Home, Homemaking, and Transnationalism

Summary

Homemaking is the social, relational, and power-laden process through which immigrants make and remake their “homes”—geographic and/or symbolic spaces of familiarity and control, ostensibly private but nonetheless embedded in a broader social structure. By focusing on immigrants’ cross-border connections, the transnationalism literature can provide the tools to examine how immigrants create a new kind of home—one that blends the familiar norms and traditions of the societies they have left behind with the new ones they learn in the host country where they now live. Immigrants’ homes are often where the politics of belonging, inclusion, and exclusion are intimately experienced and navigated. In the making of a transnational home, immigrants contend with not just local or national-level politics but also inequalities between countries at the global geopolitical level, such as immigration policies, global conflicts, and relations between sending and receiving societies. While technological advancements aim to shrink the world through faster and easier interconnectedness of societies, immigrants’ homemaking reveals the unrelenting force of borders imposed by the state even in their intimate day-to-day lives. Thus, home and homemaking provide fruitful concepts for examining the tensions between globalization and territorialization, a key topic of interest in transnationalism scholarship.