Next HOMInG’s seminar (58_21), on 22 September at 12pm (CET), will be with Prof. Robin Cohen (University of Oxford). Robin, a world-leading diaspora scholar who has recently “gifted” HOMInG a beautiful paper on “My lost Lithuanian home“, will give an online talk on The Changing Idea of Homeland and Home in Diaspora Studies. See the abstract below.Registration: bernardo.armanni@unitn.it

The Changing Idea of Homeland and Home in Diaspora Studies

Robin Cohen

The connection to a homeland has always been part and parcel of the idea of diaspora. In fact one might say that they are mutually constitutive (you can’t have one without the other). But it was not until the 1990s that the complexity of homeland (and later home) became adequately theorized. I will, in turn, discuss:

– the masculine and feminine ideas of homeland

– the way in which it became part of a list of ‘key features’ of a diaspora

– how (following Wittgenstein) homeland became one of the strands of a diasporic rope

– how it was always more complex that it seemed (using Africa as an example)

– the solid, ductile and liquid versions of homeland and home

– how liquid thinking generated the idea of home as a diasporic space

– how diasporic engagement and applied diaspora studies has (somewhat) resolidified home.