Nandita Sharma
Biographic Data
| ID | 3677191 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Nandita Sharma |
| GIVEN NAMES | Nandita |
| FAMILY NAME | Sharma |
| SIGNATURE | SHARMA N |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa |
| ORCID | 0009-0001-6854-7008 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 89 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
“Go back to where you come from”: The national re-making of racist borders”
Postcolonialism as the governmentality of immigration controls
Postcolonialism's insistence on historical connection is an important, source of its influence on contemporary social theory. The connections between metropoles and colonies of empires; between the imperial past and postcolonial present; and between people partitioned into separated state categories. However, postcolonial theory largely ignores the connections between colonial mobility controls and national citizenship and immigration controls. I…
Gaye Chan and Nandita Sharma: Eating in Public
Uncommon Sense: Natives, with Nandita Sharma [Audio podcast episode]
National citizenship and postcolonial racism
In the decisive shift from imperial-states to nation-states after World War Two, two related processes took place. There was a wide scale effort to delegitimize racist ideologies. At the same time, state sovereignty across the world was being nationalized. Nationalist ideologies were rendered not only legitimate but practically mandatory in politics. This talk charts this history in order to understand how racism is organized, practiced, and resi…
The European Union Is Killing Migrants At Europe’s Edge: Migration and Crisis in the Mediterranean . By Ċetta Mainwaring Migrant Resistance in Contemporary Europe . By Maurice Stierl
C.etta Mainwaring’s and Maurice Stierl’s books show us that state controls against people’s mobility reveal as much about the politics of nation-states and international bodies enacting such controls as they do about the people crossing borders. A stark and unavoidable conclusion in Mainwaring’s and Stierl’s respective studies is that the immigration control policies of the European Union (EU) and its member nation-states are killing unauthorized…
Be Careful What You Fight For
It is a real privilege to participate in a forum where such wonderful interlocutors engage seriously with the ideas in my book, Home Rule. The dialogue on the relationship between racism and nationalism, between "national self-determination" and the expansion of capitalist social relations, between immigration controls and the containment of emancipatory movements, and between thought and practice is enriched by each of their commentaries. These …
Minor keywords of political theory: Migration as a critical standpoint
Migration as a Critical Standpointbeginning, at the center of [our] project.Thinking about the meaning of a political concept should at the same time be a means of thinking about, and of making possible ways of intervening in, the political realities of the present" (2018:1).In this spirit, we seek to unsettle and disrupt the consensus around the selection of which keywords may be counted as vital for theorizing power, and to intervene in the pol…
States and human immobilization: Bridging the Conceptual Separation of Slavery, Immigration Controls, and Mass Incarceration
Immigration controls and incarceration both comprise state efforts to limit people’s freedom of movement. Usually analyzed separately, both are part of the legacy of slavery. In this paper, I examine the British Empire’s first implementation of immigration controls against ‘coolie labour’ from its colony of British India following the abolition of slavery in 1835. I also examine the implementation of methods of control and discipline enacted agai…
Indian Migration and the Shift in How States Limit Free Mobility
Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants
"In HOME RULE Nandita Sharma examines the twentieth-century transition from a world system based on empires to one based on nations. The UN Charter of 1945 endorsed the rights of self-governance to peoples on their land. At the end of World War II many people were displaced or had become refugees. Sharma asks why such migrants would not have the same rights as those still on their land. She traces the history of the development of the categories …
Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants
The Global Covid-19 Pandemic and the Need to Change Who We Think “We” Are
Multiculturalism
This chapter discusses the politics of multiculturalism, which is intimately related to the politics of (im)migration. It is argued that state policies of multiculturalism are best regarded as part of the neoliberal governmentality of managing and containing anti-racist demands for justice. Far from realizing these goals, official multiculturalism policies further empowered those racialized as White to continue to imagine the “nation” as “theirs.…
The intersection of social protection and mobilities: A move towards a 'Practical Utopia' research agenda
