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Tibetans are often imagined as authentic, pure, and geographically undifferentiated, but Tibetan identity formation is, in fact, varied and deeply inflected by national location and transnational trajectories. In this paper I examine the frictions of encounter between three groups of Tibetans who arrived in the USA around the same time, but who differ in their relationships to the homeland. The numerically dominant group consists of refugees who left Tibet in 1959 and of exiles born in South Asia; second are Tibetans who left Tibet after the 1980s for India and Nepal; and third are those whose routes have taken them from Tibet directly to the United States. Whereas the cultural authority claimed by long-term exiles derives from the notion of preserving tradition outside of Tibet, that of Tibetans from Tibet is based on their embodied knowledge of the actual place of the home- land. Their struggles over authenticity, which play out in everyday practices such as language use and embodied reactions to staged performances of `traditional culture', call for an understanding of diaspora without guarantees. In this paper I use habitus as an analytic for exploring the ways in which identity is inscribed on and read off of bodies, and the political stakes of everyday practices that produce fractures and fault lines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I engage with the literature on nationalism and popular culture to discuss the role of Captain America Comics in the production of American national identity and national interest prior to World War 2. The character of Captain America is introduced as an example of a rescaling icon, or a bridge between collective identity and the individual. Additionally, the impact of the context in which the comic was produced is discussed as a force in the construction of American identity before the 1941 entry of the United States into the war. The empirical portion of the paper is a content analysis of the first ten issues of Captain America Comics, all predating the attack on Pearl Harbor. The analysis focuses on the ways in which American behavior is disciplined through the narratives in the comic book, as well as the ways in which nationalities are scripted into a moral geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the wake of the Global War on Terror, Judith Butler has written of the 'precarity' of life, of the inevitable vulnerability of one's life in the face of the actions of strangers. Refusing to accept this, the United States has developed a form of nationalism that claims invulnerability for its citizens while treating as expendable the lives of distant others who even unwittingly associate with those who threaten the US homeland. Butler has extended this set of criticisms to Israel's policy towards Palestinian people and in doing so has been criticised as anti-Semitic. She has engaged with these questions about Jewish identity, nationalism, and toleration through an engagement with writers of the Jewish diaspora, developing what we may describe as a geopolitical perspective on identity. The value of such a perspective was given ironic point by the public controversy over the award to Butler of the Adorno Prize in 2012. This paper argues also that in responding to the biopolitics of the Global War on Terror, Butler has elaborated on some of the geopolitical bases of identity and in doing so has illuminated the academic politics of the current Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign called for by many institutions of Palestinian civil society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]