"Methods and Nations" critiques one of the primary deployments of twentieth-century social science: comparative politics whose major focus has been "nation-building" in the "Third World," often attempting to universalize and render self-evident its own practices. International relations theorists, unable to resist the "cognitive imperialism" of a state-centric social science, have allowed themselves to become colonized. Michael Shapiro seeks to bring recognition to forms of political expression-alternative modes of intelligibility for things, people, and spaces-that have existed on the margins of the nationhood practices of states and the complicit nation-sustaining conceits of social science.

Michael Shapiro is Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawaii.

Preface: Politics, Methods, and Loci of Enunciation 1. Introduction: Biopolitical Conceits and the Colonization of Hawai'i 2. Nation-States: Drama and Narration 3. The Musico-Literary Aesthetics of Attachment and Resistance 4. Landscape and Nationhood 5. Film and Nation Building 6.The Nation-State and Violence: Wim Wenders Contra Imperial Sovereignty Notes