ABSTRACT
This much has been become clear through the proliferation of critiques of the social and the human parading as global concepts and categories, while they are effectively no more than local ciphers for Europe and the European. Furthermore, these penetrative analyses have been at pains to point out the converse of this normative project-the ideational and physical subordination of those subhuman Others enduring an existence somewhat akin to beasts of burden in a pre-social state of nature. The task facing us, then, is easily identified if difficult to accomplish: modernity must be more profitably rethought as a diffuse and ever-expanding web of contact zones, exchanges, and relations that foreground modern human and social formation as produced by physical human traffic as well as a series of material and symbolic flows. And it is from this panoramic view that we might be able to move beyond the limited understanding of simple dichotomous human and social classifications of “them”/”us” and “here”/“there.” Instead, we may better comprehend the deep entanglements of modernity and account for the ways in which human existence and social formation is produced across time and space. In other words, these modern transnational migratory circuits, and their distended social, public, and private realms, necessitate an expanded critical imagination.
