ABSTRACT
Late-modern migrancy has a profound impact on the nation-state’s function
as the modernist’s principal locus of filiation. The Sycoraxian character of
the late-modern migrant, expressed most acutely in polyglot and creolist dis-
positions, dislodges the nation and the ethnos from their positions in identity articulations. The migrant’s multifocal attachments question the viability of
all exclusive allegiances. The technologies that have enabled the unprece-
dented flow of migrants across borders have also generalized an existential
condition that was previously associated exclusively with historical dia-
sporas. Migrancy thus emerges as a generalized condition of late modernity.
This condition has altered the way in which the West defines allegiances.
That is, while the migrant’s Sycoraxian position fosters a movement that
complicates socio-political modes of attachment, the West returns to the modernist loci of identity: it rearticulates allegiances through an oscillation
between the universal and the exclusive. Put differently, the West moves
between the rearticulation of nation and nationalism and the enunciation of
cosmopolitanism. While I will address the rearticulation of nationalism in
Chapter 4, in what follows I interrogate the condition of possibility for
cosmopolitanism as a fundamental humanist allegiance.
