| My dissertation is a comparative and interdisciplinary study of nomadism in modern literature, anthropology, and critical theory. Reading texts by Euro-American writers such as E. Evans-Pritchard, P. Bowles, S. Bellow, G. Deleuze, and F. Guattari, I discuss nomadism as an economic mode of production, an exoticist system of representation, an archetype of mobility and exile, and a problematic critical concept-all of which are constitutive features of what I call the nomadist discourse. I argue that nomadism is a frontier construct marked by self-subversive paradoxes and contradictions. I use the keyword "frontier" ironically to designate, at once, a peripheral territory accessible to the nomadist's adventure, and a circumscribed boundary or border within which "authentic" nomads, such as the Tuaregs of the Sahara and the bedouins of Arabia, are immobilized and exoticized.;I bring the linguistically and culturally loaded signs of "nomad" and "frontier" into dialectical play to expose both the expansionist privileges and the conceptual limitations underlying the anthropological, historical, literary, and theoretical representations of nomadism, from Greek antiquity to the present. Challenging recent poststructuralist and postcolonial notion of "nomad thought", I argue that the alleged counter-discourse of "nomadology" is fundamentally based on positivist concepts disguised as anti-foundationalist ones. My study is revisionist as it attempts to shift the discourses of postcoloniality, cultural studies, and feminist theory, especially as these discourses have unwittingly embraced nomadism without a recognition of its historical, aesthetic, or political implications. |
