Shavit, U. (2009). The new imagined community: global media and the construction of national and Muslim identities of migrants. Brighton, UK, Sussex Academic Press.
The New Imagined Community explores new ways of imagining national community in the context of international migration and global media. In the first part of the book, the author relates the idea of 'imagining nation states from afar' to Benedict Anderson's idea of the nation as an imagined community, arguing that new types of migrants have emerged, such as the 'passive trans-national'. The author focuses on the role of advanced media technologies (ie. satellite technology and the Internet) in facilitating relations between immigrants and their national communities of origin, drawing on biographical interview-based research with immigrants of diverse nationalities. In the second part of the book, 'Imagining the Muslim Nation from Afar', the author shifts the analysis of migrants' national imaginaries to focus more specifically on how Muslim-Arab religious scholars imagine the rise of a global Muslim nation and use advanced media technologies to enhance their global vision. This part of the book is also based on biographical interview-based research, in this case with devout Muslims who migrated from Arab countries to Frankfurt am Main, Germany. With its focus on migrants' imagined national and global communities, this book relates to recent research on transnational communities (cf. Al-Ali and Kosar*).