Chosen vagrancy differs from principled exile, which resists pleasure-denial and celebrates the rootless intellect.

Evidence

Exile, in the true sense, is of many kinds besides the purely colonial, and in any case it rarely produces an enduring sense of great pleasure. Exile usually has, as Williams points out, a principle, and the principle prevents one from ‘floating upwards’ and denying the pain. Self-exile and ‘vagrancy’, by contrast, have become more common amongst artists in every successive phase of bourgeois culture since the early days of Romanticism, and as the experience itself has been chosen with greater frequency, the sense of celebration and of ‘the migrant intellect root[ing] itself in itself’ has grown proportionately. … Ir i~ the palpable presence of this kind of living in Rushdie’s work, with its accompanying inability to believe in any community of actual praxis, and hence the belief in the universality of betrayal, which is lost in those readings of his work which locate it primarily in the problematic of the ‘Nation’ and the ‘Third World’, even if one ends by complicating that location. … Williams’s summary evaluation of that ‘tradition’, with his highly perceptive diagnosis of its particular virtues and failings, would imply, followed in its full logic, that Rushdie’s work is to be located neither in some unified and categorizable ‘Third World’, nor in some innocent myth of’migrancy’, as Rushdie himself would have it, nor in an empty, postmodernist ‘cosmopolitanism’, bur in a condition which is in some basic ways older, wider, far more extreme. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 627

Categorization

• XREF: Distinguishes forced exile-from-a-principle from chosen migrant-vagrancy; connects to Spivak’s retired strategic essentialism in that self-chosen ironic identity play tends to float free of material pain — the collective-irony bind. Also echoes earlier chapters’ critique of the untethered ‘migrant intellect’. — connects to: Chosen self-exile and vagrancy, unlike principled exile, enable celebratory uprootedness — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 627

Broader Connections

• Chosen self-exile and vagrancy, unlike principled exile, enable celebratory uprootedness #corroborates (0.95) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 627