ABSTRACT
I am of the generation born and brought up in the West in the years after the Second World War. We are the baby-boomers, coming to maturity in the second half of the 1960s. Consumption has defined our generation. Many of us, especially in settler-states (and I am thinking here of the ones that I know best, the Anglophone ones) such as the United States of America, Canada, and Australia, are the children, grandchildren, or great-grandchildren of migrants. Given that the nation-state itself, in its full governmental and institutional form, only dates back to around the first half of the nineteenth century, there is no earlier history to help us to understand the specificity of our experiences as the descendants of immigrants from other cultural, and sometimes racialised, backgrounds to this new social form-indeed, the discourse of society is itself roughly coterminous with the evolution of the state. Our ancestors were expected, and forced, often in ambivalent ways, to assimilate into the homogenising nation-state to which they had travelled.
