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more nuanced view that includes hybridity. This is the main characteristic of Homi K. Bhabha’s “politics of difference,” a concept which is instrumental in challenging the essentialism of modern sovereignty and to which Hardt and Negri oppose their globalization theory.
Taking her cue from Algerian scholar Reda Bensmaïa’s apt phrase in Experimental Nations: Or the Invention of the Maghreb (2003), Valérie Orlando characterizes wandering Maghrebian writers as nomads inhabiting “experimental nations”: spaces unhindered by borders or state bureaucracies. Orlando argues that contemporary Algerian authors, such as Salim Bachi and Malika Mokeddem, consider the postindependence Algerian state more repressive than the former colonial French empire. The (f)ailing and corrupt nation-state is gradually replaced by a borderless, nationless space in which nomadic authors, like Edward Said’s secular intellectuals inhabiting an “exilic” space (Said 407), are able to reconfigure their idioms, history, territory, and community from “outside” their homelands. Thus, “writing becomes a home for those who have no homeland,” as Said would often argue, reiterating this idea from Adorno (Nagy-Zekmi, Paradoxical Citizenship xiii).2
The figure of the nomad is also key in Hardt and Negri’s genealogy of empire. Nomadism, along with exodus or desertion-as-resistance, is part of what they call “being-against,” a stance embraced by the early “against-men,” that is, the first antifascist deserters of treacherous European governments who have become tomorrow’s “multitude.” This “new nomadic horde,” or “new race of barbarians,” offers an alternative, which is that of the “counter-empire” (Hardt and Negri 210–214).
The specter of migration looms large in this section inasmuch as this new nomadism also applies to the five million Portuguese immigrants in the world (as opposed to the ten million inhabitants of Portugal) who have emigrated, especially during the Salazar dictatorship. Although the Portuguese represent one of the main immigrant communities in France, they remain “invisible,” absent from public discourse because, as Martine Fernandes argues, they are seen as “good” immigrants, easily assimilated into French culture—as opposed to non-Western or non-European immigrants, such as Algerians, sub-Saharan Africans,