| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
It is quite clear that a traditional identity politics—a politics of respectful nonintervention in others’ cultures while chauvinistically tied to one’s own—is no longer possible according to the ideas that flow through these six novels.
These novels suggest that we must come alive to the power and the possibilities the exile can create. For the exile is not just a person made by two lands; his or her subjectivity is contructed by the fact that he or she is different from both. The exile is more active: The exile is one “who inhabits one place and remembers or projects the reality of another.”11 Seidel’s notion of projection is extremely important. The exile, being by his or her structural position already cut off from any notion of a stable landscape by his or her geographical difference, is able to understand the nature of projection—particularly the projection of a landscape, a dream of home. By being between two landscapes, the exile is able to invalidate the notion of the single and stable nation. It is the fact that the exile makes the projection, which comes in the form of an intervention—both theoretical and political—that disrupts any discourse that would affirm the solidity of any landscape. By landscape, I mean cultural constructions of “nation,” “culture,” and “homeland.”
So, just as we saw a dialectic occur within the process of mimicry, a dialectic arising out of playing many roles and resulting in the impossibility of all of them, so we see another dialectic in progress. This is a dialectic between the subject (as constructor and construction) and a notion of landscape (which is both projection and home to the subject’s being). The landscape, its social customs, its roles, and the notion of it as home, all contribute to the construction of the subject. The exile, because he or she is between landscapes, is both part of and distant from the creative processes that landscapes perform. As such, the exile invalidates the notion of subject as stable and static. The exile is the outermost example of subjectivity that returns to invade the center of the concept. Equally, the subject through its projection onto the landscape of his or her desires, hopes, dreams of home, creates notions of nation, culture, and homeland.