ABSTRACT

In the context of Gayatri Spivak’s call to the literary imagination to de-transcendentalize nationalism, this chapter asks if the movement of peoples from South Asia to the metropolitan West, as represented in literary texts, undoes the boundary consolidating work of state moves like Brexit and President’s Trump immigration ban. Literature that deals with the movement of peoples or migrancy de-transcendentalizes nationalism even when it finds itself caught in the hostile binaries of material history, such as 9/11. The literature of migrancy also pushes its reader “towards the complex textuality of the international” (Nationalism and the Imagination 21). The literature I examine seems to defy the injunctions of the state and populates host nations with cultural and racial difference. In making this move, the literature records immigrant discomfort while simultaneously recording immigrant persistence. As such, it insists on a national picture at odds with the official narrative of the host nation. In so doing, it functions not only as a call to arms, but it also inaugurates a concept of nation not co-terminus with ethnic homogeneity.