Homes and Postcoloniality
| Autor: | Aparajita Sagar |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 1997 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies. 6:237-251 |
| ISSN: | 1911-1568 1044-2057 |
| DOI: | 10.3138/diaspora.6.2.237 |
| Popis: | To be at home is to have the sense of a terrain—spatial, epistemological, cultural—which one expects to navigate with smoothness and ease. But homes, like other civic institutions, are sites for producing and reproducing bodies, borders, subject positions, discourses and ideologies, mechanisms of surveillance and discipline. Because of the formidable emotive charge it carries, the idea of home tends to erupt without warning in non-domestic sites where it might be least expected: the supposedly public sphere of Empire and nation, for instance. On the other hand, as the work of variously located postcolonial feminists has shown, women, who have been aligned with home and domesticity across various cultures, have won entry into the public sphere often only after this sphere is recast as “home.” With home and the outside so readily exchanging positions, each site can potentially borrow from the disciplinary regimes of the other, its systems of coercion and blandishment, punishment and reward. Both home and the outside, then, are categories that are mutually constitutive and contingent, lacking a content that can be fixed or known in advance of their manipulation in a specific discourse. Whether the home is seen as a refuge or a prison, is it feasible any longer to project it as the site of unique pleasures, unique terrors, or unique subversive energies? If we think of postcoloniality and diaspora as formations characterized by displacements and dispersions, by the continual unpicking of seams and borders, homes and homelessness inevitably become of special interest. What are the passports to various homes, the initiation rites, the evidence that one belongs or will learn to belong; what are the mechanisms to keep out strangers, thieves, intruders, housebreakers? And given home’s discursive propensity to crop up everywhere, is “homelessness” ever a possibility? |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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