Nation and Immigration

Main Article Content

Ali Behdad

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.

Article Details

Section
Special Issue Articles (Peer Reviewed)
Author Biography

Ali Behdad, English Department, UCLA

Ali Behdad is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at UCLA (USA). He is the author of Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Solution(Duke U. Press, 1994) and A Forgetful Nation: On Immigration and Cultural Identity in the U.S. as well as many articles on issues of travel, postcolonialism, nationalism, immigration and photography in the Middle East