Migrant Acts: Deterritorializing Postcoloniality

One way of coming to grips with Jorge Fernandes' Challenging Euro-America's Politics of Identityis to ponder what the space is that Sherman Alexie is trying to clear in the quote above. Alexie reveals an impatience not only with having to play 'the Indian' every time to the 'Cowboy' of the larger Euro-American society he lives in but also at Indian self-constructions that are derivative of a singular narrative of that colonization. Alexie resents his reduction to a stereotype co-produced by both colonizer and colonized. He recounts how after his breakthrough novel The Business of Fancydancingin 1992 he was anointed "one of the major lyric voices of our time" by the New York Times Review of Books- and his reaction was to go to the bathroom and throw up. Jorge Fernandes is trying to understand the emergence of postcolonial selves that are derived neither from imperial/colonial ideas of the non-European nor from responses to those ideas that anchor themselves in nativism or third world nationalism.

This desire for a third space, outside of either Eurocentric narrations or nativist reaction, is indexed in the first chapter of the book, "Forget the Alamo! A eulogy for Caliban." In this latest take on William Shakespeare's play on the encounter between Europe and the new world, The Tempest, Fernandes locates his enunciator of desired space in the mute and off-stage figure of Sycorax, Caliban's mother. In contrast to Caliban, who is tied as slave to his master Prospero, and cannot articulate a resistance to the latter outside his language and epistemology, Sycorax defies the colonial encounter altogether. Fernandes glosses Sycorax thus:

Her name, the phrase "Go to Hell!" is a performative utterance whose illocutionary force exceeds the fixity of proper names. She exceeds the role of a foil in Prospero's civilizational narrative. Hers is an entropic presence visible in the gravitational distortions she inflicts on those who orbit around her. Sycorax's being is quintessentially improvisational: we know of her presence, but, unlike Caliban's, cannot capture it in time and space. She is the embodiment of motion and dispersal, "an otherness that resists containment."

(19).

Sycorax is, for Fernandes, synonymous with a set of appealing attributes that mostly center on mobility and elision of the terms of the encounter between civilized and barbarian that structures colonialism. She is all about polyrhythmic appropriations, transmutations, impurity, ephemerality, and the reality of creolism rather than the imagined community of nationalism. Sycorax, to Fernandes, embodies the impossibility of being at one with the nation and the monotopic illusion that ties it to language. She is against roots and for routes, and "… transcends the territorial by eschewing the politics of authenticity … (she) is a migrant whose acts of translation and appropriation rewrite cultures and produce identities that are always already in flux." (8).

For Fernandes (drawing on Deleuze and Guattari in their A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia) bodies are not defined by coordinates that locate them in time and space, or constitute them as static and sovereign through narratives that colonize pasts, presents and futures. Rather, they are defined by their haecceity – their trajectories or vectors of movement which always retain an element of incommensurability and improvisation. Their lines of flight defy the attempt of nations and other forms of collective imagination to capture them. The result is a fractal politics enacted by fuzzy aggregates. In Fernandes' distillation:

The recursive mechanism that results from the encounter between nation-states and nomads results not in the total enclosure of the latter or in the evisceration of the former, but in a fractal politics. The fractal is not a dialectical formation that sediments identities into already established political and cultural communities. Rather, the inherently recursive structure of migrancy results in complex political formations that are themselves always...