ABSTRACT
Much discussion about borderlands has centered around the announced demise of the nation-state. As argued in the Introduction, the nation-state is the only codified, functional space for articulation and negotiation of minority position rights. What the utopian erasure of the nation-state produces in several articulations of the transnational and the cosmopolitan is the default empowerment of a vaguely defined globality which de facto privileges the local/global, cosmos/polis dichotomy imposing the false choice of the universal pole as the single way out of the dichotomy. Far more valuable—and much closer to an ideally rhizomatic existence—is the difference-producing and difference-sustaining estuarine tension that this study of translative practices in translingual authors’ works has attempted to illustrate. It is in fact the power of translative acts, communal and individual, to create estuarine environments within which one can negotiate both nationhood and globality that posit the theory of the cultural estuary as a valid lens through which to examine writing in the postcolonial studies field.
