Living Foreignness: Potentiality and "Ordinary" Performances of Being/ Not-Being.

My aim in this essay is to show how foreignness is continuously performed in "ordinary" life, both reifying and resisting normative/normalized ways of being. Drawing on Agamben's concept of potentiality, I outline a performative framework that sees foreignness-as-potentiality transcending the actuality of community. Foreignness is layered, acting in and being acted upon various sites, including nationality, but also gender, color, sexuality and profession. Given my location as a scholar of Indian origin in the U.S. academe, I consider intersecting academic roles of teacher, student and author, to illustrate the systemic violence wrought by mainstream normalization, which seeks to forcibly erode ambiguity (and thus foreignness), and the dangers of shock-and-awe spectacle that circumvents deconstruction. I argue that interventions are performed most effectively when they keep ambiguity intact, subvert spectacle, and locate foreignness-as-potentiality at the core of community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]