Twentieth International Conference on Diversity in Organizations, Communities & Nations

Abstract

The meaning(s) of “home” are once again a robust conversation in the American national landscape as we continue to struggle over neoliberal empire-inspired border racialization projects. As a critical race feminist and as a Woman of Color, I ask, where is “home”, what does it mean? I have come to the conclusion that I am unable to coherently articulate any answers. I struggle to answer questions of “home” satisfactorily because the meanings are often embedded in the construction of “home” as a “situated, fixed, safe sphere, with ties to place”. Multicultural models in the U.S. assume assimilation as the benchmark, linking “home” to a single spatial location or a monolithic, linear notion of home. How I navigate the essentialist meaning of “home“ and my place in the world as a queer Bangladeshi-Muslim-American Woman of Color born to and raised by immigrant parents in the United States has led me on a path of living and exploring (state-sanctioned) terror. The abyssal pain I feel about “home”—what it is and where it is, if anywhere—is informed by my intersectional oppressions in an American nationalistic context. For me, the question of “home” is embedded in the genealogy of “western” imperialism, i.e. borders and control, which conceptualize “home” into a single space. How I negotiate “home” is prompted by the ways in which race is defined in the United States and is situated in the ways in which I resist sexual racism.