Postmodern valorization of exile as productivity masks the genuine pains of dislocation

Evidence

Even the increasing insistence on self-exile as a positively enabling experience for writers is by no means new; what is new, and decidedly postmodernisr, is the emphasis we find in Shame on the productivity, .rather than the pain, of dislocating oneself from one’s original community, as well as the idea, made much sharper in Rushdie’s more recent writings, of multiple belongings. But this too fits, because the current metropolitan milieu, with its debunking of any ‘myths of origin’ and ‘metaphysics of presence’, does not really authorize any sustained acknowledgement of such pains. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 525

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader critique (matching this book’s project) that metropolitan poststructuralist/postmodern discourse — including the debunking of ‘myths of origin’ that underwrites strategic essentialism debates — erases material pain and experience. — connects to: Metropolitan postmodern critique delegitimizes acknowledging exile’s pain — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 231; Postmodern celebration of exilic multiplicity suppresses acknowledgment of exile’s pains
• SEED: Angle: does the metropolitan intellectual celebration of ‘multiple belongings’ and nomadic identity function as class privilege that erases the actual costs of displacement? Pairs with Ahmad’s materialist critique.

Broader Connections

• Postmodern celebration of exilic multiplicity suppresses acknowledgment of exile’s pains #corroborates (0.90)
• Metropolitan postmodern critique delegitimizes acknowledging exile’s pain #corroborates (0.85) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 231