Black, white, and brown: Coloniality, national forms, and the emergence of the global South

By interrogating both the national and the global, my dissertation attempts to create a discourse where both civil and human rights merge together. In order to create such a historical condition of equality on a global scale, I privilege the role of the cultivated intellectual. In particular, I argue about the need to undo the nation-based discourse about the U.S. by placing it in the fluid contexts of two crucial moments in modernity: the colonial period of the eighteenth century and before and the era of globalization in the late twentieth century. The goal of this ideology critique of the nation-state based discourse is to pave the way for cultural internationalism, a condition of global equality that the nation-state form has hindered so far.;By critically placing John Locke's career, his ideas of government based on labor and property, and William Bartram's silence about the Revolution in his Travels and silence the rest of his life afterwards, in the transatlantic triangular relationship of colonialism between Africa, England, and North America, I suggest that Locke-influenced Declaration of Independence and the Republic it gave rise to is rooted in cross-border geopolitics of colonial modernity. In the era of globalization, however, V. S. Naipaul, through his travels in the U.S. South, has excavated and restored the transregional fluidities of the colonial era, further demonstrating the historical impossibility of the nation-state based discourse. In his first four works of fiction, Naipaul performatively conceives this idea of colonial fluidity by mixing the cosmopolitan with the vernacular in order to make eventually his international discourse about the U.S. South possible. Toni Morrison, by advancing the presence and absence of woman's agency, and Gloria Anzaldua, by evolving her border discourse into international solidarity, critique the national and produce a discourse about vernacular internationalism.;In order to create a discourse beyond the limited and limiting national and the global, the figure of the intellectual needs to cultivate a state of mind of foreignness in themselves as well as others as endorsed by Edward Said, Hugo of St. Victor, and Kabir.