Diaspora and postmodern fecundity

Central to the experience of postmodernity is the increase in, and the intensification of, transnational encounters. The globalization of capital, culture, work-forces, and identities leads to patterns of homogenization whose totalizing tendency is undercut by intense fragmentation and the local play of differences. The increased productivity in economic and cultural terms marks the postmodern as remarkably fecund. This perception of fecundity comes from the various, and often opposing, groups on the political continuum.1 The \u27triumph\u27 of transnational capital in Asia and the entry of Eastern Europe into the capitalist fold have created unprecedented economic and financial flows. Simultaneously, the antifoundational dismantling of epistemological hierarchies release long-repressed energies that create new flows and open up fresh possibilities. These new flows and structuration’s require cognitive refrigeration, as older modes of knowing the world have become inadequate. The nation is one social and cultural formation that has come to be rigorously Interrogated in the light of the global-local· dynamisms. A rise in the volume of migrations and the increasing visibility of varied diasporas - communities that transcend the geopolitical boundaries of the nation-state - demand a new sense of national belonging: national heritage, essence, tradition etc. have lost their immanent valences. For instance, Chow (1993) stresses the need to "unlearn Chinese ness" in order to foster Chinese diasporic identity

The Plague Check: Population Culling as Pandemic Realpolitik

The COVID pandemic presented a bioeconomic opportunity to re-entrench extant differences (racial, sexual, ethnic, religious, or otherwise) and to escalate the ongoing engineering of imagined communities. This paper examines how this general paradigm unfolded in India’s lockdown of March 2020, and the consequent “long walk home” for migrant laborers. Narendra Modi’s decision exemplifies an autoimmune drive that splits the national body-politic into a visible citizenry, groomed as electorate, and the teeming masses, marked as threat and slated for expulsion from a unified body politic. Such a drive draws on moral and science-based sanctions for rationalizing what Christina Sharpe has named premature and preventable deaths. The moral sanction draws psychic force from dominant cultural symbols that mystify, sometimes sacralize, the body politic (Modi’s “Lakshman Rekha metaphor), while science-based biosecurity measures sort and segregate populations for the management of health. Plotting Malthusian historical resonances between war, famine, and disease, I characterize the Modi regime’s readiness to countenance migrant deaths as a “population culling” that is, unfortunately, an iterative feature in the archives of global pandemics