SUMMARY:

This is a contribution to the discussion forum “Conceptualizing Society after the Modern Territorial State and Nation.” Satoshi Mizutani conceptualizes transimperial history as an alternative to the prevailing nation-centrism of social analysis and politics, which he characterizes as an ethnonationalistic majoritarian claim to exclusive sovereignty. By contrast, a transimperial approach transcends the borders of individual polities and discards the claims of their hegemonic groups to power by promoting the cross-colonial solidarity of various subjugated communities. It is not formal status or ethnocultural markers that secure one’s belonging to the global network of cross-colonial solidarity but an active anti-colonialist stance. Mizutani refers to the processual and situational groupness of solidarity in resistance that brings together people across the globe who cannot be described in the nation-centered categories.