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On the Road: National Form and the Globalizing Everyday

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Nationalism and Nationhood in the United Arab Emirates

Part of the book series: The Modern Muslim World ((MMUS))

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Abstract

This chapter invokes car-driving in the UAE in order to analyze how notions of national difference are restabilized in a globalizing materiality of the everyday. It thus connects the study of everyday nationhood to what Georg Simmel understood by modernity: the dualism of living through social forms as they unfold between stabilizations and transgressions of the national. It firstly builds the mobilities paradigm with its Simmelian foundation into a framework for making sense of the everyday subject as both a nationalized and globalized way of being on the move. Through everyday car-driving in the UAE, it then empirically illustrates how this is so.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of History, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark

    Martin Ledstrup

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  1. Martin Ledstrup
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Correspondence to Martin Ledstrup .

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Ledstrup, M. (2019). On the Road: National Form and the Globalizing Everyday. In: Nationalism and Nationhood in the United Arab Emirates. The Modern Muslim World. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91653-8_3

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