Introduction

My book takes its original title and now subtitle, The Return of the Native,

from Thomas Hardy’s 1878 novel.2 Unlike Hardy’s returning native, how-

ever, the native with whom I am concerned is a nomad. My subject is thus

not nativism either as a marker of belonging or of entitlement, but the

native as a haecceity.3 I am interested in the native’s self-referential/selfidentical quality as a source of terror that disrupts the post-imperial socio-

political order. For insofar as the native’s haecceity presences a resistance to

an enfolding into the self/same, the European imperial project sought to

contain the native’s affirmative difference through narratives of social evo-

lution, which construe differences between Europeans and natives not as

qualitative, but as quantitative: it is not a difference of species, but of genus.

In these taxonomies, nations are enclosures that preserve striated fields of

difference: they are the loci of foundational identities. Late-modern migrancy disrupts these formations. Postcolonial native migrants challenge

the nation’s production of negative difference. Through a series of themes

that I will elaborate below, my book interrogates what happens to the

nation and the narratives of difference it enables when they encounter the

native as a nomad whose presence denatures the link between nations and

identities.