces us to critically reassess comparison as a scholarly method. However, rather than abandon comparison, scholars interested in transnationalism and diaspora need to recognize the centrality of comparison to transnational encounters and diasporic identity formations. Drawing on the case of the transnational world of the Garifuna between the United States and Honduras, the essay highlights the importance of comparing Garifuna identity formations in both locations in order to understand their multiple relationships to the African (or black) diaspora, and the importance of their own practices of comparison in helping to produce diasporic identities. Paying attention to how social agents make comparisons within specific contexts can provide a fruitful path of inquiry for studies of transnationalism and diaspora.

The participatory web as space for 'mediated' and 'transnational' citizenships: UK asylum seekers/refugees' 'deterritorialisation' of identity, political participation and claims making

This article draws from an empirical study conducted among asylum seekers/refugees residing in Scotland, the UK, to demonstrate that the participatory web (or Web 2.0) provides spaces for migrants' mediated and transnational citizenships. It considers how these citizenship formations are realised through online deliberation, political mobilisation, networking and claims making for social, cultural and political recognition and human rights. Therefore, the article has four subtexts that offer insights into the role played by the participatory web in migrants' mediated and transnational citizenship formations in the West. First, the participatory web offers possibilities for facilitating asylum seekers/refugees' mediated politics and inclusion into some democratic processes of the host country. Second, by using the web for networking, political mobilisation and cultural production, asylum seekers/refugees demonstrate a belonging to and identification with their homelands. Third, this kind of mediated politics, multiple belongings and identities contests the cultural homogeneity and territorial construction of the state. Fourth, the mediated processes demonstrate the intersection between mediated citizenship and transnational citizenship. The article is an attempt to provide an empirically grounded cultural approach in understanding the role of new media technology in non–citizens' mediated citizenship in multicultural democracies.

Transnational allegory/transnational history: Se sei vivo spara/Django Kill … If You Live, Shoot!

ABSTRACTThis article explores how films can offer diverse international audiences a transnational allegory that speaks to their shared experiences of a global historical situation, such as the Cold War. Giulio Questi's bizarre western Se sei vivo spara/Django Kill… If You Live, Shoot! (1967) is taken as a case study. This film provides a suggestive example of how spaghetti westerns, which are renowned for circulating internationally during the Cold War, offered narratives that resonated with audiences experiencing political turmoil and violent conflict during this historical period. Drawing on Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's idea of ‘multitude’, Django Kill is seen to provide a transnational form of history for geographically dispersed people around the world (even if they do not share the common cultural affinities that characterise, say, a diaspora), whose lives are influenced by similar ideological and material conditions.

The Domestic Face of Globalization

This article applies a global perspective to immigration in the United States, focusing in particular on law’s role in the integration of immigrants into U.S. society. The global perspective illuminates the relationship of immigration to other forms of transnationalism, as well as to the situation of non-immigrant minorities and the working poor. We review the history of immigration law in the United States as well as the main elements of current debate. Drawing on the Constitution’s guarantees of equal protection, as well as the preemption doctrine, we suggest specific ways in which immigration law might optimally evolve in the future. While information and communication technology are not discussed at length in the paper, we suggest the context in which media pluralism is relevant to a multicultural society.

Borders and 'Belongers': Transnational Identities, Border Security, and Cross-Border Socio-Economic Integration in the United States Borderlands with Canada and the British Virgin Islands

This paper comparatively analyzes processes of contemporary borderlands identity formation in the context of reinforced security and socio-economic integration in the cross-border regions of the Pacific Northwest and the Virgin Islands. Interviews and surveys of stakeholders reveal how narratives of belonging enable the articulation of a pluralist borderlands identity even in the context of re-aligned border security and socio-economic cross-border integration. The asymmetry in the relationships between the United States and its neighbors — Canada and the Virgin Islands — is as integral to security and integration as to expressions of borderlands identity. While notions of belonging in these cross-border regions remain in transition, expressions of localism are already creating a baseline for a pluralist version of transnational identity formation and culture. A tentative official movement beyond dominant notions of US security, as focused on its borders with Mexico and Canada, toward more flexible conceptualizations of perimeter security that have characterized the Virgin Islands, may also assist in the formation of such 'new regionalisms' and transnational borderlands identities.

