Un/homing and diaspora

This chapter explores diaspora and home by combining approaches to aesthetics and cultural politics to mediate insights about belonging. Along with transcending diasporic imaginaries anchored at the intersections of (trans)migration, transnational, and postcolonial experiences are representational challenges that invite questions about how activism art can ground critiques in nation-state accounts. To be productive, such critiques should engage with units of analysis such as systems, states, or individuals because the context those units provide is important for understanding the affective and embodied experiences of migration. On that basis, this chapter examines how embedding such units of analysis into poetics, art, and politics can create synergistic accounts of unhoming among activist academics and activist artists. Doing so reveals how, like absence and loss, poetic and political experiences of rootedness reveal certain structural forces that need to be challenged. To ground those ideas, I briefly refer to three key timespaces—Brexit; the Windrush scandal; and the Mediterranean migration crisis—before reflecting on how diasporic homing unfolds poetically and politically through emotions, engagements with power, and embodied practices within exclusionary spaces.