Nations, Cities and the International: The Question of Political Imagination.

This paper begins in Paris, moves to postcolonial India, and then returns to the Western metropolis through the figure of the migrant. At each stop, I will be trying to unpack how the modern nation works. As will soon become clear the task of unfurling the politics of the nation also involves unravelling some of the basic narratives of modernity. This paper about national politics is therefore, somewhat unwittingly, also a paper about politics under modernity. The paper travels through a discussion of three texts. The first is Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, a study of Nineteenth Century Paris and, as I will argue, a lucid exposition of how the nation works. The two others are postcolonial theories of nationalism, one by Partha Chatterjee and the other by Homi Bhabha. In each understanding of the nation, there is already implicated an image of the international. In the paper, I discuss how different understandings of time shape how we imagine political possibilities. I compare the idea of time that underpins the modern nation, with different understandings of time which might be explored through the site of the city. Each of the three texts criticises the failure of modern political imagination, while attempting to develop some alternatives. I argue that although Benjamin, Chatterjee and Bhabha go some way towards proposing a reimagined nation, we are still left at the end with an unimaginative, exclusive and narrow understanding of the international. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]