INTRODUCTION

Home, displacement and nostalgia

Home like roots – terms which are often assumed to imply spatial fixity can also be mobile. Mobility often implies a return, lack of movement or a fixed belonging, even in the process of movement. Across time, space and peoples, this idea of movement changes, generating fixity and continuity irrespective of the changes. A key element in understanding the relation between place, location, movement and people is what stays the same as change occurs. Often this is something social – for example the form of kinship in which people engage – or something conceptual – for example a cosmology or cultural approach towards belonging and movement (Green 2016).

Social and political revolutions, armed conflicts and wars typically trigger massive movement affecting the ability of people to move, as well as the meaning and relevance of that movement. What changes and what stays the same in such situations is not always self-evident. Here, we must also consider the difference between ‘locality’ and ‘location’. Appadurai describes locality as being ‘primarily relational and contextual rather than […] scalar or spatial’ (1995: 178). But the change of location, in the spatial sense, can be equally significant (Green 2016).

Homeland can mean a place or a region, but also territory and landscape, to which the migrant relates emotionally rather than politically or geographically (Medved 2000). It can also be linked to the concept of fatherland (or motherland), an idea or a territory. With the emergence of the modern nation state, we see the congruence between land and people and a strong relationship between blood and soil (Runblom 2000). For diaspora, blood and soil do not always coincide (Just 1989). Moreover, not all diasporans share a homing desire through a wish to return to a place of ‘origin’ (Brah 1996: 192). Brah further makes a distinction between ‘feeling at home’ and declaring a place as home. It is quite possible to feel at home in a place, and yet the experience of social exclusion may inhibit public proclamations of the place as home. ‘The concept of diaspora places the discourse of “home” and “dispersion” in creative tension, inscribing a homing desire while simultaneously critiquing discourses on fixed origins’ (Brah 1996: 197). Hobsbawm also underlines this distinction between home and homeland. Home is primarily private. But in a wider sense, home is public, a collective definition, and, as such, a social construction (Hobsbawm 1991).