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Diasporic identity emerges as an unsettled position whose features are flexible enough to accommodate its adoptive strategies across the globe between a number of intersecting discourses, locations and belongingness. The diasporic subjects feel a constant urge to reconstruct their own image of the homeland, creating an imaginative space for themselves, which is essentially linked up with their history, culture, memory and tradition. It involves the reconfiguring of the inner landscape as the repressed memory of the past is viewed as an underlying condition of the nostalgic drive in the reinvention of an imaginary homeland. The diasporic subjects are continually faced with the problem of recollecting, rewriting and restaging the fragmented shadows of a long-lost past. Thus attempts are made at tracing, retaining, re-examining, and reconfiguring one’s roots in the cultural space of an alien ambience.

Avtar Brah in his Cartographes of Diaspora describes this complexity of dislocation when he claims ‘home’ to be a mythic place of desire which exists in multiple dimensions in the diasporic imagination subverting the stable dialectics of all diasporic identities. Stuart Hall in New Ethnicities identifies two different yet intersecting phases of Black identity formation in Britain- first, the unifying effect of communal resistance; secondly, the extraordinary diversity of subjective position which effects the de-homogenisation of cultural identities and the notion of race. Moreover, Kobena Mercer in Welcome to the Jungle points out how Black lesbian and gay groups helped effect a paradigm shift from the essentialized notion of diasporic subjectivity to a condition which is fluid, contingent and shifting generating the possibility of a new culture. Paul Gilroy in his influential The Black Atlantic sets these transnational tendencies of black history and experience against those ideas of community rooted in the misappropriated ideas of purity and cultural essentialism. In a similar pattern The Politics of Home by Rosemary Marangoly examines the shifting representation and modality of home in twentieth-century fiction reassessing the postcolonial narratives of belonging, exile and immigration which argues literary allegiance as curiously visible in the textual reformulation of home. According to Ogbazi and Mara, the concept of space carries utmost importance in diaspora studies and is related to the spatiality of human existance- the physical or geographical space human beings occupy and the implications such spaces have on them (“Cartographies and Geographies” 1). Liyue Huang, in his paper, “The Construction of Identity in "the Third Space"" argues that The third space is created with "mixing" and that the binary opposition and contradiction between the two sides of the colonization, there is a mixed space, namely "the third space", which is a negotiable space outside the "self" and "other". This space enables many new cultural identity meanings to emerge (134). Above all, Homi Bhaba, the high priest of diasporic dialectics who rejects the idea of ‘sovereign’ as pure and essentialising, in his Location of Culture favours a discursive identity formation and using concepts such as mimicry, interstice, hybridity and liminality demonstrates that cultural production is always most productive when it is most ambivalent.

The shifting nature of home and fluid identification has replaced the conventional conceptualization of fixed home. In the world of increasing globalization, ‘home’ carries multiple shades of meaning and is far from being a simplistic notion of rootedness and belonging. The shifting nature of home and fluid identification has replaced the conventional conceptualization of fixed home. The idea of home turns out to be a semiotic site where one negotiates the fluctuating images of the past with the conflicting realities of the present. The ceaseless movements that inform the lives of the diasporic individuals tend to loosen the sense of coherent identity and holistic communities in which stable, consistent, essentialized notions of identifications are openly questioned and contested. Questions such as what is home? Where is it? How does one’s identity change with changing places? What defines one’s identity? Is identity bound to a specific territoriality or can it be reconfigured with the existing memory in relation to the lived experience of the present locality? are some of the key inquiries which problematize the concept of home in diasporic studies.

 In explicating home, therefore, in the specificity of diasporic subjectivities, one must attend to the factors associated with nation, space and integration. The diverse connections and movements across the world have made our society densely diasporising which point out to the ways in which “the experience of space is always socially constructed” (Gupta and Ferguson 11). The manner in which people feel at home essentially relates to their feeling of rootedness to a particular locality and the connections to other places which are nourished through social networks and sensory environments. ‘Home,’ then, is defined as several sites of sensory connections and dwelling places, both past and present, in the course of a person’s growth and mobility in terms of travel, transition and memory. It can be described both as the actual place of residence carved out through lived experiences and the metaphorical space of individual attachments and belongingness.  The discourse of home indelibly involves the discussion on identity and belonging which can be reconfigured with the concurrent existentialities of the diasporans perpetually balancing and reconciling the global with the local, the personal with the political, and the feeling and inwardness of ‘here’ with ‘there’. The paper thus seeks to chalk out these spatial, temporal and emotional connections the immigrants foster and sustain in the creation and cultivation of their disparate homes away from their actual homes.

