Identity is not a stable and immutable entity admitting the possibility of a single, fixed sense of belonging, rather it becomes a construct which is an evolving process of maintaining identification beyond the limits of time and space in order to live with a difference which entails a transcendence from the clearly demarcated borders and boundaries of belongingness. According to cultural theorists, a fully unified, complete and coherent identity is a myth as it is formed and transformed constantly in relation to the ways individuals are represented and addressed within the framework of cultural configurations which environ them. Stuart Hall believes that identity in the postmodern world has becomes a ‘moveable feast” because “within us are contradictory identities, pulling in different directions, so that our identifications are continuously being shifted about” (“The Question” 277).

The transformative dynamics of locations and territories of the contemporary world no longer bind the people to a single particular space. The perception of disruption from a particular location constitutes the general texture of eternal human existence in a diasporic migratory reality because the privileged role assumed by ‘home’ doesn’t comprise the prime goal of all human activity but becomes its essential condition and hence the perpetual movements and ceaseless commencements. The study of the space, therefore, is considered as one of the important determinants of identity drawing significant academic and critical intellections. In the everydayness of life itself, the two terms such as ‘place’ and ‘space’ are often used interchangeably, although there is important distinction between the two. ‘Place’ is said to be a concrete manifestation of the abstract idea called ‘space’. The undifferentiated spatial entity is gradually assigned the status of a place as we tend to be familiarized with it and endow it with significance and value. As Yi-Fu Tuan argues, “if we think of space as that which allows movement, then place is a pause; each pause in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place” (6). I am inclined to agree with Yi-Fu Tuan’s opinion that space is necessarily associated with movement and place with relative stasis which makes me emphasize throughout this paper that the relocation of the self is more focused on the socio-cultural space rather than a physical setting called place, delimited by the fixated premise of stability and security.

In the socio-cultural space of human society, ‘personal space’ is culturally conditioned and is highly dependent on the existing contextualities. Securing the sovereignty of that space and to prevent any transgression, definitive boundaries are erected to confine and construct it as ‘home’. The mere possession of the territorial right over a place, however, does not ensure the construction of a home because the boundaries which premise a space do not entail a physical space but a cultural and psychological space which connotes ownership and belonging, and home is not a mere site for comfort and security but a vital point in which one negotiates the experience of belonging and unbelonging. Home, thus, becomes a significant determinant of identity in which belonging turns out to be an important qualification to determine the distinction between those having ‘home’ and those who are deprived of it. Home, in the words of Buechner then is “a place you feel you belong, and which in some sense belongs to you” (7).

The discourse of home also includes another important element: ‘memory’ whereby one reconciles the perception of nostalgia and resistance both at individual and collective levels as the real landscapes are inevitably intertwined with landscapes of memory. Landscape as a definitive product of mindscape points out the nexus between place and memory which suggests that history is narratological, a product of the things being reminded and thus historical or collective memory is viewed as the product of external programming in which “personal memories have been reshaped into collective memories by forms of political intervention . . . in landscapes, particularly through ‘official’ acts and objects of commemoration” (O’ Keeffe 6). There is, therefore, the necessity to restate or redefine the notion of place-identity which are created for different reasons by different individual at different times proffering a confluence of different narratives and thus are “user determined, polysemic and unstable through time” (Ashworth and Graham 3). The imagined past interspersed through these narratives provides resources for the imagined future, and collective memory or heritage becomes imbued with the imagining of the past and is more concerned with meanings and values than realities or actualities of the places. The transformed realities of the places thus helps with disowning or forgetting an unpleasant past that serves as a burden of the present involving positive recreation of the present from the imaginary past that actually never was.

