| dc.contributor.author | Johnson, Brian R. | en_US |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2014-10-21T12:38:22Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2003 | |
| dc.date.issued | 2003 | en_US |
| dc.identifier.other | AAINQ83723 | en_US |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/10222/54578 | |
| dc.description | This thesis analyzes the proliferation of nomadic tropes in recent Euro-American literary and theoretical discourse as both a symptom and a strategic response to what Fredric Jameson calls "the cultural logic of late capitalism." Although current uses of the nomad to signal nostalgic or radical consciousness tend to claim a decisive break with the Eurocentric vocabulary of modernist primitivism on the grounds that they privilege spatial categories over temporal ones, the shift from modernist primitivism to postmodernist nomadology represents neither a decisive break nor a simple repetition, but an ambiguous mutation in the structure of twentieth-century primitivism. Both the complexity and the appeal of the nomad for contemporary writers, I argue, stems from the nomad's unique synthesis of spatial and temporal categories. | en_US |
| dc.description | The first chapter of the thesis provides a genealogy of the nomad in anthropological writing since the eighteenth century to illustrate nomadism's constitutive implication in temporal-evolutionary paradigms and to trace the emergence of two competing nomadic figures: "the pure nomad" (whose mobility derives from pastoralism) and "the general nomad" (whose mobility is unqualified). Chapter Two explores how the poetics of these competing nomadic figures both instantiate and diverge from modernist primitivism through readings of their function as signs of dwelling and homecoming in T. E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1935), Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines (1987), and Michael Asher's The Last of the Bedu (1996). Following Jameson's account of modernity and postmodernity as periods dominated experientially by categories of time and space respectively, I identify a general shift towards nomadic representations of the primitive in Chatwin and Asher's works, and a more specific shift in representations of nomadism itself from the evolutionary "pure nomadism" favored by Lawrence, to the more spatially-oriented "general nomadism" preferred by his successors. | en_US |
| dc.description | In Chapter Three, I turn from these more popular texts to address the development of philosophical "nomadology" in the poststructuralist theory of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Although their adoption of the nomad as a figure of radical political discourse ("the war machine") and libidinal experimentation ("the nomad subject") is often dismissed as utopian or anarchic, I find that attention to alterations in the rhetoric of nomadism from their earlier to their later work reveals a more cautious, flexible, and nuanced political "toolbox" than their critics usually allow, even if their critique of primitivism is ultimately incomplete. Finally, I consider ways in which the tension between utopian and cartographic versions of nomadism within Deleuzo-Guattarian nomadology have been synthesized in postmodern and postcolonial fictions that treat nomadism as a hinge between apocalyptic thinking and navigational discourses of cognitive mapping. Alfred Bester's early cyberpunk novel, The Stars My Destination (1956), and Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient (1992) illustrate how the nomad's spatio-temporal doubleness allows it to coordinate competing political aesthetics and thus to figure more complete, more nuanced visions of social transformation. Ultimately, however, the thesis suggests that nomadism's imbrication in colonial discourse makes it a problematic figure for political discourses whose very aim is the undoing of the structures that subtend primitivist discourses of imperialist nostalgia. | en_US |
| dc.description | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Dalhousie University (Canada), 2003. | en_US |
| dc.language | eng | en_US |
| dc.publisher | Dalhousie University | en_US |
| dc.publisher | | en_US |
| dc.subject | Literature, Modern. | en_US |
| dc.subject | Anthropology, Cultural. | en_US |
| dc.subject | Sociology, Theory and Methods. | en_US |
| dc.subject | Literature, Canadian (English). | en_US |
| dc.subject | Literature, English. | en_US |
| dc.title | Nomads and nomadologies: Transformations of the primitive in twentieth-century theory and culture. | en_US |
| dc.type | text | en_US |
| dc.contributor.degree | Ph.D. | en_US |
