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 chapter 1 REFORMULATING DIASPORA SPATIALITIES Diaspora stories are about the possibilities and the impossibilities of being in place. This chapter is a consideration of the ways in which spatial discourses in U.S. literature and in critical interdisciplinary approaches inform our thinking about diasporas. Lived and imagined places play a significant role in the production of diaspora communities and literatures. In the literary production of diaspora experiences, new spatialities are created and established ones are engaged and destabilized. Place is also a source through which cultural identities and practices are constructed. Diaspora literatures about labor migrations and racialized diasporic settlements, such as the ones examined in the next chapters, stage the diasporic sense of place as a struggle with existing spatial discourses based on racialization and enclosure—what I shall call the coloniality of place. I begin by underscoring the import of place to U.S. literature to understand better how diaspora social formations and narratives negotiate with prevalent spatial practices and discourses, especially around enclosures. The exposition of the idea of migrant sites in the latter part of the chapter builds on the discussion of place in U.S. literature and diaspora spatiality. In that section, I explain how the term “migrant sites” encapsulates the the tension between the translocal (migrant) dimension of place, produced by the knowledges, languages, and memories of other places, and the enclosures of diasporas through spatial stereotypes generated by civilizational , racialist discourses (sites). AMERICAN PLACE While there is certainly not a single force or concept shaping American Literature , nature and place have provided a cornerstone that shaped its “national fantasies .” In the formation of most national identities, land or territory is axial. As Jonathan Boyarin and Daniel Boyarin explain in their book Powers of Diaspora, “In the modern, territorial nation-state space is an unchanging ground of iden- tity” (). In the nations of the “young” Americas, geography was destiny. American nations built their identities around places constructed as available, vacant, and endless. Seen as a boon and a curse, a desert and a garden in turns, American space became a medium for the creation of some imagined communities and the locus for the near-demise of others. In the U.S. North American context, the Puritan vision of a civic society depended on a designated American space. As the political scientist David Jacobson has explained in Place and Belonging in America, “civic politics was also an inherently territorial phenomenon, as it involved the need to order the world, to delineate and determine God’s jurisdiction territorially, and the territorial jurisdiction of his people. . . . People and civil polity become synonymous with ‘place’ and constituted, and are constituted by a ‘territory’” (), necessarily of a bounded, bordered nature. Pointing to the prevalence of references to land, gardening, and planting in Puritan writing, Jacobson argues that, contrary to the perception of Puritan denigration of the wilderness as a site exclusively associated with demons and darkness, “the land, the vegetation, and the soil were . . . part of the very soul of Puritanism and its ethic, contributing to, and anticipating, a theme in American national identity and, indeed, in all national movements” (). The territorial nature of early American morality, ethics, and politics served to justify the conquest of “nomadic ” unbordered peoples, and to sow the seeds of nationhood. Thomas Jefferson ’s agrarian ideal itself was an instrument of national identity construction around territory, property, and individualism, which undergirded the expansion projects into the West, Louisiana, and the Northwest. Key to the self-representation of “America” as nation, land and nature are also the basis of its putative uniqueness. The American imaginary has long constituted itself as possessing a special, exceptional relation to nature. Of course, geography has been central to the symbologies of many, if not most, nations in their formative stage and thereafter. Yet the “exceptionality” of the United States might lie in the immense discursive proliferation of “exceptionality” itself regarding the relationship between nation and nature. The perceived singularity of the United States in its relationship to nature has strong foundations in its self-image as a “frontier” settler nation. Indeed, in both of the foundational myths of “the frontier ” and “the garden,” land is the key component that shapes the idea of America and its uniqueness (see Dyck). While the industrial revolution in Europe was propelled by available capital and labor, the United States, which lacked both, relied on its vast natural resources (that is, the exploitation thereof for raw materials ) to spur development and eventual prosperity. A...

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