Naturalizando la nación: aliens, apocalipsis y el estado postcolonial

Abstract

This paper examines the predicament of the postcolonial nation-state through the prism of environmental catastrophe: how is it that plant “invaders” can become an urgent political issue, and what might this reveal of the shifting relations among citizenship, community, and national sovereignty under neo-liberal conditions? Pursuing these questions in relation to a case from the “new” South Africa, we posit three key features of postcolonial polities in an era of laissez-faire: the refiguration of the subject-citizen, the crisis of sovereign borders, and the depoliticization of politics. Under such conditions, aliens ˆ both plants and people ˆ come to embody core contradictions of boundedness and belonging; and alien-nature provides a language for voicing new forms of discrimination amidst a culture of “post-racism” and civil rights.