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This is the first book to investigate how migrants and migrant rights activists work together to generate new forms of citizenship identities in a multilingual setting. Based on robust theoretical engagement and detailed empirical analysis, Shind's book makes a compelling case for rethinking citizenship and community from the angle of language.

This is the first book to investigate how migrants and migrant rights activists work together to generate new forms of citizenship identities in a multilingual setting. Based on robust theoretical engagement and detailed empirical analysis, Shind's book makes a compelling case for rethinking citizenship and community from the angle of language.

Translation is often assumed to be successful if it builds understanding beyond linguistic barriers. In contrast, failed translation signals miscommunication. The article challenges this assumption to explore the potentials of failed communication for the idea of community: how we might come together to build relationships when we fail to understand each other. The article is based on the case of multilingual migrant activism, where participants of activism rely on translators because they do not share the same language for communication. I will demonstrate that, deliberately or accidentally, voice and silence are misunderstood through the figure of the translator, and how unintelligibility comes to shape interactions. Drawing on the works of contemporary political thinkers including Jean-Luc Nancy, Iris Young, and Slavoj Žižek, I will argue that such communication failure allows us to realise community in the sharing of our own limitations of being, beyond the binary between 'us'/'host' and 'them'/'guest'. ; publishedVersion ; Peer reviewed

What happens to sovereign power when petty sovereigns refuse to exploit discretionary power to suspend the rule of law, the very power that is delegated to them and makes them who they are? How might such a refusal contribute to a better understanding of the relationship between resistance and sovereign power? This article revisits Judith Butler's notion of petty sovereigns to explore the possibility that petty sovereigns establish a distinctive relationship with law. This article draws on a case involving one nameless petty sovereign and his published writings. He writes novels to expose how law is used by some officials to realize a particular policy goal with regards to nuclear energy. His novels blur the line between fiction and non-fiction: it contains classified information only available to bureaucrats, discusses actual energy policies and related laws, and introduces fictional characters who resemble non-fictional characters. I argue that this example suggests that petty sovereigns are not necessarily tied to the node between governmentality and sovereignty. Shifting between the worlds of fiction and non-fiction, petty sovereigns slip away from sovereign power, which controls the subject-making process, and quietly resist sovereign politics through the contingency of subjectivity.

This paper examines the domestic response to the Great East Japan Earthquake that occurred in March 2011. The demand to (re)build a new 'community' in Japan was triggered by the fatal destruction of towns by the earthquake and the tsunami, and the uncertain future of these towns - and of Japan - due to the subsequent prolonged crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Drawing on the political theory of Jean-Luc Nancy, the paper examines what kinds of communities were realised in the aftermath of the disaster. It argues that two distinctively different types of communities emerged. The first type of community was based on the inside/outside logic, whereby Japan was imagined as one unified entity surrounded by a boundary which separated the safe inside from the dangerous outside. The second type of community was based on sharing. Immigrants in Japan identified themselves with the survivors since both of them shared the experience of losing home and the same home (called Japan). In this way, the immigrants challenged the idea of community as one unified entity and realised a new form of community. Adapted from the source document.