I agree for the most part, Ernesto.
I do find the idea of thinking about transnational flows useful for thinking about our current world, though. For example, Appadurai's 5 "scapes" are easy to understand by students and have enough meat in them to generate good conversations among seasoned thinkers.
The part I agree with you on is the most is the fact that nationality and the nation are here to stay for now. In digital humanities we have many flows, but also an overwhelming number of national memory projects. If the nation is imagined through it's media, digital archives are certainly contributing. This is the case of the US, and happens in the form of funding and institutional support for projects. I would hazard that two sorts of general "genres" have thrived: a canonical one centered on the history of the English language and European art; and one that we could describe as the soft multicultural narratives of modern liberals. These are gross generalizations, of course, but lacking evidence to the contrary...
Going back to freezing now, A.
On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 12:47 PM, Ernesto Priego efpriego@gmail.com wrote:
Hello Alex, all,
Thanks for sharing this post with the list. I read it yesterday and I thought it was a very interesting post. The questions Barrett asks at the end are relevant.
However, I hope you don't mind a sincere and personal reply inspired by the emotions and thoughts that reading this article provoked in me over the last few hours and which I haven't been able to express anywhere else. Below are just some disjointed ideas.
I find concepts such as "post-national" really troublesome. On a personal and political level the concept annoys me; it upsets me. What are the pre-required affordances for "post-nationalism"? What is really meant by this? (and with this question I don't mean "let's read closely the key authors who have used this terms to find out how to understand the term properly"). It seems to me that more than ever the concept and reality of Nation (the country where one was born and one has a identification document from) imposes very concrete conditions that in my opinion render the idea of post-nation as Utopianism.
As someone who has travelled (in a very limited scale) with a Mexican passport for some 20 years, I have never been in a situation in which I can say that the concept of "Nation" has been left behind. On arrival to other countries, my wife, colleagues, friends go through a queue which is different than mine. Often, they have to wait for me to be finally allowed in. Last year in Vancouver, I was the only passenger from the whole plane who had to go through two different border checks including an extended interrogation that was triggered by the words "Mexican academic".
In the digial sphere, I continuously witness the consolidation of localisms, parochialisms and a general lack of interest in what happens outside "the Developed World". Everyday I grow more and more disappointed at how the "World Wide Web" is not really international nor global nor, er, "postnational".
I have gradually lost interest in much of the theory that as a young student fascinated me (this includes postcolonialism). I think there is an implicit symbolic violence in the proliferation and popularity of terms that really do not mean much when contrasted to the reality of millions, not only stateless persons and refugees, but also regular people of all walks of life and social classes who are denied freedom of transit and other human rights precisely because of their nationality. Post-national DH? Post-national subjectivities? I doubt it very, very much. Maybe for a happy few, or for the citizens of nations whose passports are welcome by treatises around the world, but not for millions of others.
Thanks for reading.
Best,
Ernesto
*Dr Ernesto Priego*Lecturer in Library Science Acting Course Director, MSc/MA Electronic Publishing, City University London
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On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 5:01 PM, Alex Gil colibri.alex@gmail.com wrote:
Hi all,
Here's a post by Paul Barrett which offers some thoughts on the (possible) role of the nation in DH. I hope you find it useful:
http://dhpoco.org/blog/2014/01/20/where-is-the-nation-in-postcolonial-digita...
My hellos from cold NYC, A.
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