Nation and Immigration

Abstract

In my paper, I wish to offer a critical assessment of the cultural and political implications of postcolonial and cultural critics’ abandonment of situated terms like immigration, citizenship, race, state, and their celebratory embracing of such unmoored notions as nomadism, deterritorialization, exile, hybridy, and postnation. On the one hand, I hope to demonstrate that postcolonial critics’ valorization of displacement’s redemptive power mystifies the oppositional possibilities of hybrid consciousness. On the other, I wish to argue that such theoretical projects fail to both historicize the particularities of postcolonial cultural formations and the importance of the politics of location in describing various manifestations of the global.