The “Unhomely”
Much of my writing and teaching gravitates toward the idea of the unhomely. I take it from Homi Bhabha and Martin Heidegger as cited in the introduction to Bhabha’s The Location of Culture:
To be unhomed is not to be homeless, nor can the ‘unhomely’ be easily accommodated in that familiar division of social life into private and public spheres. The unhomely moment creeps up on you stealthily as your own shadow and suddenly you find yourself… taking the measure of your dwelling in a state of ‘incredulous terror.’ And it is at this point that the world first shrinks… and then expands enormously… The recesses of the domestic space become sites for most intricate invasions. In that displacement, the borders between home and world become confused: and, uncannily, the private and the public become part of each other, forcing upon us a vision that is as divided as it is disorienting.
—
Although the ‘unhomely’ is a paradigmatic colonial and post-colonial condition, it has a resonance that can be heard distinctly, if erratically, in fictions that negotiate the powers of cultural difference in a range of transhistorical sites.