The nomad contains the history of the diaspora and the refugee, but also the colonial settler and conqueror. While domestication often signifies being bound to property, the narratives we frequently pull from as regards nomadicism are after agrarianism and the development of civilization. The uprooted one is either unseating others or the unseated other. Even the nomadic trader signifies both surplus production and specialization, accumulation and division of labor. In a century of the climate refuge and the migrant laborer, one that will see hundreds of millions moving for safety and work, and in an era of social theory that is suffused with Deleuze’s nomad and Agamben’s refugee, what does it mean to “prefer flows,” to “Believe that what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic” (as Foucault famously wrote)?
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