National Identity, Transnationalism and Global Interconnectedness - Term Paper Example

National identity, transnationalism and global interconnectedness National identity is an identity or sense of a person to belong toone nation or state. It regards no citizenship status of the person and is therefore described as difference awareness (Cameron, 2004). Different studies have shown that national identity can result from common points in daily lives of the people such as; their national symbols, national colors, language, national consciousness, culture, blood ties and cuisine (Cameron 2004, p.78). National identity of many citizens of a nation may tend to strengthen somehow when the state or country if affected culturally or economically or if threatened militarily, an example being the case of Poland of which remained under Russia and Austria in the years 1795-1918. The sense of national identity is portrayed as the citizens try to unite with their fellows for mutual protection (Cameron 2004, p.87). Following Rana Dasgupta’s Tokyo Cancelled, we understand national identity, transnationalism and interconnectedness in a special way. He examines how the thought or idea of national belonging strives much to keep going in representations of the offshore (Dasgupta 2009, p. 74). His idea shows that there is difficulty that emerges from the act of trying to present the offshore hence leading to the opening up of new perspectives on matters like global capitalism by focusing on the differential relationship to the country or state. He goes on to explain the nature of this offshore as another form of globalization for the readers understanding of the nation-state as the weak form of contemporary governance (Dasgupta 2009, p. 43). We can suggest that far from coming to be a progressively marginalized form of governance (this being due to development of forces and transnational institutions as well as globalization), the nation-state has the ability to use the offshore as a ground to negotiating between international connectivity and national sovereignty (Dasgupta 2009, p. 75). I agree to the notion that matters such as cosmopolitanism is the antithesis of the state or nation in that, it tries to seek to embody world citizenship as another alternative to suit national belonging. However this issue of cosmopolitanism shows an assumption that states or nations are closed systems of which offers its privileges to the citizens evenly (Dasgupta 2009, p.77). This tendency, precisely, is even clearer in this Rana Dasgupta’s novel Toyko Cancelled, which contains thirteen stories all told over a particular night in an airport by a group of stuck international travelers (Dasgupta 2009, p. 18). The scenery of these stories are very different including Argentina, France, China, Germany, Japan, India, Nigeria ,Turkey, Poland, Ukraine, the United States and the United Kingdom among other places. The nationalities of tellers of the stories are indirect but, as implied, equally wide-ranging (Dasgupta 2009, p. 17). Therefore the text can be seen to characterize a common trend in the contemporary action of which progressively more tries to embody its characters’ capability to move between or change locations and reveals a withdrawing concern for the unity of place(Dasgupta 2009, p.15). While Tokyo Cancelled is understood as being a novel that summarizes the transnational nature of modern-day living, one should importantly note, too, that these individual stories regularly realize this in the course of a demonstration of the offshore. Dasgupta presents stories that absorb Business Process Outsourcing and international call centers and, international shipping and convenience, and export processing zones or international free-trade (Dasgupta 2009, p.14). All of these entail the shift of capital between authority and control in order to try and evade excise and directives. Although the portrayal of these features of up to date capitalism often appear minor to the narrative, upon analysis they are more of central to this narrative organization or structure of the stories they appear (Dasgupta 2009, p.98). For instance, as an example, in the story-The billionaire’s sleep- the eponymous cursed billionaire has chronic insomnia that makes him infertile. In the attempt to get out of this suffering and problem, he illegally gets a cloned kid which generates a series of fantastical proceedings that ends up in a disastrous and terrible conclusion (Dasgupta 2009, p.88). Attributing to this novel’s intermingling of current neoliberalism and fairytale, the narrative is made possible through using of the offshore activity. For instance, this cloning process is off shored in away to avoid regulation and the resource of the wealth of this billionaire is from an Indian call-centre that offers services to American customers (Dasgupta 2009, p.59). In the process where he dresses up his BPO-offshore in the expression of national harmony or solidarity, his factory removes his workers away from the Indian diurnal cycle and practically transports them to the North American day (Dasgupta 2009, p.52). His insomnia becomes the major symbol for his workers ‘displacement socially, which leads the offshore to embody