Rhetorical inflation made exile a soul-condition detached from material life

Evidence

Out of these reorganizations of capital, communications and personnel has come the image of ‘theorist’ as ‘traveller’, and of literary production itself as a ruse of immigration, of travelling lightly. … The fact that some of these intellectuals actually were political exiles has been taken advantage of, in an incredibly inflationary rhetoric, to deploy the word ‘exile’, first as a metaphor and then as a fully appropriated descriptive label for the existential condition of the immigrant as such; the upper-class Indian who chooses to live in the metropolitan country is then called ‘the diasporic Indian’, and ‘exile’ itself becomes a condition of the soul, unrelated to faces of material life. Exile, immigration and professional preference become synonymous and, indeed, mutually indistinguishable. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 339

Categorization

• DEFINE: Shows a discursive move from metaphor to fully appropriated descriptive label — a mechanism relevant to how ‘strategic’ identity terms harden into naturalized residence.
• XREF: Illustrates Spivak’s own warning trajectory: strategic essentialism’s ironic reference to essentialism hardening into genuine essentialism — here exile similarly slides from metaphor to condition-of-soul. — connects to: Self-exile makes a writer accountable to his new, not home, readership — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 512; Inflationary rhetoric turned exile into a synonym for voluntary migration — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 136

Broader Connections

• Inflationary rhetoric turned exile into a synonym for voluntary migration #corroborates (0.95) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 136