As even a cursory look at global politics today reveals, a large number of countries, including China, Mexico, Russia, India, Hungary, the Philippines, and Haiti, are actively involved in institutionalizing their relationships among groups constituted as their diasporas. Introducing the concept of the “domestic abroad,” this book argues that despite the existence of informal, and in some cases formal, links between diasporas and their homelands in the past, we are now witnessing a far more widespread and qualitatively different phenomenon. The production of the domestic abroad rests, first, on ... More

As even a cursory look at global politics today reveals, a large number of countries, including China, Mexico, Russia, India, Hungary, the Philippines, and Haiti, are actively involved in institutionalizing their relationships among groups constituted as their diasporas. Introducing the concept of the “domestic abroad,” this book argues that despite the existence of informal, and in some cases formal, links between diasporas and their homelands in the past, we are now witnessing a far more widespread and qualitatively different phenomenon. The production of the domestic abroad rests, first, on the constitution of diasporas as subjects of an expanded, territorially diffused nation and the proliferation of institutional links connecting this “global” nation. But the domestic abroad is also a product of the economic transformation of the state, a transformation broadly categorized as neoliberal restructuring. This book argues that these two processes—political and economic, affecting nation and state—far from being distinct, are in fact intimately related and that it is only by unraveling their mutually constitutive relationship that we can make sense of the domestic abroad phenomenon. Empirically, this argument unfolds through a historically nuanced study of the production of the Indian domestic abroad. The latter half of the book focuses on the structuring and restructuring of postcolonial India to reveal the manner in which the boundaries of the Indian nation and the extent of the authority of the Indian state are dynamically shaped by the development of capitalist social relations on both global and national scales.