Nationalism

Abstract

Since the late 1970s, postcolonialism has come to stand for a number of socio-cultural conditions such as exile, migrancy, deracination, displacement, historical weightlessness, and what some critics have tended to term ‘extraterritoriality’. A great number of postcolonial intellectuals have emigrated to the West to live and work, and thus reinstituted, whether by volition or under coercion, the Eurocentic myths of the Western metropolitan centres as the emissary and beacon of light to the four corners of the world. Their presence at the heart of Europe, at the nerve centre of what, to paraphrase Edward Said, used to rule the waves, and at the academic circles of a newly emergent imperial power has partly fulfilled Thomas Carlyle’s dream about London as the ‘rendez-vous of all the “children of the Harz-Rock’s,” arriving in select samples, from the Antipodes and elsewhere, by steam and otherwise, to “season” here’.¹ Moreover, their tense affiliations with their countries of origin have marked them as restless, transgressive and Januslike critics and writers whose project has been a relentlessly incessant endeavour at casting doubt on all categorical designations, essentialist discourses and ideologies of imperial domination. Thus, the occupation of an in-between position has lent these critics and writers a radical edge that cuts across dogmas, orthodoxies, and taboos.