ensuring security for white American citizens from racialized others, remains deeply
rooted within American national identity. The USA has long grappled with how to
manage its black, native, Asian and Latino immigrant populations. In essence, powerful
groups in the USA have often constructed groups who differ by race, ethnicity and
religion as potential threats to American security...Unassimilable groups within the
borders of the American nation-state pose certain risks the indigenous folk who refuse
to give up their land and their traditional ways, the black people whose ghetto art
catalyzed hip hop, Latino immigrant populations who insist on speaking Spanish and
sending money home to their relatives, all constitute potential threats to the American
way of life...Thus every concept of threat remains racialized. (Collins 206)The paradox of the privilege both migrancy and nomadism claim to offer is exhibited in
the above as the racialization of the western social order into a water-tight spectacle will
continue to stand in the way of the integration quest that drives these abstractions of
mobility which have done a lot to draw many from the postcolonial world into a
disposition towards exilic dislocation in other names.
Closely related to migrancy and nomadism in the discourse of exile is multiculturalism.
Like the other two concepts, multiculturalism assays to bring into focus the dialectic of
home and exile, on the one hand and the nation state and diaspora on the other, setting
home and the nation state in a battle for not only survival, but also that of integrity (David
Bennett 1998:44). Yet since “its coinage by a Canadian Royal Commission in 1965”
(Bennett 2), the term has meant different things to different people. To the postcolonial
world particularly, the perception of it has been essentially along the axes of increased
border crossing. Again, the impression of it is that of the provision of respite to
predominantly postcolonial minority groups whose movement, usually to the
metropolitan countries of the North, seeks in a way to endorse the pluralism of identities
and tolerance which the space of the host countries provides. If in a way this appears to
be a measure of the willingness of the host nations to open up and extend hands of
accommodation to the perceived postcolonial beneficiaries, the desired expectation has,
for the most part, remained elusive.
Yet, multiculturalism which is conceptually plagued by conflicting framings, thrives,
among other things, on the fetishization of community (Joseph in Donna Strickland
2004:182). Put differently, the practice is sustained by the suspension of recognition of
difference to legitimize the abstraction of a melting pot of culture in a fashion that