Return of the native : postcolonial migrancy and the (im)possibility of the nation

Abstract

The refusal of the native's entelechy assumes two distinct forms. In the first, the native is a prop in a colonial mise-en-scene colonial travelogues attest, though present, the native seldom rises above the threshold of recognition. His proximity to nature is so total as to defy recognition. In the second, the native is recognized only insofar as his proximity to nature renders him an anchor in an evolutionary meta-discourse. The native's presence is interpreted as validating a taxonomic scheme that produces Europeans as a genus apart. In both representational forms, the negation of the native's potentiality is imbricated in the construction of the nation as the site of identity and difference through an organic discourse that transforms territory into an epiphenomenon of landscape. Post-World War II movements of capital and populations across national borders have profoundly altered conceptions of the political. These dislocations have introduced ever-widening social and political imaginaries that challenge the nation-state's function as the locus proper of sovereignty. Consequently, the native's symbolic import, as a concept-metaphor that moors identity to the nation, is disrupted. Using postcolonial migrancy not only as a concept that denotes spatial movement, but as a philosophical disposition, the dissertation interrogates the consequences for the nation and the narratives of difference it enables when they encounter the postcolonial native as a nomad whose presence denatures the link between nation and identity. The dissertation argues that encounters between nation-states and postcolonial migrants result neither in the total enclosure of the natives nor in the evisceration of the nation. Rather, the encounter gives rise to a fractal politics that resists the sedimentation of identities into established political and cultural communities. The recursive structure of migrancy results in complex political formations. These are always already in the process of being deterritorialized, engendering associations and movements that exceed the narrow bounds of the nation-state.