At Home in Asia?

Introduction on special issue in International Journal of Cultural Studies is out now, written together with Yiu Fai Chow and Sonja van Wichelen. In the article, we argue that home is not always or only sweet home. For us, it is constructed with contradictions, ruptures and anxieties. Indeed, the world never fails to present us with ‘real’ people with ‘real’ issues of home. After ‘rescuing’ the idea of home from its two assumed arch-enemies ‘mobility’ and ‘urbanization’, we will proceed to formulate our appeal to reconceptualize ‘home’ and explicate why and how to do so. We have cited instances from Hong Kong, Beijing and Asia at large, not only because the empirical core of this special issue is on Asia, but, more fundamentally, also because we want to take issue with the Eurocentric bias in the debates on home hitherto. We conclude by making a modest plea – or more accurately, to configure various trajectories of thinking on ‘home’ into a plea – to bracket home as (making) place, (not) belonging and (flexible) citizenship.

Other contributors of the special issue are Ien Ang, Melani Budianta, Roberto Castillo, Stephen Yiu-Wai Chu, John Nguyet Erni, and Chris Moreh.

You can find the introduction here, and the ‘online first’ articles here.