Immigrants and Exile

I would like to comment on Barbara's remarks and the insightful question of: "how can robust communities be developed from groups of intellectuals whose "consciousness [is] unable to to be at rest anywhere" (494)?" I do not aim at providing an answer, and I may actually take it quite on a detour from its original scope of query, but there are interesting layers that could be added to it, and that actually tie this issue with most of the others that have been raised in these threads and that are dealth with by the other readings as well - issues such as oppression, racism and racialization, the Syrian refugee crisis, and ultimately the processes of othering and integration, that we could imagine as the tense extremes of a dialectical relation in the life of an exile, especially if an intellectual. In the first place, it is useful to keep in mind the personal and cultural history behind Edward Said's intellectual career and standpoints. As a Palestinian, he knows and carries better than anyone else today what it means to be displaced and systematically oppressed for generations, floating in that limbo of being costantly hoping yet not having concrete perspectives of returning, to be adjusting to a new place and yet to be nostalgic and attached to one's "native" identity, which is particularly threatened and longed in the case of the Palestinian people. Now, it is fundamental, in my opinion, to frame Said's piece within his broader work and theories before being able to make inferences or deepen our reflections. The only text I have read from him entirely and that I feel confident enough using as a reference point is his major book Orientalism. One of the book's main arguments could be summarized (altough probably over-simplified), just to the limited means of our limited discussion, by Said's claim that "“Neither the term Orient nor the concept of the West has any ontological stability; each is made up of human effort, partly affirmation, partly identification of the Other.” This importantly leads to theories of decoloniality and postcolonial thought, of which Said is considered to be one of the fathers exactly through his work Orientalism. Being aware of this and especially keeping in mind the arguments made by Fanon and Wilson, and even DuBois, in the extracts we have been reading, everything seems to connect together in depicting the modern world as one of scattered "exiles" whose own consciousness undergoes complex processes of attempting to reconcile itself within a distorted, liquid (referring to Bauman's theories of liquid modernity, for example) conception of space and time, such as that of the globalized society. Furthermore, in this world, the exile with a restless, because aware, consciousness, enters relationships with the people of the country he enters as foreigner that are fundamentally relations of power, where the possibility of a positive and desirable notion of "integration" is made ever slighter by the nude facts of colonization, cultural appropriation and inequality itself. How can there be (and should we wish there was) real integration or adjustement, as it seems to be mentioned by the several testimonies of our own immigration as international students to Canada, when our relationships with the Other, may that be the foreigner or our host if we are the foreigners, are so much shaped by the material and cultural power embedded within our identities? Is the process of othering unavoidable, especially in a global capitalist consumer society where we relate to each other on material bases of individual advantage?