Description
Book SynopsisThe twentieth century has witnessed the rise of a large population of postcolonial intellectual migrants willingly arriving from formerly colonized countries into the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada to pursue intellectual goals. Embedded in this movement from the formerly colonized spaces into the West is the vexed question of dislocation and displacement for these intellectual subjects.
The Postcolonial Citizen traces how such modes of (un)belonging are represented within literary and cultural space and how migrancy, and in particular the postcolonial intellectual migrant, is symbolically and philosophically understood as a cultural icon of displacement in the West. Using literary texts, autobiographical narrative of displacement, and cultural criticism, this book treats the cultural reception of intellectual migrancy (particularly within America) as both an uneasy and ambiguous condition. What is timely about this book's treatment of migrancy is the current threa
Trade Review«Immigrants rarely speak in one tongue alone, but, alas, academics often do. While laying claim to her postcolonial citizenship, Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt shows us that academia too can be a foreign country. The form of her book, its multiple registers and idioms, announces a new polyglot nation. This is the work of a true intellectual migrant.» (Amitava Kumar, Professor of English, Vassar College; Author of ‘Passport Photos’)
«Suspended in the complex constellations of planetary modernity, where migration and the migrant set the critical stage for a radical revaluation of ‘citizenship’ and belonging, ‘The Postcolonial Citizen’ bravely and brilliantly travels into the unfolding languages – both poetical and political – of the agonistic fusion of horizons which, however viciously resisted and cruelly denied, is the becoming of today’s world.» (Iain Chambers, Università degli Studi di Napoli ‘L’Orientale’)
