Vol 16, No 1 (1997)

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Central to the experience of postmodernity is the increase in, and the intensification of, transnational encounters. The globalization of capital, culture, work-forces, and identities leads to patterns of homogenization whose totalizing tendency is undercut by intense fragmentation and the local play of differences. The increased productivity in economic and cultural terms marks the postmodern as remarkably fecund. This perception of fecundity comes from the various, and often opposing, groups on the political continuum.1 The 'triumph' of transnational capital in Asia and the entry of Eastern Europe into the capitalist fold have created unprecedented economic and financial flows. Simultaneously, the antifoundational dismantling of epistemological hierarchies release long-repressed energies that create new flows and open up fresh possibilities. These new flows and structuration’s require cognitive refrigeration, as older modes of knowing the world have become inadequate. The nation is one social and cultural formation that has come to be rigorously Interrogated in the light of the global-local· dynamisms. A rise in the volume of migrations and the increasing visibility of varied diasporas - communities that transcend the geopolitical boundaries of the nation-state - demand a new sense of national belonging: national heritage, essence, tradition etc. have lost their immanent valences. For instance, Chow (1993) stresses the need to "unlearn Chinese ness" in order to foster Chinese diasporic identity.

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"Nowadays, a far graver mistake is made: race is confused with nation and a sovereignty analogous to that of really existing peoples is attributed to ethnographic or. rather linguistic groups. " Ernest Renan.18821 Although Jacques Derrida is not usually thought of in terms of the problematics of nations and nationalism, the term "endless deferral" cannot help but evoke his philosophical project, and it is to his picture of logo centrism that I initially tum in elaborating ,South Africa's "preeminent" status as a nation whose identity always seems to reside in some "elsewhere" space. Apartheid may well be considered as the last 10- geocentric colonial structure (unless, that is, one wishes to included Bosnia under this unpleasant rubric) to finally collapse.1 Further its collapse may be considered the end of a state apparatus formed as an institutionalization of logocentric thinking (something unusual for Derrida who very rarely talks in terms of practices). Let me then begin this paper by turning to the idea of logo centrism and slowly proceed through it to the theme of national identity and its deployment by various theorists.

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