Description
To the extent that home as a concept appears in international political theory, it is read as providing the inclusion/exclusion and inside/outside fundaments that serve as basis for the politics of nations and nation-states. Relatedly, in light of global migration crises, and the associated displacement and homelessness, theoretical exercise around the question of home seeks to identify, situate, and index it locationally – here, there, or elsewhere. In this context, I wish to rethink home experientially and relationally. Drawing from the South Asian experience, I argue that here home is an immanently moving base for relating, such that belonging is always already multiple. Not confined to spaces within walls, home spills out on to such spaces of shared becoming as streets, terraces, and courtyards, extending belonging in movement. The space of the inside is also not a sealed space. It is constantly reconfiguring with the ingress of all sorts of bodies: elemental bodies like dust or seasonal bodies like heat and monsoonal rains, and so on. Amidst this abundant repletion, a characteristic of the densely populous region of South Asia, home is always shifting or expanding or shrinking in relation. Foregrounding movement as the basis of encounter, I seek to map home in its shared ways of becoming. This enables dynamic conceptions of belonging and community, where encounter, porosity, density, and flux take precedence over such fixed categories as location, territory, ground, and identity, calling for an urgent shift from the politics of exclusion to the politics of movement.