Currently, a number of contributions in mobility studies are looking for fruitful intersections with other ‘adjacent’ approaches . In this spirit, our theoretical paper argues to study one particular aspect: the intersection of social protection and mobilities. Currently, the provision of social services in the ‘West’ is strongly entrenched within nation-state logics, which assume that clients’ immobility is a precondition of service delivery and…
Racism
Racism is central to the construction of the ‘others’ of citizenship. This is in no small part because ideas of ‘race’ closely and easily articulate with ideas of ‘nationhood’. While ideas of ‘race’ tell us that each of us belongs to one discrete ‘type’ of people who are inherently unlike those in other groups, ideas of ‘nationhood’ tell us that each of us has a unique place in the world that is ours and ours alone. The ideological practices of r…
Strategic Anti-Essentialism: Decolonizing Decolonization
Home Economics: Nationalism and the Making of 'Migrant Workers' in Canada
A massive shift has taken place in Canadian immigration policy since the 1970s: the majority of migrants no longer enter as permanent residents but as temporary migrant workers. In Home Economics, Nandita Sharma shows how Canadian policies on citizenship and immigration contribute to the entrenchment of a system of apartheid where those categorized as ‘migrant workers’ live, work, pay taxes and sometimes die in Canada but are subordinated to a le…
Tortillas and Tomatoes: Transmigrant Mexican Harvesters in Canada
Anti-Trafficking Rhetoric and the Making of a Global Apartheid
This essay critically examines the historical and contemporary discursive practices of anti-trafficking campaigns. I argue that such campaigns within the global North, often led by feminists, constitute the moral reform arm of contemporary anti-immigrant politics that targets negatively racialized migrants. As in the past, current campaigns collude with a state-backed international security agenda aimed at criminalizing self-determined migrations…
Travel Agency: A Critique of Anti-Trafficking Campaigns
This paper offers a critical evaluation of anti-trafficking campaigns spearheaded by some in the feminist movement in an attempt to deal with the issues of unsafe migrations and labour exploitation. I discuss how calls to “end trafficking, especially in women and children” are influenced by – and go on to legitimate – governmental practices to criminalize the self-willed migration of people moving without official permission. I discuss how the id…
Migrant Workers as Non-Citizens: The Case against Citizenship as a Social Policy Concept
Facilitating the movement of individuals and communities from second-class citizenship to full, participatory citizenship has been a preferred social justice strategy for many on the Left. Indeed, within the Canadian social policy and community development literature, the debate over how to re-energize concepts such as citizenship has raged hotly since the mid-1980s. Citizenship is not, however, an unproblematic or wholly inclusive concept. Numer…
Minor keywords of political theory: Migration as a critical standpoint
Migration as a Critical Standpointbeginning, at the center of [our] project.Thinking about the meaning of a political concept should at the same time be a means of thinking about, and of making possible ways of intervening in, the political realities of the present" (2018:1).In this spirit, we seek to unsettle and disrupt the consensus around the selection of which keywords may be counted as vital for theorizing power, and to intervene in the pol…
Travel Agency: A Critique of Anti-Trafficking Campaigns
This paper offers a critical evaluation of anti-trafficking campaigns spearheaded by some in the feminist movement in an attempt to deal with the issues of unsafe migrations and labour exploitation. I discuss how calls to “end trafficking, especially in women and children” are influenced by – and go on to legitimate – governmental practices to criminalize the self-willed migration of people moving without official permission. I discuss how the id…
Migrant Workers as Non-Citizens: The Case against Citizenship as a Social Policy Concept
Facilitating the movement of individuals and communities from second-class citizenship to full, participatory citizenship has been a preferred social justice strategy for many on the Left. Indeed, within the Canadian social policy and community development literature, the debate over how to re-energize concepts such as citizenship has raged hotly since the mid-1980s. Citizenship is not, however, an unproblematic or wholly inclusive concept. Numer…
States and human immobilization: Bridging the Conceptual Separation of Slavery, Immigration Controls, and Mass Incarceration
Immigration controls and incarceration both comprise state efforts to limit people’s freedom of movement. Usually analyzed separately, both are part of the legacy of slavery. In this paper, I examine the British Empire’s first implementation of immigration controls against ‘coolie labour’ from its colony of British India following the abolition of slavery in 1835. I also examine the implementation of methods of control and discipline enacted agai…
National citizenship and postcolonial racism