or take a malady form. Similarly, in the story A Rendezvous in Istanbul there happens to be a Ukrainian woman who must take a journey in order to rescue and liberate her lover who is magically held in Marseille in a seized containership (Dasgupta 2009, p.55). However, together with this, there happens to be another sort of magic, whereby the ship owners allegedly based in the United Arab Emirates, disappears mysteriously leaving for unpaid taxes only their bill. As with The billionaire’s sleep, the material of Dasgupta’s contemporary fairytale is sped up by majorly the economic conditions within the offshore where jetty of the nation-state are slackened by the capability of financial capital in avoiding its social responsibilities (Dasgupta 2009, p.75). In A rendezvous in Istanbul, the sailors have to put up with the cost of this evasion given that they are detained by the powers that be in lieu of missing tax-revenue (Dasgupta 2009, p. 90). Potentially the most fascinating exploration of this offshore happens to occurs in the story, the lucky ear cleaner. A young barber here, Xiao song, who is from Hunan Province in the southern China, is convinced by his mother to take a trip to Shenzhen in search of modernity’s well-known lure of streets that are seemingly paved with gold (Dasgupta 2009, p.89). Once he gets in Shenzhen, he is seen by a certain business-owner and is engaged in an employment with more responsibility and liability in large sums of money that is far more beyond his expectations. Suddenly he inducts into the way that laws of money shapes people, places, and things, he finds himself bright enough to make sense of the city in its spread of rocketing towers that are easily readable, just like a simple bar graph that its unwritten labels and axes were each day becoming more intuitive and obvious (Dasgupta 2009, p. 77). The picture of the Shenzhen townscape as money at its most theoretical, suggests that Xiaosong’s introduction into global capitalism already has enabled him to interpret and translate place into value. What is most fascinating about this short story is the way it demonstrates or shows how the offshore changes the surface and appearance of the nation (Dasgupta 2009, p. 67). This is most apparent in the illustration of Xiaosong’s relocation to urban from rural China which is given in terms more frequently associated and connected with international migration. As he travels between Hunan and Shenzhen he is smuggled as cargo in such ways that resembles the circumstances of international migration clearly, under existing neoliberalism (Dasgupta 2009, p. 92). However more suggestively, he is castigated by his employer for carelessly walking around without papers and goes on to secure him an impermanent residence permit to make certain he does not get captured hence ending up in a repatriation centre or custody. This makes it clear that the scale of this nation is reconfigured in order to be similar to the evidently external migration and movement between nations (Dasgupta 2009, p. 89). It is necessary to get back to the thought of the offshore as the divergence of the state and as well as to recognize its suggestion for Shenzhen as being special economic zone (Appadurai 1996, p.52). Cosmopolitanism and Transnationalism are two notions that seem popular in up to date journalistic and scholarly discourses everywhere in the world currently. Both of them have no definition that can be accepted universally even though different explanations and descriptions may seem to refer to them hence making them challenged in the literature (Appadurai 1996, p. 41). Cosmopolitanism has before been used and described as a new ethnic and moral standpoint appropriate for 21st-century international or global life; even though it has as well been criticized as a form of manifestation of the state of mind of the upper and middle classes lifestyles (Appadurai 1996, p.53). The rising force of transnational connections raises issues that have been discussed in this essay such as; can transnationalism bring greater heights of cosmopolitanism? Is localism a contradiction of both these and such processes (Keller 2008, p. 51)? Current discussions on such topics often tend to suggest a confirmatory answer to questions like these (Keller 2008, p. 38). Transnationalism was first connected to the modern and recent immigrant allies, even though the concept may have been stretched to include more and other groups of people, as well as a whole range of activities across the borders. This essay may be an input towards gaining theoretical clearness with regards to the act of putting into concepts (and differentiating between) cosmopolitanism and transnationalism (Keller 2008, p. 39). My dispute is that these transnational experiences has to be visualized as involving sub-levels ranging from the creation of the transnational social spaces up to the creation of transnational societies or communities. Therefore, the connection between cosmopolitanism and the transnationalism’s is less frank than what it seems at a first glance (Keller 2008, p.32). The realism of internal globalization is what’s responsible for the change of the modern people’s everyday lives disregarding