All the Way Home: Diasporic Unbelonging and Nomadic Drift

• In Event: The Political Flows and Social Engagements of Home and Place

Abstract

This year’s meeting demands an understanding of shifting notions of home, and challenges the perceived opposition of not home. Current examinations in American studies have taken influence from a large number of philosophical theories and continues to develop new ways of tracing the impact of social, cultural, and spatial production. The first part of this paper will be influenced by postmodern and poststructuralist theories that have emerged as avenues for questioning (not)home, offering new ways of approaching socio-political space by interrupting essentialist configurations of space and society, and by extension exposing once more the social construction of race, class, and gender. Increased attention to the cultural meaning of social practices, consumptive habits, and political engagements associated with home has produced valuable insight, however, attempts to provide answers to the ways in which our notions of place is produced have often relied, un-reflexively, on a limited sense of human participation.
The second part of this paper examines durations and encounters of home/not home. Briefly, I examine Dionne Brand’s (2012) forging a new kind of map that does not abide by existing cartographic rules, for those rules have eliminated possibilities for certain bodies. Brand works delicately to develop a lexicon, drawn from her African ancestry, which paves the road for a different sense of home that both considers and does away with our commonplace notions of geographic space, place, and diaspora. I then connect Brand’s use of the floating diasporic subject with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s (1987) figure of the nomad in which they examine social formations that resist the coding of territory of the striation of the state. “The nomad has territory”, however the nomad’s existence is intermezzo, or always between. Paradoxically, nomad life is constantly in threat of capture, constantly being reterritorialized by the state, or the creation of certain manifestations of home.
When Brand evokes “The Door of No Return” she simultaneously ushers in belonging (home) and unbelonging (not home); not a place but a collection of places; a paradoxical emptied beginning. Brand’s symbolic use of the ocean describes her movements toward and away from her “home”. The use of “the door” offers a seasick metaphor for her relationship to space, nation, and self. Brand’s landing is not a predetermined, nor is it happenstance. Rather, it is a nomadic drift within which she can assert: “Belonging does not interest me. I had once thought it did. Until I examined the underpinnings. One is misled when one looks at the sails and majesty of tall ships instead of their cargo”. The bedrocks of Brand’s (un)belonging, or home/not home, address a missing component of Deleuze and Guattari’s nomad; the diasporic subject complicates their notions of exteriority. Conversely, Brand’s account turns toward ambivalence, rather than the political possibilities of refusal that Deleuze and Guattari advocate. This pairing leads me to question the ways in which home/not home emerge from legacies of colonialization and are raced, gendered, and otherwise bifurcated and displaced, but at the same time may offer durational encounters that, with close attention, offer new political possibilities.

Author

• Abraham Weil, University of Arizona (AZ)