A Diaspora Journal
by Joshua Ellison · 11/01/06
THERE IS ALSO a public dimension here that is as important as the private one. It’s part of the story too, part of what gives it urgency. As humanity becomes more nomadic and connected, a new kind of map has emerged. The movements of people – along paths of aspiration and necessity – now shape the world almost as much as the states that contain us.
Increasingly, the landscape is dominated by magnetic poles of power and opportunity. They exert their strong pull on people from less prosperous parts of the world, or on those looking to take advantage of their expanding access. This has changed life dramatically in places like New York, Paris, Berlin, even Tel Aviv and Dubai, as well as in the global hinterlands. The world’s metropolises are, more than ever, populated by people with complex allegiances, histories, and self-definitions. If it were ever possible to speak broadly about the qualities of a Londoner or a Torontonian, it is definitely not now. Those cities, today, are places from which millions of lines extend – in the form of people, capital, art, information – and touch nearly every other conceivable point on the globe.
The new geography has a near-universal impact, but it is not experienced equally. It seems that the world is being divided into open and closed zones. The new map is tiered. My American birth, and my passport, let me turn my curiosity towards other parts of the world: to travel, to study, to do business through a series of welcoming, and ever more accessible, doors. Many others – most, in fact – find themselves on the outside, looking in. My open zones are closed to them. My borderless world is, to them, a high-walled fortress. They enter at their own peril, or not at all.
All the same, nationality, ethnicity, and language have–generally speaking–a less deterministic effect on the trajectory of our lives. Although they still confer blessings and curses, still play a large part in defining our place on the map, we find ourselves with a host of opportunities for redirecting our fate. Our lives are less easily situated within parochial settings. Who we work for, whose food we eat, whose books we read and movies we see, where we choose to live – these things are now less localized, less mindful of innate difference. Even within the limits of our respective playing fields, we have many choices to make about how to navigate our own positions. If Habitus has real relevance, its because the border-crossing condition has become a largely egalitarian one; and we all have to recognize it if we are to meaningfully interpret the world we live in today.
