A postmodern mandala? Moving beyond methodological nationalism

Abstract

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All at sea? Using seaborne mobilities to decolonialise national narratives in maritime museums

“…Mobilities range across time and space, history, society, politics and culture (Kuusisto-Arponen 2009, 550). In turn, the Hypersea's multidimensional, endlessly mutable watery mobility poses a conceptual and analytical challenge to static, territorialised national narratives (Sutherland 2016). Seaborne perspectives are not new.…”

“…In a survey of Atlantic history, Alison Games (2006, 744) suggests that it is the seascape's 'political neutrality that encouraged scholars seeking to escape the restrictions of the nation-state to move toward the borderless world of the Atlantic […] by privileging interactions and comparisons and by rejecting nationalism altogether for new analytic categories.' In other words, it is only by decolonialising and stepping outside methodological nationalism -an approach that takes the nation-state for granted as an analytic categorythat scholars, museums and their audiences can critically analyse heroic and folkloric nation-building narratives (Sutherland 2016;Anderson 2019). An alternative analytical approach premised on the Hypersea's inherent mobility holds out that possibility.…”

“…Sheller (2014) later noted that the mobilities turn had yet to take root in sociology to the same extent as in human geography, and the same can be said for political enquiry. As Peter Nyers (2006, 3) notes, the words state and static are both derived from the Latin 'stave', meaning to stand, and methodological nationalism, understood as taking the nation-state for granted as a category of analysis, continues to be prevalent within the discipline (Sutherland 2016(Sutherland , 2017. To take the nation-state as the norm entails, conversely, that 'mobility between nation-states is understood as anomalous' (Brubaker 2015, 132).…”

Stop the clock! Taking the nation out of linear time and bounded space

“…This is the solid imagined community travelling, or progressing, through history, to which Benedict Anderson refers. This article sets out to trouble these fundamental premises, which serve to legitimate the nation-state construct, delimit who belongs to the nation, and thus ultimately underpin citizenship regimes and the world order (Sutherland, 2010, 2012, 2016, 2017). James Ferguson and Akhil Gupta (2002) defined state spatialisation in terms of verticality and encompassment, thereby capturing the hierarchies and boundaries inherent in the nation-state construct.…”

“…The article argues that rather than start with a bounded notion of the nation moving through linear time as a category of analysis, approaching a sense of belonging to the nation as part of a broader politics of longing offers a more open point of departure for exploring its multifaceted manifestations in today’s world. In so doing, it adds to ongoing debates across the social sciences and humanities that seek to transcend methodological nationalism and propose alternative frameworks for analysing national belonging (Taylor, 1998; Levitt and Glick-Schiller, 2004; Sutherland, 2016). The article proceeds as follows: It first introduces Wet Ontologies (Steinberg and Peters, 2015) as a counterpoint to conventional understandings of the nation in time and space, such as that developed in Benedict Anderson’s seminal text, Imagined Communities (1991).…”