At the same time as your approach re-emphasizes the role of the work of imagination

in social life, it also claims that the link between imagination and the social is nowadays a

highly global and deterritorialized one. This, in turn, creates what you call "diasporic public

spheres" or "translocal communities". To quote a characterization of yours: "As Turkish

guest workers in Germany watch Turkish films in their German flats, as Koreans in

Philadelphia watch the 1988 Olympics in Seoul through satellite feeds from Korea, and as

Pakistani cabdrivers in Chicago listen to cassettes of sermons recorded in mosques in

Pakistan or Iran, we see moving images meet deterritorializes viewers." (Modernity at

Large, p. 4). How - to approach this important issue - are these diasporic publics related to

the nation-state and to nationalisms that do not seem to go away? Inhowfar do they go

beyond all affiliations with "the nation"? 

The new ethnicities, often produced by mass migration, are beset by incredible acts of

violence. This ethnic violence (itself constantls displayed on a global scale by the mass 

media) is most commonly attributed to a revived tribalism and an explosion of raw,

primordial feelings - a faulty explanatory model you call the "Bosnia Fallacy". What other

explanation would you give of this phenomenon (i.e. one not relying on some sort of

tribalism)? 

 Current theories consider globalization either as homogenization (increasing uniform

Americanization and McDonaldization) or, on the other hand, as an essentalization of

locality. Your theory which tries to offer a contextual and relational alternative to these two

models attempts to capture a certain dialectic movement within the process of globalization:

viz, the constant production as well as continuous dissolution of locality effected by this very

process. What exactly is the status of site or locality within this dialectic movement? Or

asked differently: Is there something like a vanishing of concrete sites in the midst of

today's disjunctural cultural flows? 

 What exactly is the "nature" (in social and political terms) of the new "virtual

neighborhoods" or translocal migrant communities created in the aftermath of postnational

movements? What active political role do you think these virtual communities can play in

the future? 

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