“Is this nationalism or some new horror?” Gargi Bhattacharyya and Sivamohan Valluvan on borders and labour in the emerging future

The first conversation in a three-part series on Resisting Nationalism is with Professor Gargi Bhattacharyya. Via their recently published The Futures of Racial Capitalism, Gargi will explore with Vallu the place but also limits of nationalism in shaping emergent postliberal regimes of migrant labour governance and disposability.

The nationalisms multiplying across the world, cutting across conventional Global South-Global North geographies, will be explored here. Intriguingly, it is often the nationalist frameworks of bordering and labour management as innovated in other parts of the word (East Asia, the Gulf States) that is steadily being exported to Britain. Probing questions will also be explored about how some of these new realities operate beyond the idea of nation, allowing for transnational and tech-enabled infrastructures that organise stratified labour pools of disposable exploitation.

PART OF THE RESISTING NATIONALISM SERIES