In the contemporary world of increasing globalization, the notion of home as a stable and fixed location has changed to represent a state of constant flux characterised by instability rather than permanence, perpetually recreated and reconfigured in the migratory process of dislocation and its summative re-plantation of individual identity and belongingness. With the experience of dislocation and fragmentation the conventional home of stability and physical centeredness assuming an unified, absolute reality becomes fractured and disrupted which anchors the individuals in eternal transit “between a plurality of life-worlds but come to be at home in none” (Nigel and Overing  160). The notion of home at once becomes a normative, spiritual and cognitive experience which correlates the metaphysical sense of homelessness with a sense personal estrangement on the level of consciousness. Being ‘homeless’, therefore, according to this view, is not so much about movements or the fluidity of socio-cultural time and space but that “one is at home when one inhabits a cognitive environment in which one can undertake the routines of daily life and through which one finds one’s identity best mediated – and homeless when such a cognitive environment is eschewed” (qtd. in Etoroma 103). The construction and enactment of home, both behavioural and ideational thus is contingent up on the migratory process in which individuals deliberately operate as ‘transnationals’ traversing and transgressing the assumed socio-cultural borders of stabilizing boundedness and imagine new possibilities of belonging on their way. Home, therefore, is not a fixed place of identification or belonging but rather “a constantly negotiated space between self and location” (qtd. in Sojka 521). Negotiating the tension between the stasis of the remembered home and the mobilized reality of the physical home left behind, consequently, lands these dislocated diasporans in a ‘third space’ which emerges out as an in between space of cultural translation, markedly different from either alternatives of identifications. This ‘liminal’, in-between space is a highly reactive site of symbolic interaction, bridging the gaps and incogulities between the antagonistic binarism of the contraries which “prevents identities at either end of it from settling into primordial polarities” (Bhabha The Location 5). This interstitial passage between fixated belonginess, according to Bhabha, “opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity” (The Location 5). which necessarily foregrounds the significance of the ‘threshold’ existence implicating the indefiniteness of all home-making projects.

The meaning of home for these displaced disporans then lies in the interactive process of cultural translation- the diverse ways whereby they strive to relocate ‘home’ in diasporic imagination. Salman Rushdie’s idea of cultural negotiation echoes the concept of ‘routes’ rather than ‘roots’ that James Clifford emphasizes in his work Routes: Travel and Translation which proclaims the fluid notion of home signalizing the “multi-locationality across geographical, cultural and Psychic boundaries” (Brah 194). The notion of ‘routes’ or ‘translation’ as home or homing desire allows for a plurality of perception and heterogeneity of identification because of its stress on multiple locations and journeys. It involves a fluctuating contextualization that Rushdie calls “ambiguous and shifting ground” (Imaginary Homelands 15) or Homi Bhabha’s “liminal space” (The Location 5) which points out the inevitable non-essentialist conceptualization of diasporic space where cultural hybridity becomes the defining principle.

The evolution of the ‘third space’ destroys the symmetrical representation of cultural formation as fixed and static. It deconstructs the historicity of cultural identification as homogenizing, unifying and absolute force. For this reason, Bhabha contends that the in-between third space occupied by the diasporic subjectivities is stuffed with creative possibilities: “It is the space of interaction emerging in the cultural interstices that introduces creative invention into existence” (The Location 12). Diasporisation thus challenges the territorial model of nation-state and questions the rubrics of nation, nationalism and cultural homogenization.

The postmodern thinkers Giles Deluze and Felix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus seeks to recast this multiplicity of cultural representation with the rhizomatic theory of difference in which the world is no longer viewed as being comprised of distinct entities – aggregative and integrative; rather a fundamental saturation of difference becomes an essential condition for the possibility of the phenomena. Diaspora like rhizomes defies the dimensions of over simplification – on one hand, it focuses on the lines of articulation, of sedimentarity, strata and territories, on the other, it attends to the lines of flight, movements of deterritorialisation and destratification. It is territorialisation which constantly replicates the possibilities for deterritorialisation. Every rhizome in this irrepresentational disruption “contains lines of sedimentarity according to which it is staratified, territorialized, signified, attributed etc as well as lines of deterritorialisation down which it constantly flees” (Deluze and Guattari 9). The diasporic individuals like rhizome, in their search for a home, are thus endowed with a double perspective of performative negotiations which entail an attempt at reproduction and reinvention of cultural determinants in which both points of departure and arrival are always in a constant flux transgressing the stable and frivolous physicality of longing and belonging.

