More on Roots and Routes

Just a bit of a postscript regarding Clifford's essay, which appeared in 1994, I believe. I think the questions he raises are vitally important (especially for our pursuits in this class), and they're immediate and direct: "What is at stake, politically and intellectually, in contemporary invocations of diaspora"? This is especially pertinent given that diasporic consciousness and positions so often get articulated (in largely salutary ways) by academics, theorists, writers, artists, etc. What happens when we nearly start to celebrate the condition of exile? What responsibility do we have as participants in literary studies, in a class like this one, etc., to keep this discourse rooted in historical and cultural specificity? If any of you end up pursuing inquiry along these lines (perhaps in conjunction with a study of the origins and trajectories of one or more of the characters we'll encounter in the fiction), you might check out Caren Kaplan's essay "Traveling Theorists: Cosmopolitan Diasporas," which I'm pretty sure I have up on e-reserve (having intended at one point to put it on the schedule); in fact, the book in which this chapter appears, Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement is fabulous and useful, reminding us in myriad ways that "all displacements are not the same." Also relevant in this constellation, I think, would be Rushdie's essay "Imaginary Homelands," Pico Iyer's travel book/essay The Global Soul, and Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan's essay "Postcoloniality and the Boundaries of Identity" (can't remember where this essay appears, but it's a good one).