The Fantasy of "Home": Locating Dislocation, Loss, and Silence

Abstract

The meanings of home are once again a robust conversation in the American national landscape as we continue to struggle over postcolonial empire-inspired borders. As a critical race feminist and decolonial ethnographer, I have immersed myself in the stories of detained children inhumanely separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexican border and as a cross-cultural and interfaith urban shamanic practitioner, I have been energetically tending to the racialized and sexualized traumas of over 2000 separated families under the Trump administration. Here, where a “border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge”, I am prompted to contend with the following haunting questions in the context of racialized oppressions and sexualized traumas: Where is home, what does it mean, and is there really no place like home? I am particularly concerned about thinking through neoliberal anti-liberatory U.S. racialization projects and the notion of home or what I call the neoliberal home. I concern myself with diverse languages, images, myths, and rituals through which “home” is represented and constituted for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color folx from the dispatches of sexual racialized traumas in the American nation state. In this autoethnographic womanist narrative, I forefront how I as a brown, queer, and Muslim American mother-academic and we as a nation struggle over meaning, memory, and knowledge-production of home and in this talk I offer my audience an embodied restorative experiential practice of how to engage in hegemonic interruption or what I have named as embodied tender rage.

Presenters

Roksana Badruddoja
Professor and Chair, Sociology and Criminology, Manhattan College, New York, United States

Details

Presentation Type

Workshop Presentation

Theme

2024 Special Focus—The World on the Move: Understanding Migration in a New Global Age

KEYWORDS

HOME, DISPLACEMENT, AUTOETHNOGRAPHY, EMBODIMENT, RAGE, SEXUAL RACISM, EPISTEMIC VIOLENCE