Home and Its Refusals: Tensions of Flesh and Place in the Racialized and Diasporic Subject

Abstract

This article explores the phenomenon of alienation as it figures in the often-coinciding experiences of racialisation and diaspora. Working through the sites of body and home, this article draws out some of the tensions that inhere in the racialized and diasporic condition. Part 1 examines racialized alienation through the concept of bodily confiscation, and considers what it is to have one’s body taken away through the processes of racism. The article then complicates this account with an examination of the ways in which our bodies are never really our own to begin with; whether through accounts of the sociality of the body, or through a consideration of the body’s constitutive thingliness, as advanced in Anne Anlin Cheng’s Ornamentalism. Part 2 moves on to explore alienation in the context of diaspora, where home often figures compellingly for those who have experienced loss and displacement, or who have inherited the affects of its trauma. Working through the significance of home in the face of its refusal, the article then turns to the tensions that arise when diasporic home-making takes place in settler colonial contexts, and consider the complicities and solidarities that immigrant-settlers can become enfolded in, and the modes of refusals these demand.