"Building on his critique of the nationalism that constrains most scholars and on the rich Caribbean intellectual tradition and transnational experience, Carnegie offers a timely critique of the links between race and the nation-state. He turns to a Bahá'í world community that has deep roots in his native Jamaica for a vision of the global and local in a world without oppression and inequality."-Nina Glick Schiller, coauthor of Georges Woke Up Laughing: Long Distance Nationalism and the Search for Home

"Carnegie has taken up his pen, and his fine scholarly intelligence, against the nation-state, its lofty pretensions and its low crimes, its interferences as well as its betrayals. Challenging in its provocations and substantive in its arguments, this book is a welcome contribution to studies of nationalism and the Caribbean."-David Scott, Columbia University

Eyeing nationalism's hold on modern consciousness from positions deep inside the nation-state's borderlands, Postnationalism Prefigured traces a story of displacement, innocent terrors, and unfulfilled collective ambition. It is also a story of hope. Drawing on ethnography, history, fiction, popular culture, and his own experiences as a Jamaican-born anthropologist, Charles V. Carnegie assembles and interprets the experiences of a diverse array of people--albinos, slave runaways, followers of Marcus Garvey, traders, and transients. Through them, he demonstrates that race and nation are exhausted conceptual and organizational forms. He shows many of these borderland people making alliances across racial and territorial boundaries and producing richly textured forms of transnational life well before transnationalism became fashionable in social analysis. Extending the horizons of current scholarship, Postnationalism Prefigured points towards possibilities for new forms of world community that can accommodate local histories, cultures, and loyalties in a larger global framework.

Charles V. Carnegie teaches anthropology and is the chair of the African American studies program at Bates College, Maine.