To what stake then is the tenacity inherent in such sense of community tied; and to what
extent can the preservation of privileges for a negligible part of a subordinated group be
used as a measure for living up to the ethos of tolerance? Perhaps the first challenge
posed in this case is the need to unmask the implications of the elite ideology that
downplays the more credible pulse of the larger community of the border-crossing
phenomenon. More substantially, the question raised above returns us to the fetishization
that dogs the sense of community that multiculturalism practised with an affected slant
creates. As Miranda Joseph reckons:
Fetishizing community only makes us blind to the ways we might intervene in the
enactment of domination and exploitation. I see the practice of critique, and in particular
a critical relationship to community, as an ethical practice of community, as an important
mode of participation. (Donna Strickland 2004:182)Thus the refusal to admit the faultlines of multiculturalism practised in this mode that
underwrites imperialism and betrays a collusion with the imperial order to affirm the
disingenuity of the capitalist order may have, after all, drawn back the march towards
global equity more than it appears to have advanced it. Among other things, consumerism
and the deception of purchasing power that it confers on buyers, especially of the
privileged few that make up this hue of postcolonial subjectivities may have blinded them
to the enormity of the betrayal that their attitude embodies. Whatever purchasing power
they boast about, only goes to serve the capitalist interest of the host nations. Although
speaking essentially to the treachery of capital mobility and the intractable elusiveness
that globalization engenders as a fulcrum for contemporary capitalism, the painful
lugubrious lamentation that one finds in “Immigrant Voice” in When it no Longer
Matters where you Live , over the slippage of cash from migrants in the USA,
demonstrates the unpalatable dynamics of “domination and exploitation” that
multiculturalism endorses. Thus, for a future that will be worth dissipating multicultural
energy upon by Africans who must find themselves in the diaspora of the West, Serote
affirms the primacy of return as an antidote to drowning in the pull of multicultural
proselytizing. Read in this thesis against the frame of “transnation”, the idea of “history is
the home address” in Serote also responds to the double standards of the concept.