We think of immigration as a movement in space, from one country to
another.... [Immigrants] were born in another country, in another
culture. They bring with them from their homeland certain habits and
values, shared assumptions and common experiences -- certain prejudices,
perhaps. They face nativist hostility...
The same could be said of another set of immigrants: those who have made
the journey through time rather than space.... In the great cities and
airports, in the suburbs and projects, among the young millennials
who've never been anywhere but the present, you will see people in their
nineties who have travelled to the second decade of the 21st century
from a strange, faraway land, the America of the 1920s. Millions of
Americans -- some of them never having changed their spatial addresses --
have survived a long and perhaps difficult journey to modern America
from their birth-time in the America of the 1930s and 1940s....
If spatial immigrants find it hard to assimilate, they feel rejected,
whereas temporal immigrants feel usurped.
-- James
Meek. "
Refugees from the Past" a review of
Raymond
Chandler: The Detections of Totality by Fredric Jameson.
London
Review of Books Vol. 39 No. 1 (5 January 2017) pages 31-34.
The implication is that such eloquence as Nulty has is dependent on the
preservation of the racial status quo; that for him to treat the races
equally would be not only to deprive him of overt power but to
impoverish his power of speech, to subtract permanently from that
essential part of himself that consists of racism; that it is impossible
for black people to gain dignity without their white oppressors losing
self. It may be that those Americans who emigrated joyfully and
hopefully from the old America of the 1940s into the new America of
civil rights were outnumbered by those who came as refugees from the
past. 'When we left the old country, we were forced to leave everything
behind. They even took our racist vocabulary.'
-- James
Meek. "
Refugees from the Past" a review of
Raymond
Chandler: The Detections of Totality by Fredric Jameson.
London
Review of Books Vol. 39 No. 1 (5 January 2017) pages 31-34.