Nationalism has again consolidated itself at the centre of European politics. Common here is the compulsion to place the bulk of a society’s challenges at the door of racialised minority communities. These are the expendable peoples who are rendered, yet again, ‘less-than-human’. It remains particularly frustrating that some who propagate for a left alternative also seem wedded to the nation-in asserting control over migration, over security, and over how we imagine our everyday sense of community. Amidst this dispiriting replaying of history, I contend that dissenting scripts arise in the working class multicultures still available. These formations continue to rehearse hopeful practises of shared life less prone to modernity’s suffocating emphasis on communitarian conceptions of space, culture and politics.
This lecture was held as part of the 2019 Holberg Symposium: "From Double Consciousness to Planetary Humanism" in honour of Holberg Laureate Paul Gilroy.
BIOGRAPHY
Sivamohan Valluvan is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick. He previously studied at the University of Manchester and Stockholm University. His latest work is the 2019 monograph The Clamour of Nationalism, published with Manchester University Press.