In the decisive shift from imperial-states to nation-states after World War Two, two related processes took place. There was a wide scale effort to delegitimize racist ideologies. At the same time, state sovereignty across the world was being nationalized. Nationalist ideologies were rendered not only legitimate but practically mandatory in politics. This talk charts this history in order to understand how racism is organized, practiced, and resi…
Postcolonialism as the governmentality of immigration controls
Postcolonialism's insistence on historical connection is an important, source of its influence on contemporary social theory. The connections between metropoles and colonies of empires; between the imperial past and postcolonial present; and between people partitioned into separated state categories. However, postcolonial theory largely ignores the connections between colonial mobility controls and national citizenship and immigration controls. I…
The intersection of social protection and mobilities: A move towards a 'Practical Utopia' research agenda
Currently, a number of contributions in mobility studies are looking for fruitful intersections with other ‘adjacent’ approaches . In this spirit, our theoretical paper argues to study one particular aspect: the intersection of social protection and mobilities. Currently, the provision of social services in the ‘West’ is strongly entrenched within nation-state logics, which assume that clients’ immobility is a precondition of service delivery and…
Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants
"In HOME RULE Nandita Sharma examines the twentieth-century transition from a world system based on empires to one based on nations. The UN Charter of 1945 endorsed the rights of self-governance to peoples on their land. At the end of World War II many people were displaced or had become refugees. Sharma asks why such migrants would not have the same rights as those still on their land. She traces the history of the development of the categories …
Be Careful What You Fight For
It is a real privilege to participate in a forum where such wonderful interlocutors engage seriously with the ideas in my book, Home Rule. The dialogue on the relationship between racism and nationalism, between "national self-determination" and the expansion of capitalist social relations, between immigration controls and the containment of emancipatory movements, and between thought and practice is enriched by each of their commentaries. These …
Migrant Workers as Non-Citizens: The Case against Citizenship as a Social Policy Concept
Facilitating the movement of individuals and communities from second-class citizenship to full, participatory citizenship has been a preferred social justice strategy for many on the Left. Indeed, within the Canadian social policy and community development literature, the debate over how to re-energize concepts such as citizenship has raged hotly since the mid-1980s. Citizenship is not, however, an unproblematic or wholly inclusive concept. Numer…
Travel Agency: A Critique of Anti-Trafficking Campaigns
This paper offers a critical evaluation of anti-trafficking campaigns spearheaded by some in the feminist movement in an attempt to deal with the issues of unsafe migrations and labour exploitation. I discuss how calls to “end trafficking, especially in women and children” are influenced by – and go on to legitimate – governmental practices to criminalize the self-willed migration of people moving without official permission. I discuss how the id…
Anti-Trafficking Rhetoric and the Making of a Global Apartheid
This essay critically examines the historical and contemporary discursive practices of anti-trafficking campaigns. I argue that such campaigns within the global North, often led by feminists, constitute the moral reform arm of contemporary anti-immigrant politics that targets negatively racialized migrants. As in the past, current campaigns collude with a state-backed international security agenda aimed at criminalizing self-determined migrations…
Home Economics: Nationalism and the Making of 'Migrant Workers' in Canada
A massive shift has taken place in Canadian immigration policy since the 1970s: the majority of migrants no longer enter as permanent residents but as temporary migrant workers. In Home Economics, Nandita Sharma shows how Canadian policies on citizenship and immigration contribute to the entrenchment of a system of apartheid where those categorized as ‘migrant workers’ live, work, pay taxes and sometimes die in Canada but are subordinated to a le…
Tortillas and Tomatoes: Transmigrant Mexican Harvesters in Canada
Racism
Racism is central to the construction of the ‘others’ of citizenship. This is in no small part because ideas of ‘race’ closely and easily articulate with ideas of ‘nationhood’. While ideas of ‘race’ tell us that each of us belongs to one discrete ‘type’ of people who are inherently unlike those in other groups, ideas of ‘nationhood’ tell us that each of us has a unique place in the world that is ours and ours alone. The ideological practices of r…
Strategic Anti-Essentialism: Decolonizing Decolonization
Multiculturalism
