Transnationalism: Issues and Perspectives

Abstract

Well-known social scientist and humanist from USA, Latin America and Spain, such as Saskia Sassen, García Canclini or Monsivais, worked together at an international conference held in Los Angeles (Cal.) in order to make a compelling case for the transnational as an operative analytical category. Their essays, collected in this volume, consider how cultural studies, political analysis, urban studies and the study of migrations change when using a sort of a transnational perspective, that goes beyond the economic determinism underlying the liberal concept of “globalization” and the more critical of “mundialization”. After an introduction that carves out a scientific space for a transnational frame of reference and clarifies its political dimensions, the book deals with three main issues: the interaction of global (supra-national) and local (infra-national) forces in global cities, post-metropolis and other post-national spaces; a critical consideration of current use of modern political discourse, from the oxymoronic notion of “world citizenship” to the ambivalent realities of “human rights”; and how transnational forces and scapes subvert collective imaginaries, figurations, identities and memories that formed the cultural core of nation(alism)