Our Epoch’s Little Banishments

Abstract

I argue that the conceptual locus of the category banishment in today’s world is not banishment in the historical sense of the term, but a new kind of banishment that is predicated on the formation of geographies of privilege and disadvantage that cut across the divides of our modernity – East-West, North-South. The formation of such geographies includes a partial disassembling of the modern national territorial project, one aspiring (and dependent on) national unity, whether actual or idealised. This also means that there is a weakening of the explanatory power of the nation-based encasements of membership (for citizens, for firms, for political systems) that have marked our modernity. The micro-banishments I refer to are part of emergent and proliferating geographies of disadvantage (for citizens, firms, districts) internal to a country.