{"id":52,"date":"2025-09-21T21:57:06","date_gmt":"2025-09-22T01:57:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/?p=52"},"modified":"2025-09-21T21:57:06","modified_gmt":"2025-09-22T01:57:06","slug":"in-response-to-is-there-an-idea-or-image-or-line-from-our-readings-that-has-stuck-with-you-for-more-than-the-week-or-unit-when-it-was-discussed-what-are-you-continuing-to-think-about-it-why-do-y","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/in-response-to-is-there-an-idea-or-image-or-line-from-our-readings-that-has-stuck-with-you-for-more-than-the-week-or-unit-when-it-was-discussed-what-are-you-continuing-to-think-about-it-why-do-y\/","title":{"rendered":"In Response to “Is there an idea or image or line from our readings that has stuck with you for more than the week or unit when it was discussed? What are you continuing to think about it? Why do you think it has had this effect?”"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the records of Isabelle Eberhardt\u2019s life I find neither the vagabond nor the nomad she so fondly self-references. Instead, I find a woman at odds with her colonist\u2019s background, yet who finds herself wedded to it again and again \u2014 no matter the landscape. This turn of events may have always caught Eberhardt by surprise, but its cause is really quite simple. A \u201cnomad\u201d must not only shed all attachment to the material forces around them (oppositional and otherwise), and, consequently, shed all loyalties. The spy, however, is a figure of multiple loyalties: their attachments not disavowed, but instead participated in with even more vigor than the common person. As such, a spy cannot be a vagabond, nor a vagabond a spy \u2014 no matter how much Ian Fleming\u2019s romantic storytelling attempts to conflate the two.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Still, why does the role Isabelle occupies (spy) seem to correspond so frequently to the role she <\/span>wishes<\/span><\/i> to occupy (nomad)? The answer lies on page 213 of Julia Kristeva\u2019s <\/span>Powers of Horror<\/span><\/i>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cOn close inspection, all literature is probably a version of the apoc-<\/span><\/p>\n

alypse that seems to me rooted, no matter what its socio-historical<\/span><\/p>\n

conditions might be, on the fragile border (borderline cases) where<\/span><\/p>\n

identities (subject\/object, etc.) do not exist or only barely so\u2014<\/span><\/p>\n

double, fuzzy, heterogeneous, animal, metamorphosed, altered, abject.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

It is important to understand that border enforcement, in the context of the nation-state, are largely a modern innovation. It draws on the colonial <\/span>demand for dominion over the Earth, segmenting it into individual pieces that individuals or\u00a0<\/span>communities claim to \u201cpossess.\u201d For many colonial subjects, the imposition of border regimes stoked <\/span>more terror than direct violence from colonizers, as the false imposition of ill-defined borders led not only <\/span>to violence from those meant to enforce them but also from the oft-disparate cultures <\/span>and societies now forced to occupy the same \u201cnation.\u201d It is only in this world, where the horror of\u00a0<\/span>borders and their fragility is stark naked, that we can understand the blurring between Isabelle\u2019s <\/span>lived and desired roles.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Spies and nomads share one commonality: the ability to permeate borders. Nomads because they have unattached themselves from nation-states and all that they entail, and spies because they are attached to multiple of these colonial projects intending to redesign the world. Eberhardt, over and over again, confuses her ability to occupy the contradictory worlds of colonial Algeria as proof of her “nomadic” lack of attachment to the way of things. However, Isabelle’s ability and desire to occupy these worlds is a direct result of her many attachments \u2014 her eroticized fascination with Arab Islamic culture sublimated in her operative work for the French Empire. Unable to let go of either attachment, she finds a way to manipulate them in her favor: allowing her access to a “foreign frontier” all while refusing to renounce her colonial background.<\/span><\/p>\n

The nomadic life she details living, then, is revealed to us: a tower of dust.<\/p>\n



<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the records of Isabelle Eberhardt\u2019s life I find neither the vagabond nor the nomad she so fondly self-references. Instead, I find a woman at odds with her colonist\u2019s background, yet who finds herself wedded to it again and again \u2014 no matter the landscape. This turn of events may have always caught Eberhardt by … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “In Response to “Is there an idea or image or line from our readings that has stuck with you for more than the week or unit when it was discussed? What are you continuing to think about it? Why do you think it has had this effect?””<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7245,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-52","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7245"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52\/revisions\/55"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}