because there was a felt need to blur difference across various axes. This is usually done
to institute a morality that would be sympathetic to and sustain some measure of
universal levelling of conflicting identities. Yet the discourse of nomadism returns us
reflectively to the antecedent of colonialism which thrived via the ordering of difference
(Linda Anderson 2005: 114). At the core of such a dialectic was the racial imperative
which drove the operation of the imperial agenda as a commonality throughout spaces of
subjugation whether in the colonies of occupation, as was the case in many parts of
Africa and Asia, or colonies of settlement as in the case of Southern Africa, the Americas
and Oceania.
The blurring the differences with which migrancy is concerned, becomes a Herculean
task in view of the inveterate binary. Khader’s model does more to speak to the
intersection between postcolonial nativeness and nomadism, and the literal consequence
of mixed blood and identity as in the case of discussions of nativism in America. All the
same, we must recognize the general postcolonial efforts within the “aesthetics of
dislocation” that highlights “postcolonial imperative ... [and] celebrates an inclusive,
affirmative, and accumulative identity” (Khader 85) as something that, at least in the
metaphorical sense, speaks to the condition of postcolonial nomadism beyond the space
of American nativism. To face the race question and how it stands in the way of
postcolonial migrancy, Patricia Collins (2006:205) observes about the British society for
instance that it remains challenged by the disruption which its “seemingly homogenous
national identity” has suffered through “post-colonial migrations.” This may explain
more pragmatically the frontline role of race, besides other recently invented strategies of
imperialism, in undermining the ideals of migrancy.
But it is with the American society that she paints so convincingly both the historical and
contemporaneous dynamics of race and racism that have always been put in place to
negate any such practice of fulfilled multiple subjectivities. Usually the basis for racial
essentialism is couched in the shorthand of threat-wariness:
the notion of threats to so-called American security is far from a novel idea within
domestic American politics. In particular, the concept of the racial threat, namely,