Why Should We Study Immigration Flows in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries?
Abstract 1. Ten years back when I published The Marginal Nation (1999), I had remarked intuitively that national histories would have to be revised in the light of the studies on migration. I had termed my own study as a study of neo-nation in the Althusserian spirit of over-determination. I followed up that remark with another study of the figure of the migrant in the background of the practices of friendship and enmity I studied the instance of one part of our country, the Norheast – in order to grasp the role of population movements in our political history. In The Materiality of Politics (Volume 1, Chapter 5, 2007), which had as its part this second study, I had termed migrant as the figure of the abnormal in the context of the circles of insecurity that make up the nationalist universe. But I feel that both these attempts were inadequate in terms of theoretically formulating the significance of the historical question of immigration and control practices. I think we have to formul
