Postlude: Viably Small Stories for the Displaced
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Published:January 2025
The various threads developed throughout the book are woven together to present a succinct diagram of a political ontology in which a proposal for emplacement makes sense, summoning a “we” under the label of the “displaced,” those who both know only how to be with infrastructures of displacement and find that this situation is no longer viable. On this basis, the chapter then moves on to make explicit and raise a series of questions about the challenges of enacting a cosmopolitics oriented toward emplacement and “the small.” It is argued that a series of tests of viability will need to be overcome in the pursuit of emplacement: the reluctance of the displaced to act without knowing what lies ahead, the teleology that establishes the big as the only realistic direction to move forward, and the rejection that emergent versions of the small might generate.