“Meditations on ‘Displacement,’ Indigeneity, and Misrecognitions in U.S. Area Studies: Reframing Global/Local Poetics in the Post-Imperial Pacific” (original) (raw)

For 'displacement,' the OED tracks the quasi-materialist tangle of the English semantic record when it tells us that rulers, plants, waters, feelings of aggression, and day-laborers all can be displaced, that is, shifted, removed, deflected; in short, put out-ofplace by some disruptive structural, biological, or tactical shift, as revealed in the OED's macro-instance of creative destruction from 1880, "the displacement of human labor… through machinery." Nowadays, with the more ethereal rise of diaspora discourse, borderlands paradigms, and postcolonial dissemination models of split subjectivity into power across the professional US academy, displacement has become a virtually normative concept/tactic by which to talk of, track, and organize the makings of world literature, knowledge, community, and culture.