The onset of the neo-liberal wave of globalization in the post-Cold War 1990s triggered massive flows of people into the West. These movements were predominantly of brown populations heading westward for work, education, and, to a lesser extent, as refugees.

The first two factors were closely linked: the ‘globalized’ Western university system actively opened its doors to international students and capital. Once an international student graduated from, say, an Australian university, pathways to permanent residency and citizenship often became available, a development that also had significant implications for the labor market.

People, consequently, crisscrossed the western world. Mobility and the ‘skill premium’ became the new mantras and buzzwords. People who ‘settled’ in the western world returned home only as visitors, to see family. Some waxed nostalgic about ‘roots’ only to return to their western habitats and so on.

This was a very liberal world which paid homage to philosophers like Immanuel Kant, and theoreticians of nationalism that asserted ‘communities were mere imagined constructs’. The world as it was, and as it is, could be imagined as one ‘giant imagined community’.

On the face of it, there was(is) nothing to quibble with this ‘brave new world’. But scratch the surface, deep problems – structural, conceptual and even emotional – emerge. In the main, the major ones pertain(ed) to identity. What and who was the ‘new’ man(woman) in this ‘new world?

The Americans, typically, had an ingeniously innovative........

© Kashmir Observer