This postmodernist model of diaspora connotes a condition rather than being definitive of a community. This condition not only displays a strong proclivity towards multiple journeys and localization but also exhibits a subversive impulse of disrupting the boundaries of the binaries. It perpetuates a differential redefinition of cultural accommodation and syncretism filtering out the pitfalls of essentialism and stereotypical reductionism. The substantiality of hybridity is thus reasserted, by the recreative ‘third space’ which is presented as a mode of articulation in the performative dialectics of engendering reflective possibilities and exists as an “interruptive, interrogative and enunciative space of new forms of cultural meaning and production blurring the limitations of existing boundaries and calling into questions established categorizations of culture and identity” (Meredith 3). Stuart Hall, like Bhabha thus analyzes cultural identity as a relational and interactive entity – “fluid, contingent, multiple and shifting” (McLeod 225) which can be contrasted with the ‘border lives’ of Bhabha in which concepts are overlapping, hybridized in shifting subjectivities that promotes the necessity and possibility of replicating new cultural landscapes for these displaced diasporans. Human subject is no longer viewed as grounded in a fixed identity but rather is a discursive effect generated in the act of enunciation. Diasporisation and hybridity then share the commonalities – the denial of the essentialist positions of home and belonging, purity and inherent authenticity of cultural constants. Diasporic composite formation thus takes up the virtual ‘third space’ as an incontrovertible ‘in-between’ position that challenges fixity, authenticity and fetishism of monolithic cultural configuration. The actualization of ‘self’ as well as ‘other’ is believed to be constructs on the same ground and allows an unprecedented cosmopolitan nomadism which perpetually dyanamicises the idea of belonging and rootedness.

In course of time, identity which is associated with a certain sense of collectivity begins to be linked with a place, a language, an ethnicity and a culture which has been severely criticized in the framework of contemporary critical theory. Identities, according to the contemporary cultural critics are not bounded by a place, language ethnicity or culture. Rather than being a fixed entity, it emphasizes the process of eternal transformation utilizing the resources from history, language and culture:

Though they seem to invoke an origin in a historical past with which they continue to correspond, actually identities are questions of using the resources of history, language and culture in the process of becoming rather than being:   not “who we are” or “where we came from”, so much as what we might become, how we have been represented and how that bears on how we might represent ourselves. (Hall “Who Needs Identity” 4)

Moving away from the conceptualization of identity to identification, Hall stresses the unmonolithic image of identity which is established through the inclusion of differences and by addressing the informing otherness. In this continuous process of ‘suturing’, the focus is shifted from maintenance of boundary to its summative erosion. Boundaries are significant not in the sense that it is a prime marker in the poetics of inclusion or exclusion but that it turns out to be increasingly porous and permeable. Differences still continue to exist, but are transacted across and between cultures rather than subsumed through assimilation or acculturation. Diasporic homes are thus built, un-built and re-built through the process of negotiation using the existing cultural resources to reconfigure its informing elements in relation to the present contextualities of time, place and situation. For Avatar Brah, the diasporic space is replete with the genealogies of journey which are combined with those of staying whereby the boundary line between journeying and staying becomes intertwined and blurred. The confluence of such diverse narratives captures the tension between national and transactional, self and other, originary and diasporic.

