Homing Desire, Cultural Citizenship, and Diasporic Imaginings

This article examines the relationship between homing desire, cultural citizenship and diaspora communities. I begin by examining how citizenship is a deeply gendered concept. From there, I will explore how citizenship practices, although promising enfranchisement and equality, sometimes socially exclude certain gendered and racialized individuals and communities as inauthentic citizens, non-citizens, or denizens. Finally, I will analyze the concept of cultural citizenship and how it is being used in various diaspora communities as ways to imagine multiple modes of belonging within and beyond the coherence of national boundaries. I argue that to fully comprehend the lived experience of migratory and diasporic subjects, we, as feminist and diaspora scholars, need to pay heed to how migratory subjects negotiate and rewrite their citizenship status within the nation-state with cultural productions and cultural acts. In the process, migratory and diasporic subjects stake claims to their multiple identities, multiple homes and affiliations, and socio-political membership to the nation(s) and transnational communities