Disjunction, Ethics and the Diasporic Subject

Abstract

Amongst the issues which have emerged from recent studies on transnationalism, globalism and the new world order is the idea that globalization has potentially made us all denizens if not citizens of the world in a way eighteenth-century theorists of cosmopolitanism could never have anticipated (Appiah, 2006). Not only are our mental horizons considerably broader (Appadurai, 1996), our deeds and decisions have an impact which reaches far beyond our national frontiers, as the current debates about global warming and starvation seem to indicate. And yet the passage from ‘the local tribe’ to what Anthony Appiah (2007) calls ‘the global tribe’ is far from being an altogether smooth one. If we have undeniably gone more global — at least the privileged fringes of our societies have — and can now project ourselves beyond the closed circle of family and locally contracted ties, the phenomenon has shown its limits. The rise of nationalist voices and the revival of regional customs and ways of life are symptomatic of the limits and difficulties of such dramatic tension between the local and the global which characterizes life today (Bayart, 1996) in a world where local solidarities often outshine global ties and where the global community sometimes seems more like fiction than reality, a matrix of potential encounters, a network of randomly constructed links, episodic and fleeting, noncommittal and changing, than real relations that bind members of a community together.¹