MMB Reading Group – ‘Home Rule’ by Nandita Sharma

This month the MMB reading group discusses Nandita Sharma’s recent book Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants (2020, Duke University Press). In this book she explores how the current political order of nation-states institutionalises the notion that each ‘people’ has its own place in the world by limiting access to national citizenship and authorised immigration. In her recent MMB blog, which draws on the Home Rule, Nandita writes:

‘This national regime of governmentality, which I term the Postcolonial New World Order, co-opted radical anti-colonial demands and replaced them with demands for national sovereignty. Calls for ‘national self-determination’, I argue, perverted demands for the return of expropriated land and for the freedom of labour from exploitative class relations. Instead of decolonisation, people got the postcolonial rule of nation-states.

Nationally sovereign states have not only continued the work of imperial-states to organise the global accumulation of capital, their policies (both ‘domestic’ and ‘foreign’) have led to the enormous expansion of such practices. Since the start of the Postcolonial New World Order, more people and more land (and air and water) have been brought into capitalist social relations than ever before. Hardly an inch of our world has been spared. Under the rule of postcolonialism, disparities between the rich and the poor – and between Rich and Poor Worlds – have intensified.’

To sign up for this month’s reading group, please fill in this form by 30^th April. A Zoom link will be sent to attendees the day before.