Salman Rushdie, Stuart Hall, Homi Bhabha and others have emphasized the fluid structure of ‘home’ referring to the concept of hybridity to signalize the evolvement of a new, mixed and dynamic culture as movements and flows across the world have been intensified keeping pace with the postmodern upheavals in the contemporary world. Rushdie in Imaginary Homelands posits that “the great possibility that mass migration gives the world” results in a “newness [that] enters the world” due to the “mélange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that” (394). When migrants move, from their homeland to another land they not only carry their home culture to the host land, but in the process introduce new features of the host country to their own existing set of cultural referents. The transactive encounters between different culturalities accentuate the formation of new cultural spaces resulting from the localization of global culture and the globalization of local culture which is called glocalization by the globalist theorists reflecting a reciprocal rhetoric of mutual influences and relationships. Hall points out that identifies are about interrogations, about the resources of history, language and culture. Far from being situated in an essentialized root, cultural identity is an evolving process which constantly subject to the endless discursive play of history, power and discourse. Identity, therefore, is mediated through different representations such as language practice and projections, memory, fantasy and so on. This diasporic space exists as critiquing the rhetoric of return to the homeland or reclaiming an ancestral part because identities emerge from these split narratives as imaginary constructions yet inevitably politicized in a range of influential relationships. Thus, reclaiming the representation of one’s identity entails a subversion of the constraints of identity politics. The new space generated from these cultural transactions allows the diasporans to use their own languages, to recover their own histories and to reconfigure their new roots. Migrating from one spatial geopolitic to another also involves a migration from a certain psychological, emotional and mental context to the other. The diasporans with this physical and metaphorical dislocation have to relentlessly condition themselves between the ambivalent feeling of homeliness and homelessness, inaugurating a sense of loss through their multiple movements in the act of reclamation. Because it is an impossibility to reclaim what in lost, the diasporic subjects are left with “not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imagined homelands” (Imaginary Homelands 10).

1. Ashworth, G. J. and B. Graham. “Senses of Place, Sense of Time and Heritage.” Senses of Place: Senses of Time, edited by G. J. Ashworth and B. Graham,  Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005, pp. 1-15.
2. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of culture. London, Routledge, 1994.
3. Brah, Avtar. Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. London, Routledge, 1996.
4. Buechner, Frederich. The Longing for Home. San Francisco, Harper Collins, 1996.
5. Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA, Harvard UP, 1999.
6. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix, Guattari.  A Thousand Plateaus, translated by Brian Massumi, London, Athlone Press, 1988.
7. Etoroma, E. E. “Finding home.” International Journal of Diversity in Organisations, Communities & Nations 6.3, 2006, pp. 103-110.
8. Hall, Stuart. “The Question of Cultural Identity”. Modernity and its Futures, edited by Stuart Hall, David Held and Tony McGrew, Cambridge, UK, Polity Press, 1992, pp. 274-316.
9. ______“Who needs Identity?” Questions of Cultural Identity, edited by Stuart Hall and Paul Du Gay, London, Sage, 1996. pp. 1-17.
10. McLeod, John. Beginning Postcolonialism. Manchester, Manchester U Press, 2012.
11. Meredith, Paul. “Hybridity in the Third Space: Rethinking Bi-cultural in Aotearoa/New Zealand.” Proceedings of Te Oru Rangahau Māori Research and Development Conference, School of Māori Studies, Massey University, 7-9 July 1998, Te Oru Rangahau Maori Research and Development Conference, Massey University, Palmerston North. Palmerston North, N.Z.: Te Pūtahi-ā-Toi School of Māori Studies, Massey U, 1998, pp. 1-7.
12. O’Keeffe, T. “Landscape and Memory: Historiography, Theory, Methodology.” Heritage, Memory and the Politics of Identity: New Perspective on the Cultural Landscape, edited by N. Moore and Y. Whelan, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. pp. 3-18.
13. Rapport, Nigel and Joanna Overing. Key Concepts in Social and Cultural Anthropology, London and New York, Routledge, 2004.
14. Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981-1991, London, Vintage, 2010.
15. Sojka, Eugenia. Canadian Diasporic Artists and Changing Narrative of Homeland. Katowice, Poland, University of Silesia, n.d. PDF.
16. Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press,1977.