Populist movements and right-wing nationalism, often identified through anti-migrant, ethnonationalist tendencies are resurgent around the world. This project explores an un-examined notion and pursuit of home that underlies modernity’s ideals of nation, belonging, identity and place.
Supported with funding from the Faculty Research Grant, St Jerome’s University and the University of Waterloo Explore Grant.
“Home is not a singular, individual concept but is realised only in relation to the plurality of what is (what exists ) outside of home. Home is constituted in multiple instances and in multiple ways, whereas a sense of home is experienced as a singularity always in the plurality. Rather than the traditional notion of home being a physical house or structure, or belonging to a particular territory, ‘home’ is an infinite plurality of singular instances of home . Home is experienced, created and recreated, each time that there is an encounter at the threshold of intimacy and foreignness or difference.” - Tataryn 2021, 155.
“We crave the limit that gives us finitude; we crave the same limit that gives us identity, difference and law, i.e. the nation-state; citizenship; legal status. … These categories, porous and unsatisfactory as they are, make us all the hungrier for home, compelling us to retreat from the excess of the limit to cling desperately onto categories and distinctions, ultimately arriving at nationalism, protectionism, xenophobia. The attempt to define and condition the limit, for instance.”
— Tataryn 2021, 156.