The Domestic Face of Globalization: Law’s Role in the Integration of Immigrants in the United States

This article applies a global perspective to immigration in the United States, focusing in particular on law’s role in the integration of immigrants into U.S. society. The global perspective illuminates the relationship of immigration to other forms of transnationalism, as well as to the situation of non-immigrant minorities and the working poor. We review the history of immigration law in the United States as well as the main elements of current debate. Drawing on the Constitution’s guarantees of equal protection, as well as the preemption doctrine, we suggest specific ways in which immigration law might optimally evolve in the future. While communications and communications technology are not discussed at length in the paper, we suggest the context in which media pluralism is relevant to a multicultural society.

Conclusion: From Rule of Law Promotion to Rule of Law Dynamics

In The Dynamics of Rule of Law in an Era of International and Transnational Governance (forthcoming Cambridge University Press, 2012), we presented a new analytical framework for understanding developments in the rule of law field, describing and assessing the interrelated processes of rule of law promotion, diffusion and conversion. In this concluding chapter, we address the following issues, taking up in turn rule of law promotion, diffusion and conversion, and summarizing for each the main developments, their causes, and key issues for further research. Have the major actors in the rule of law field, including the “great powers” and international organisations, altered their strategies, programs and practices to reflect the shift to new levels and new forms of governance? Do rule of standards apply to new international and transnational forms of regulation? Should they be modified to fit the different context? Can the interactions between national and international levels be structured so that they do not become a new source of rule of law violation? Does international law provide a clear and acceptable set of standards that can form a common baseline for rule of law promotion both in states and for new forms of governance? And how does rule of law promotion, whether or not based on standards of international law, cope with the wide variety of forms of resistance from the targets of rule of law promotion?

Cultural Oxymora

This article provides a close reading of the Israeli version of the Idol format. Using the concept “cultural oxymora,” contradictions that serve to negotiate meanings, the analysis examines the case through six lenses: pluralism (stressing the institutionalized pluralism by auditioning in Israeli and Jewish communities outside the country), performance (songs that are associated with the Jewish State’s bereavement rituals while adding a counterhegemonic vocal presentation), patriotism (nationalism and the military in the transnational format), periphery (exposing its ethnic richness while using stereotypes), participation (manufacturing consumers’ “democratic” election), and promotion (national media event of coronation with ordinary characteristics). The conclusions suggest that cultural oxymora may explain the appeal of reality TV since they support a complex inclusive interpretation of the shows that maintain a dialogue between neo-Marxist readings, emphasizing a critical view on the show’s commercial-hegemonic structure, on one hand, and reception-centered readings, stressing audiences’ gratifications and pleasures, on the other.

Constructing Transnational and Virtual Ethnic Identities: A Study of the Discourse and Networks of Ethnic Student Organisations in the USA and UK

This paper draws on the experiences of Indian-origin groups in the USA and UK to examine transnational forms of ethnicity. It focuses specifically on ethnic organisations that are engaged in constructing transnational ethnic identities, using religion as a means for constructing new, virtually linked communities. Based on web-based data of Hindu student groups in the USA and UK, this study examines transnational ethnic identities these groups deploy on their websites, and to what extent these are similar across the USA and UK. As Hinduism is a religion with no uniform sets of practices (chosen religious texts, practices and beliefs are culturally, regionally and family dependent), it provides a good basis for examining whether the identities constructed by these groups are transnational, that is, the same elements are emphasised by groups in the two countries to construct ethnic identities that transcend the specificities of the national and local contexts. It also examines the structure of links between websites to show whether websites that appear to be nation-specific are actually linked to each other to create a transnational network. The findings of this study suggest that the study of transnationalism needs to be extended beyond the current focus on ‘home’ and ‘host’ countries to consider what happens in multiple ‘host’ countries. It also shows that organised groups promote homogenised versions of virtual ethnicity as they build transnational networks across countries.