Reimagining the US National Time in West of the Jordan and The Last Generation

Abstract

In Chapter 1, I have argued that non-national consciousness is a specific moment in which the subject remains immutably foreign despite citizenship and acculturation. Along these lines I have used the term non-national not only to mean moving beyond geographical territories but also to mean using a non-nation-centered perspective to examine communities formed and defined by their ethnic, racial, and religious affiliations, located both within and outside of specific geographical territories. I have also reconfigured the notion of “imagined communities” as “imagined (transnational) communities.” This perception of the nation in terms of transnational communities stands in contrast to the paradigmatic story of consensus and homogeneity of the American nation. Within the context of nation formation, Anderson draws an analogy between the idea of the nation “conceived as a solid community moving steadily down (or up) history” and the “idea of a sociological organism moving calendrically through a homogenous empty time” (26). Nevertheless, the conception(s) of the nation from the perspectives of the colonized, the exiled, the displaced, and the migrant disrupt the genealogy of the nation as a steady movement in history as well as the perception of it as a solid community.