The primary question dealt with in this book—whether identities are fixed or do they travel across economies, geographies, epistemologies, and ontologies?—reminds me of Sara Shneiderman’s (2015) question of “is ethnicity a rock or a river?” (p. 3) While looking at how ethnicity as an identity is understood and practiced among the Thangmi community in Nepal and parts of India, she underlined that while community members, to gain state recognition of their ethnicity, performed ethnicity in a way that led to the framing of their identity as a fixed object, deep down in the community’s consciousness, ethnicity was truly processual—never in a state of being but always becoming (Anthias 2006; Bhambra 2006).

Framing identity as a “rock” or as a fixed object leads to the reification of identities, something that Nancy Fraser (2000) warned us against while talking about the “identity model.” Consequently, one can experience blockages and disruptions to the flows, of intermingling between identities and cultures, which Dey has touched upon when he writes about the racial discrimination faced by African Indians in Gujarat or when he discusses how caste consciousness among upper-caste Hindus in South Africa leads to their racist behavior toward local black Africans. This book, thus, comes at an important time when identities are increasingly being turned into fixed entities and are politicized—the rise of right-wing fascist regimes all over the world is an indication of that.

In such a world, Dey in turn decides to focus on the “porosity and hybridity,” the flows, and “non-purity.” This has allowed the work to open up discussions surrounding belongingness, which is in line with scholars such as Deleuze and Guattari (1987) and Yuval-Davis (2011). Deleuze and Guattari (1987) question fixity, linearity, cyclical, and binary thoughtprocesses, including belongingness, by placing the image of the root, which is always “tracing” origins, goes in one linear direction, and works with binary logic, in opposition to the image of the “rhizome.” As opposed to the “root,” the rhizome is nonlinear, multiplies in any direction, and works with the principles of connection and heterogeneity. The rhizome does not reproduce like tracing in exact ways; it is a map that draws unique connections and is opposed to any fixed structure. A root reterritorializes, but a rhizome deterritorializes, and then it may again reterritorialize and again deterritorialize, and this goes on without any order.