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Examining the work of Frantz Fanon and Stuart Hall, this article argues that their biographic practices and experiences as colonial subjects allowed them to break with imperial representations and to provide new, anticolonial imaginaries. It demonstrates how the experience of the racialized and diasporic subject, respectively, creates a kind of subjectivity that makes visible the work of colonial cultural narratives on the formation of the self. The article first traces Fanon’s and Hall’s transboundary encounters with metropolitan Europe and then shows how these biographic experiences translate into their theories of practice and history. Living through distinct historical moments and colonial ideologies, Fanon and Hall produced theories of historical change, which rest on epistemic ruptures and conjunctural changes in meaning formations. Drawing on their biographic subjectivities, both intellectuals theorize cultural and colonial forms of oppression and seek to produce new knowledge that is based on practice and experience.

The purpose of this paper is to engage theoretical displacement with the actual identifications of human displacement caused by dire circumstances of war and economic oppression and environmental degradation as indicated in UNHCR Global Trends documents.

The approach includes a comparative analysis of the theoretics of dislocation through close reading, cultural and textual analysis.

Earlier forms of forced migration due to enslavement replay themselves in the current forms.

This study provides the means for subsequent scholars to do the kinds of analyses which move from the theoretical to the practical.

The study can be a good research tool for practitioners in international relations.

Scholars and activists of displacement, deportation, refugee status have additional material for their projects.

This study is the only one of its kind as it links the issues of African diaspora to the Mediterranean.

Gay men in the New York City metropolitan area were interviewed from 1990 to 1991, during the period of the AIDS epidemic. Using an interview schedule, they were asked questions about “coming out of the closet” and other identity issues: their experiences of “difference,” beliefs about monogamous or “open” relationships, and their views about sex and commitment. The study's focus was on the men's “moral discourse” or their relationship to the “good,” including ideas of the self, other(s), friendship, love, sex, and commitment. The study yielded a consistency in the men's responses: they did not wish to impose on other gay men their own convictions about being gay, sex, and intimate relationships. Their talk was tentative, localized, highly personal, and “nonjudgmental” on a range of identity and moral issues. These findings are discussed by relating the men's life experiences to the gay culture they shared: their unwillingness to judge others reflects their own formative experiences of “coming out” in a society that judged gay men harshly and who, in later years, lived at the time of the AIDS crisis.