There is no Revolutionary Nationalism: A Conversation with Nandita Sharma

Speaker: Professor Nandita Sharma, University of Hawai‘i at Manoa
Chairs: Ida Roland Birkvard, Queen Mary University of London and Alex Stoffel, Queen Mary University of London

Mobile People: Mobility as a way of life is a Leverhulme Trust Doctoral Scholarship programme at Queen Mary University of London, Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences and School of Politics and International Relations.

In Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants (2020), Nandita Sharma traces the emergence of ‘the postcolonial new world order’ arguing that the universalisation of the nation state has led to the hardening of borders and an historically unprecedented extension of capital into everyday life. Provocatively, Sharma argues that we must understand the anti-colonial national liberation movements of the postwar period as complicit in the construction of this new world order, in turn unsettling the ‘critical’ vocabulary of research on borders, migration, and forms of colonialism.

To discuss her critique of the ostensibly progressive distinction between ‘bad’ nationalism in the colonial core and the ‘good’ nationalism of the colonial periphery, Sharma is joined by Leverhulme Trust Doctorial Scholars Alex Stoffel and Ida Roland Birkvad.



Nandita Sharma is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Hawai’I at Mānoa. Sharma’s research and activism centres around issues related to migration, migrant labor, nation-state power, ideologies of racism, sexism, and nationalism, processes of identification and self-understanding, and social movements for justice. 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).