Nandita Sharma discusses 'Home Rule' with Joseph Nevins | April 2, 2020

Co-sponsored by Duke University Press

During this time of a global pandemic, the division of our world into separate, nationally sovereign states is proving to be deadly. Instead of having a globally organized response to Covid-19, each nation-state is self-isolating with the demonstrably false claim that shutting down national borders will keep its citizens safe. However, efforts to stop the entry of non-nationals has done more to deflect attention away from the failures of national governments than to expand health and social policies that would save lives.

Nandita Sharma’s new book, Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants (Duke University Press, 2020), has something to say about the dangers and follies of national sovereignty. Far from liberating us, Sharma argues that a world of national sovereigns (and the continuous struggle for national sovereignty by those without it) has created greater disparities in wealth, power, peace, and life – both within any “national community” and across the international system of nation-states. The growing support for nationalism across the world, and across the left-right political spectrum, Sharma argues, has worked to harden criteria for “national belonging,” shrink criteria for political membership, and expand practices of expropriation and exploitation. In a world of nation-states, we have truly created a wider “social distance” between Us and Them.

In the midst of this global crisis, we see two diverging responses. One is to hunker down into normalized nationalisms and racisms by seeing the virus as a “foreign invader” legitimizing the further fortification of borders. The other response is to call for greater social solidarity, as seen in calls for income relief, healthcare for all, and moratoriums on evictions and foreclosures. A small section of those calling for these measures demand a more worldly solidarity, one that truly includes us all.

In this online discussion, Joseph Nevins (Vassar College) will join Nandita Sharma in a discussion about how nationalisms and racisms are manifest in the official responses to the global Covid-19 pandemic. Rejecting such politics, they will discuss the necessity of placing global solidarity at the center of our analyses and actions.

******

Nandita Sharma is Professor of Racism, Migration and Transnationalism in the Department of Sociology at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. She is the author of Home Economics: Nationalism and the Making of 'Migrant Workers' in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2006) and Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants (Duke University Press, 2020).

Joseph Nevins teaches geography at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. Among his books are Dying to Live: A Story of U.S. Immigration in an Age of Global Apartheid (City Lights Books, 2008); Operation Gatekeeper and Beyond: The War on “Illegals” and the Remaking of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary (Routledge, 2010); and (co-authored with Suren Moodliar and Eleni Macrakis) A People’s Guide to Greater Boston (University of California Press, forthcoming in 2020).