whether they are transnational or they are not (Conell 2013, p.69). The importance of this global interconnectedness as a significant component for social sciences in the 21st century has been broadly appreciated as well as recognized in many different literatures (Conell 2013, p. 77). Globalization helps in promoting the conception of the transnational social spaces and also helps in reconfiguring objects of enquiry of the sociologists – up till then considered as the foundation or institution of the national society (Buerk 2006, p. 55). However, there are consequences of the increased Mobility that are markedly dissimilar and unlike between the upper and middle classes in the highly developed industrialized countries and the middle classes in the typically peripheral or minor societies that constitutes to make up the majority of the population in the world (Conell 2013, p.66). Images of tourists and tramps can be used to emphasize or draw attention to the manner that social mobility across the borders takes action as a fresh social or cultural capital form that preserves new and latest partition among individuals and their classes (Buerk 2006, p.54). The theoretical appearance of this statement is to be set up in the current description of people as transnational or cosmopolitan. In contemporary discussions, the description of cosmopolitanism as an aesthetic and intellectual posture of openness towards opposing cultural experiences is only understood as a property of the individuals that possess adequate reflexive cultural proficiencies that enables them to contrive within these new meaning systems (Buerk 2006, p.42). Ordinary people – ranging from the refugees, exiles or migrant workers – do not essentially possess these intellectual and cultural tendencies. The constituents of the latter group are described as the people that are out of place, i.e. transnational people (Buerk 2006, p. 47). In contrast, it can be argued that even the working-class refugees (immigrants) are able to produce and express working class cosmopolitanism, which is an interpretation that challenges the theoretical relations among class, cosmopolitanism and transnational mobility (Portes 1999). All of this can strongly suggest the importance of describing clearly, the link or connection between transnationalism and cosmopolitanism. These ideas can be interpreted and applied with reference to certain specific groups of individuals, hence suggesting not only a social reality or certainty, but also an involvement between status, class, and ethnicity or race, on one hand, and on the other, linguistic use (Portes 1999). Another suggestion may be brought forward by the fact that the labels of cosmopolitan and transnational are very far from just innocent descriptions of a real situation. On the contrary again, cultural tradition and national origin play a significant role in the task of these labels (Auge 1995, p.66). The disjuncture between reality and image that underlies the layperson’s judgment about whoever looks like a transnational or trans migrant tend to reveal an unwanted yet an obvious and clear complexity – and this complexity is what is explored here (Portes 1999). Representing labels, all these terms are in use selectively with regard to those people belonging to different classes and different ethnic and racial backgrounds (Auge 1995, p.56). The relationship between the interruption or disruption of national space and variations within the nation can also be the central to my final and concluding text for discussion (Portes 1999). This essay can be seen as to confront and challenge the triumphalism dream of India as a being a front-runner in this twenty first century universal or global trade in the course of its description of nations that seem as divided amid those who profit from development and the ones that do not profit (Auge 1995, p.44). This is to a degree accomplished through a portrayal of the nation’s rural communities that tend to highlight the continuing or ongoing advantage of traditional land-owning best (Portes 1999). Notably, in its investigation of the nation’s new economy and cutback, the novel also regularly alludes, if somewhat seemingly, to this role played in sustaining the differences and inequalities between the different castes, or classes, of the nation. For instance, we can draw a link directly between the international economics and the political corruption of politics regionally (Portes 1999). Bibliography Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Auge, M. (1995). Non-places: introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity. New York: Verso Books. Buerk, R. (2006, January 26). Villagers left in limbo byborder fence. Retrieved April 23, 2014, from news.bbc.co.uk Cameron, A. (2004). The Imagined Economies of Globalization. London: Sage. Conell, L. (2013). Offshore cosmopolitanism. Open Arts Journal(1), 60-68. Dasgupta, R. (2009). Tokyo Cancelled. New York : HarperCollins publishers. Portes, A. (1999). Conclusion: Towards a new world- the origins and effects of trans-national activities. Retrieved April 2014, from www.unesco.org Trans-nationalism. (2008). Keller, F. Retrieved January 24, 2014, from www.unesco.org Read More