Mobile borders and chronotope of homeland

Abstract

Abstract In this article, we examine the imagining of homeland as one of the discursive practices of rearticulating belonging within new state borders. The study focuses on an under-researched diasporic group of the Dungan community in Kazakhstan and examines how the diaspora subjects make sense of shifting borders and legitimize their presence within an increasingly homogenizing nation-state. Specifically, our interrogation focuses on spatiotemporal frames for re-imagining the notion of homeland and belonging in the context of shifting borders and changing conditions of settlement. We show how the Dungan negotiate their social positioning by re-orienting themselves to their ancestral home and their current place by discursively constructing double loss – permanent dispersal from China, their ancestral homeland, and displacement from the home and ideal life they managed to build in the Soviet Union. This spatiotemporal perspective allows us to see that the notion of homeland, a defining feature of diaspora and often viewed as naturalized and fixed, is a fluid construct, and one which can be rooted in time just as much as in space. The study contributes to understanding of processes of diasporic imagination in response to sociopolitical changes, and shows us that feelings of displacement can arise without physical dispersal, that temporality is as important in the processes of constructing diasporas as spatial movement.