The notion of home conjures up an emotional territory which the diasporic individual seeks to belong. It is implicitly structured as “a purified space of belonging in which the subject is too comfortable to question the limits or borders of her or his experience” (Ahmed 339). The narrative of dislocation, in fact, duplicates multiple homes in the diasporic memory of the immigrants which makes the limit between home and away a permeable and porose one for one’s home is not situated outside one’s self but an indispensible part of it. Home, in diasporic discourse, thus designates an intricate, complex experience of belonging characterized by a plurality of identification – a constructed location challenging the idiomatic of fixity, boundedness and nostalgic exclusivities. The intersectional space between diaspora and the place of origin are forever infested with an undercurrent of ambivalence and split perception as the diasporans are torn between disparate experiences of homes and contrastive affiliations. Scattering or dispersion leads to a splitting sense of the home in which “a fundamental ambivalence is embedded in the term diaspora: a dual ontology in which the diasporic subject is seen to look in two directions – towards a historical cultural identity on one hand, and the society of relocation on the other” (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin 425).

The concept of home is contributory to the general understanding of diaspora. The cultural identity of the diasporic individuals essentially relates to the plurality of homelands which is characterized “not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity” (Hall 56). Diaspora identities, with their varied notions of home and belonging, “are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference” (Hall 56). The diasporic homes are thus continually constituted and reconstituted with the shifting configurations of identity and belonging and its informing elements.

Home is a place created out of connections, collective memories and perceptions that solidify one’s sense of identity and nativity, registering a feeling of nostalgia when dislocated. It performs a historical function, collectively contributing to the personal memories and collective myths. It involves a fellow-feeling among the members of a specific locality experienced in an indigenous space of belonging and proceeds with a stabilizing rhetoric of progressive ideologies. However, the ease of movement and economical fulfilment thrust the lives of the individuals into a permanent flow when a certain degree of instability naturally comes to be associated with the idea of home which is progressively redefined as a space resulting from multiple journeys across the globe.

 Accordingly, most of the diasporic narratives incorporate a nostalgic recreation of the past through shared memories. The physicalities, peculiarities, histories and myths associated with the homeland leave an indelible mark on the collective memories of the diasporans. These shards of memories may not be a pure embodiment of the past but serve as reflecting the manner in which they are fluctuatingly modified to make sense of the existing conditionalities in a new alien ambience. The revitalization of fluxing, disintegrated sets of images of the homeland moves beyond the fixated geographical boundaries effectuating the emergence of a new communal reality constructed through a universal, globalizing sense of belonging which scrupulously distances itself from absolute national prejudices. As a result, “homeland had become a homing desire and soon home itself became transmuted into an essentially placeless, though admittedly lyrical space” (Cohen 3). Home, as a native land of identification and an imagined community, is thus deconstructed into unmonolithic, non-absolutist properties highlighting the interactive or transactive encounters between cultures and communities. The poetics of homeland, in this globalizing space, demonstrates the corrosion between the native land and the diasporic individuals as it turns out to be highly pluralistic, diversified and hybrid in a range of transcultural possibilities.

Stuart Hall in his paper, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” asserts that cultural identity is always in the process. It is never complete and endlessly on the move. Cultural identity is dynamic and contested and is articulated through the relation of power, practices and experiences in the society. It is not predefined and ahistorical, transcending territory or culture. Hall seeks to re-theorize cultural identity, taking recourse to Lacan’s theory of enunciation, which suggests that the speaking subject and what is spoken do not coincide. Identity is not to be viewed as an essence but a certain positioning in a discourse and this representation is again conditioned by the position of the spoken form. This interpretation is highly complementary to the purpose of this thesis, as it seeks to reject the legitimacy of the hegemonic nation-state laying claim on a fixed, clearly demarked self-defining home. Hall dismisses the claim of culture as an ontological primordial home which can be recovered by looking back to the place of origin or pure ethnicity and highlights the local or historical contextualities in the formation of cultural identity. Hall conceives the presence of a ‘New World’ across the globe which is the meeting ground of different cultures of the world – a negotiated space – “the place of many, continuous displacements . . . the signifier of migration itself” (52). It is the continuous negotiations and mediations between cultures which evolve the distinctive cultural identity of the ‘New World’ diasporic communities. It points out the deferred, disseminated positionality of all cultures admitting differences, discontinuities and hybridity into its supposed framework of originality or essence. Diaspora becomes a signifier for new possibilities informing the cultural homes and identities of these diasporans. Hall thus attacks the linear, unitary model of diaspora proposed by William Safran, claiming that “Diaspora does not refer us to those scattered tribes whose identity can only be secured by some sacred homeland to which they must at all costs return. . . . The diaspora experience as I intend it here is defined, not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity” (52-53).       

