CHANGING WORLDS CHANGING NATIONS: The Concept of Nation in the Transnational Era

The title of the book, “Changing Worlds, Changing Nations: The Concept of Nation in the Transnational Era”, underlines the transforming status of the discourse on nationalism and transnationalism. The book focuses on how the realities and identities of people are influenced by the changes taking place in the varying dimensions of nation-states.

The term ‘transnationalism’ sounds simplistic, yet it is not so explicit in nature and is apparently enveloped in myriad confounding applications. Transnationalism, as it is largely understood, is a concept that disrupts and scatters the idea of centrality and periphery. It may be properly conceived as a kind of relationship between nation-states, a crossing of national borders, a cultural/political interplay between different national cultures, or a mode of mobility of trans/national subjects. To be more precise, transnationalism means a form of multi-nationalism something that shares cultural connections with more than one nation.

Changing Worlds, Changing Nations consists of thirteen articles that consider the feasibility of nation-states in a transnational era and examine the role of language and culture in seeking a new identity for them. The book focuses on the Indian context as a case study of the thematics but it extends necessarily this nationalistic framework to reflect on other, wider contexts. The hope is that the book as a whole, and the individual articles on their own, would spark some new discussion and analysis of literary works in view of transnationalism. There is an ethical call that needs to be addressed if we are to maintain the relevance of discussions of post-colonial and transnational issues.

Joel Kuortti is Professor of English at the University of Turku, Finland. He is also Adjunct Professor of Contemporary Culture at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. His research interests have been post-colonial theory, Indian literature in English, transnational identity, and cultural studies. His most important publications include The Salman Rushdie Bibliography (1997), Place of the Sacred: The Rhetoric of the Satanic Verses Affair (1997), Fictions to Live In: Narration as an Argument for Fiction in Salman Rushdie’s Novels (1998), Indian Women’s Writing in English: A Bibliography (2002), Tense Past, Tense Present: Women Writing in English (2003), Writing Imagined Diasporas: South Asian Women Reshaping North American Identity (2007), Reconstructing Hybridity: Post-colonial Studies in Transition, co-ed. with J. Nyman (2007).

Om Prakash Dwivedi is Assistant Professor in English at Mody Institute of Technology & Science, Lakshmangarh, Rajasthan (a deemed University). His research papers have appeared in such reputed international journals as Transnational Literature (Australia), Journal of Asia Pacific Studies (USA), DOST (University of Turin, Italy), and The Journal of Contemporary Literature (Allahabad, India). He has also edited two books titled, The Fiction of Amitav Ghosh: An Assessment (2010) and A Spectrum of Indian English Literature (2010), and is presently working on a project, The Other India: Narratives of Terror, Communalism and Violence.