This chapter discusses the politics of multiculturalism, which is intimately related to the politics of (im)migration. It is argued that state policies of multiculturalism are best regarded as part of the neoliberal governmentality of managing and containing anti-racist demands for justice. Far from realizing these goals, official multiculturalism policies further empowered those racialized as White to continue to imagine the “nation” as “theirs.…
The intersection of social protection and mobilities: A move towards a 'Practical Utopia' research agenda
Currently, a number of contributions in mobility studies are looking for fruitful intersections with other ‘adjacent’ approaches . In this spirit, our theoretical paper argues to study one particular aspect: the intersection of social protection and mobilities. Currently, the provision of social services in the ‘West’ is strongly entrenched within nation-state logics, which assume that clients’ immobility is a precondition of service delivery and…
Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants
"In HOME RULE Nandita Sharma examines the twentieth-century transition from a world system based on empires to one based on nations. The UN Charter of 1945 endorsed the rights of self-governance to peoples on their land. At the end of World War II many people were displaced or had become refugees. Sharma asks why such migrants would not have the same rights as those still on their land. She traces the history of the development of the categories …
Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants
The Global Covid-19 Pandemic and the Need to Change Who We Think “We” Are
The European Union Is Killing Migrants At Europe’s Edge: Migration and Crisis in the Mediterranean . By Ċetta Mainwaring Migrant Resistance in Contemporary Europe . By Maurice Stierl
C.etta Mainwaring’s and Maurice Stierl’s books show us that state controls against people’s mobility reveal as much about the politics of nation-states and international bodies enacting such controls as they do about the people crossing borders. A stark and unavoidable conclusion in Mainwaring’s and Stierl’s respective studies is that the immigration control policies of the European Union (EU) and its member nation-states are killing unauthorized…
Be Careful What You Fight For
It is a real privilege to participate in a forum where such wonderful interlocutors engage seriously with the ideas in my book, Home Rule. The dialogue on the relationship between racism and nationalism, between "national self-determination" and the expansion of capitalist social relations, between immigration controls and the containment of emancipatory movements, and between thought and practice is enriched by each of their commentaries. These …
Minor keywords of political theory: Migration as a critical standpoint
Migration as a Critical Standpointbeginning, at the center of [our] project.Thinking about the meaning of a political concept should at the same time be a means of thinking about, and of making possible ways of intervening in, the political realities of the present" (2018:1).In this spirit, we seek to unsettle and disrupt the consensus around the selection of which keywords may be counted as vital for theorizing power, and to intervene in the pol…
States and human immobilization: Bridging the Conceptual Separation of Slavery, Immigration Controls, and Mass Incarceration
Immigration controls and incarceration both comprise state efforts to limit people’s freedom of movement. Usually analyzed separately, both are part of the legacy of slavery. In this paper, I examine the British Empire’s first implementation of immigration controls against ‘coolie labour’ from its colony of British India following the abolition of slavery in 1835. I also examine the implementation of methods of control and discipline enacted agai…
Indian Migration and the Shift in How States Limit Free Mobility
Gaye Chan and Nandita Sharma: Eating in Public
Uncommon Sense: Natives, with Nandita Sharma [Audio podcast episode]
National citizenship and postcolonial racism
In the decisive shift from imperial-states to nation-states after World War Two, two related processes took place. There was a wide scale effort to delegitimize racist ideologies. At the same time, state sovereignty across the world was being nationalized. Nationalist ideologies were rendered not only legitimate but practically mandatory in politics. This talk charts this history in order to understand how racism is organized, practiced, and resi…
Postcolonialism as the governmentality of immigration controls
Postcolonialism's insistence on historical connection is an important, source of its influence on contemporary social theory. The connections between metropoles and colonies of empires; between the imperial past and postcolonial present; and between people partitioned into separated state categories. However, postcolonial theory largely ignores the connections between colonial mobility controls and national citizenship and immigration controls. I…
“Go back to where you come from”: The national re-making of racist borders”
Political science (16 works) · Sociology (16 works) · Law (12 works) · Politics (11 works) · Citizenship (9 works) · Migration, Refugees, and Integration (8 works) · Political economy (7 works) · Immigration (6 works) · Nationalism (6 works) · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity (5 works)