Rethinking home in diasporic contexts: hopeful luggage, between errancy and rootedness

Abstract

Two migration narratives are analysed here. The analysis focuses the protagonists of Graciliano Ramos Vidas Secas and Caryl Phillips The Final Passage in their search for home. The migrants´ reduced luggage is taken as symbolic of their dispossession and also as pointing to cultural difference. Bhabha´s reflections on cultural difference and the concept of home, as defined by Theano Terkenli, offer the theoretical foundation for this analysis, and trigger considerations on the way representation leads beyond itself, to the social asymmetries implicit in the opposition between rootedness/ vagrancy, and in the aspiration for home and its denial.