Writing Diaspora in the West: Intimacy, Identity and the New Marginalism

In Writing Diaspora in the West, Peter McCarthy argues that the surveyors and theoreticians of modern human subjectivity have discovered in the margins a motherland, nourishing and nurturing them in the fantastic culture of what he terms the 'new marginalism'. This culture, McCarthy argues, is the product of a certain fantasy, the projection of a subjective homeland onto the various margins of discourse, subjectivity, history and geography that goes beyond a Left minoritarian ethos. This fantasy leads to a certain marginal affectivity, a fascination and identification with things perceived at the margins or bounds of a psychopathological homeland, especially with those who live or subsist there. McCarthy's work stands as a challenge to liberal critical orthodoxies concerning the representation of marginal experience.