Analogously, Paul Gilroy employs the spatio-temporal image of the ‘Black Atlantic’ to suggest the indeterminacy of cultural home in non-absolutist terms. Gilroy’s metaphor of the ship serves as a microcosm of the entire cultural configuration in motion, between the continents, which steers our attention away from the originary ‘home’ or ‘roots’ to what he claims as the dynamism of ‘routes’, a transnational dialectics of interconnectedness traversing the cultural or territorial boundaries of identification characterized by “flows, exchanges, and in-between elements that call into question the very desire to be centred” (The Black Atlantic 190). Gilroy questions the very essentialist notion of home which, far from being a stabilized location, is “marked out by flows” (Gilroy “Diaspora and the Detours of Identity” 328), suspending cultural identity to an indeterminate space, always in flux, under construction and incomplete – a never ending ‘process’ than a finished, always already ‘product’. Construction of such replicated ‘homes’ is valorizing in the sense that it enables the dispersed diasporans to reconfigure their cultural roots, challenging the originary myths associated with a particular community or ethnicity. Homi Bhabha, in this context, coins the term, ‘dissemiNation’ which conveys the idea that the ‘nation’ is already contained in ‘dissemination’ and hence it exposes the frivolous insubstantiality of nationalistic representation, privileging cultural boundedness and common origins to the exclusion of difference or otherness. This idea of Homi Bhabha resonances with Rushdie’s concept of home as a “scattered” entity (Imaginary Homelands 17) which cannot be actuated through space or time. The evolvement of terminology such as ‘scatter’ and ‘dissemination’ is indicative of a shift of focus from the firmness of ‘roots’ to the fluidity of ‘routes’ which unsettles “the ideological maneuvers through which ‘imagined communities’ are given essentialist identities” (Bhabha “Dissemination” 300). Construction of diasporic home, then, is forever deferred in a transnational hybrid space existing as a perpetual tension between ‘roots’ and ‘routes’. 

The ability to identify and recall the past thus gives meaning, purpose and value to the individual existence. Self-continuity primarily depends on the function of memory, and recollecting past experiences connects us with our previous selves, however disparate we may since have become. As Lowenthal aptly observes: “Those who bring more of their past into their present thereby both confirm their own identity and enrich the past with the past’s amplified residue” (198).

The poetics of identity formation or socialization, therefore, seeks to conceptualize memory as one of the indispensible parts of self-actualization and situates it within the framework of human action and understanding, providing a solid emotional basis for the individuals to account for human behavior. Memory and identity thus change in course of time and far from being fixated, become representation or reconstruction of realities which are subjective rather than objective phenomena of the collective unconscious. Memory, however, involves indirect, second-hand accounts of the past events which is ‘history’ and ‘history’ in turn relies upon the eyewitnesses and other people’s accounts and recollections that is memory. We tend to view other people’s memories as history, as something that is empirically tenable, as we often verify our own individual accounts. The connection between memory and history then is a dialectical one, each influencing the other, reshaped by each other, blurring the boundary line between the known and the unknown, the self and other, the story and the history.

Rushdie, in his observation of the fallible memory’s “fragmentary vision” (10), interestingly establishes a parallel between remembering and archeology which replaces the responsibility of the cultural preservation with an emphasis on universality, a re-articulation of “fractured perception” (12) or partial exposure as representative of the diasporic identity which is by its very nature incomplete and fractured. Rushdie attends to the problematics of the diasporic role as preserving cultural memory which itself is not a homogeneous entity emphasizing the fractured plurality of experience, and wonders “. . . how can culture be preserved without becoming ossified?” (17). Rushdie is up against “the adaptation of a ghetto mentality . . . to continue ourselves within narrowly defined cultural frontiers” (Imaginary Homelands 19) through the rhetoric of claiming authenticity through perpetuation of historical narrative for it corresponds to the replicative act of erecting exclusionary boundaries of identity or belonging.

Conversely, Maurice Halbwachs, in his seminal work Individual Memory and Collective Memory, argues that there are no authentic individual memories as such, since all memories are collectively formed in a specific society or culture. Halbwach emphasizes the social role of memory as a collective process because the individual’s mind is organized and saturated by a social process; it perceives and remembers within the outline of a given social context and therefore “no memory is possible outside frameworks used by people living in society to determine and retrieve their recollections” (43). The individual memorizes by placing himself with the larger perspective of the group and their viewpoints and group memory manifests and exacerbates itself in the fragmented memories of the individual lives. So, how we view or evaluate things today can be understood within the always-already model of our old memories, which by degrees adapt to our present perceptions of the world. As collective memory is inevitably a reconstruction of the past in the light of the presence, we seek to preserve and cherish the memories of our lives which are continually produced and reproduced. It is through the evocation of such memories that “a sense of our identity is perpetuated” (Halbwachs 47). Thus, memory in general and individual or private memory in particular, are recreated through social interactions in which particularly specific interpretations of things and events are reflected, demonstrated, negotiated, shared and contested, leading to a fluid dynamics of representation in the manner we define ourselves, the world and the others.

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