ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the new global imaginings of panjabiyat and the Panjabi nation to propose an ethnocultural and ethnospatial definition of the Panjabi nation by examining the new meanings of panjabiyat and communities produced in relation to Bhangra performance. Bhangra Nation is similar to the Sikh Nation in being a deterritorialized transnational topos of community that invokes primordialist objects to interrogate nationalist cartographies. The chapter shows that while dance and music invite non-Panjabi communities to join the Bhangra Nation, Panjabi lyrics and kinemes reconstruct a boundary-crossing post-national Panjabi imaginary that recovers the memory of undivided Panjab. Bhangra Nation's topos of national identity resembles that of the Sikh nation in being a topos of community that contests the topos of the nation and national cartographies. But Bhangra Nation is an inclusive, ethnospatial narrative permitting porous, intersecting boundaries opening out to all Panjabi and non-Panjabi ethnies in opposition to the exclusivist, reactive, ethnoreligious Sikh nation.
