>From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
>> > I don't consider myself to be "part of" any country.
>> Have a passport? Pay taxes? Like it or not, you're part of it.
>
>that's a very technical way of looking at the world. i have a french
>passport but i've been living in japan and paying taxes here for a
>few years and intend to be here for quite a few more. what am i a
>part of ? does my experience (and yoshie's and other lboer's and
>migrants generally speaking) say more about what it is to be (or not
>to be) a part of something ? or are we just exceptions that do not
>matter. i think being a migrant tells a lot about what you are made
>to think you are a part of.
>
>didn't chuck mean that his concern is not exclusively in the us and
>as such does not feel bound there ? why do you have to reduce his
>identity to the state that exploits/dominates him ? it is not
>exactly easy nor romantic to be a 'citizen of the world'. his 'not
>being part of any country' sounds like 'being of every country'.
>ain't it the way we ought to see our 'participation' if we want to
>reduce or abolish state oppression ?
Your life until the point you went to Japan was shaped by being French. I remember annoying Fred Pfeil at a Marxist Literary Group conference a year or two ago when I gave him a hard time over his t-shirt that read "I used to be a white American but I gave it up for the good of humanity." But like it or not, he's still a white American - his life has been shaped by being one, he's taken for one by cops as he walks down the street and by clerks when he enters a store. It's not something you can just opt out of. Of course you can act politically to challenge race and racism, but you can't step out of the system with a declaration. Similarly with nationality; my example of a passport was a metonymical way of saying that we're all part of a system of nation-states that regulates participation and movement across borders. As a foreigner in Japan, you're treated very differently from Japanese citizens - and unless I'm falling prey to cliche, Japan is one of the less welcoming places in the world for foreigners. So migrants underscore the limits of the national system - an extreme version being the refugees penned up in the Australian desert at Woomera. Similarly for the metonymy of taxes - I was referring to the whole set of laws and compulsions that apply to everyone living within national borders. That may be "technical," but it's how nation-states work, no?
Doug