ABSTRACT
To think, to write, to be, is no longer for some of us simply to follow in the tracks of those who initially expanded and explained our world as they established the frontiers of Europe, of Empire, and of manhood, where the knots of gendered, sexual and ethnic identity were sometimes loosened, but more usually tightened. Nor is it to echo the mimicries of ethnic absolutisms secured in the rigid nexus of tradition and community, whether in nominating our own or others’ identities. It is rather to abandon such places, such centres, for the migrant’s tale, the nomad’s story. It is to abandon the fixed geometry of sites and roots for the unstable calculations of transit (Chambers 1994a, 246).
