Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments and Deterritorialized Nation-States

Nations Unbound is a pioneering study of an increasing trend in migration-transnationalism. Immigrants are no longer rooted in one location. By building transnational social networks, economic alliances and political ideologies, they are able to cross the geographic and cultural boundaries of both their countries of origin and of settlement. Through ethnographic studies of immigrant populations, the authors demonstrate that transnationalism is something other than expanded nationalism. By placing immigrants in a limbo between settler and visitor, transnationalism challenges the concepts of citizenship and of nationhood itself.

Linda Basch is director. National Council for Research on Women. Nina Glick Schiller is associate professor of anthropology, University of New Hampshire and academic editor of the Journal Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power. Cristina Szanton Blanc is senior research associate at the Southern Asian Institute, International Affairs Columbia University and author of the Gordon and Breach title Urban Children in Distress: Global Predicaments and Innovative Strategies (1994).