Afterword: Mobile Desires

Abstract

In her affective postscript to Mobile Desires, Kaplan retraces the sensorial and intellectual paths she has followed in learning and unlearning what it means to be a critical feminist thinker in a transnational world. She punctuates her poetic narration of how she came to study travel, colonialism, and, eventually, military occupation with vivid accounts of the subtly and spectacularly violent mobilizations and immobilizations taking place across the globe at various moments in her life. Striking a tone that is at once somber and hopeful, Kaplan interprets this collection as an inquiry into desires, mobilities, and the spaces of border possibilities that not only enhances critiques of the co-constitutive relationship between nationalism and imperialism but also embraces the moments of hope that flash up amidst even the most oppressive mobility regimes.