SOAS Research Online

Abstract

What is home after home? Does the dwelling continue to dwell? How do we speak about home? How does home speak us? This panel discusses how awareness and articulations of ‘home’ might change after we come to inhabit spaces and times that are ‘not home’. We are also asking if ‘home’ is contingent on ‘not home’, as ‘I’ is performed through the ‘Other’. Moving away from the concept of ‘identity’ as something stable and unique in spatial, temporal or psychic spheres, we are especially interested in the socio-anthropological elaborations of the concepts of (un)canny, hybridity and affectivity of home, as the attempts to locate the ‘anthropos’ in the intersections of social and political realities of belonging. Our proposal builds upon Yael Navarro Yashin’s (2012) discussion of ‘ruination’ and the ‘unhomely’, as well as Stuarts Hall’s concept of ‘articulation’ (Hall and Du Gay 1996). Our focus is on both the individual and the collective localities of being in various forms of ‘governing of the self’, such as: nationalities, ethnicities, races, genders, sexualities or religions, particularly as interpreted in regards to the feeling or becoming of/at ‘home’ and ‘unhomely’, as they appear after spatial and temporal alienation, or in the resistance to the dominant narratives of belonging. We seek contributions that locate home and belonging as they appear in discursive (re)positioning, life stories, bodily movements and reflexes, materialities, dreams, silences, and dialectics arising from ‘new spaces’. We propose an analytical framework of ‘migration’ that includes a range of situations where ‘home’ may not be readily attainable and/or definable. Papers might consider, but should not necessarily be limited to, post-conflict landscapes, regimes of displacement and emplacement, transnational, transversal, and trans-gender/sexual habitations, as well as the roles of non-human agency, materiality and affect as they pertain to ‘post-home’ lives.