Why it’s hard to feel at home

© Photo by Marzolino

To feel at home in today’s world is a very big demand because the sense of homelessness, looked at from a long period of historical reflection including our present moment, has always been a place of feeling at home and not feeling at home. Arendt, Freud, Heidegger – in all these cases, you feel both placed and displaced at the same time. It’s very difficult to think of a period where you feel at home because of these larger contradictions.

When you ask me to think about this question in relation to these large categories of globalisation, colonialism or anti-colonialism, I begin to think about the limits of this kind of nominalism. That’s how we get contained in a particular history. But these are very limited issues, partly because the question of periods and ages where historians feel at home – people are made to think that they were at home – are very complicated. It seems that transition is a much better discursive or analytic time frame than thinking of ages and periods which are all neatly labelled, and thinking we knew what the world was like.

How enlightened was the Enlightenment?

Here you have a time when concepts of citizenship are in the West; concepts of nation and responsibility are beginning to be formulated in a really effective way, in a liberal way but at the same time, you have Empire and subject people who are not citizens. And you have John Stuart Mill saying, I am a democrat in my country and a despot in somebody else’s country, i.e. India. What does that make of me?

How post-colonial is post-colonialism? Here again, you have remnants of the anti-colonial movement as part of the nationalist movements while, at the same time, you have issues of an emergent bourgeois power group of privilege. You have many of the problems of the earlier period – inequality, injustice, poverty – still continuing. Then, you have the further entanglement of having hegemonic financial structures – what people call the Washington Consensus, or the IMF – intervening in this moment. People like Joseph Stiglitz say that this is a period that is very reminiscent of the neo-colonial. So, who is at home there?

Finally, what is globalisation? How global is it and who is at home in globalisation? Here you have, on the one hand, the circulations of goods and finances, with major conventions established for trade, and on the other, you have ethnonationalist groups which are emerging at the leadership level, which do not allow the free passage of people and which boost a certain kind of religious nationalism or racial nationalism – deeply provincial, deeply problematic and against the spirit of any kind of global cosmopolitanism. So, in what sense can we ever be at home and not feel displaced or homeless at the same time? Conceptually, politically, psychically?

The concept of progress

The Enlightenment, imperialism, post-colonialism, globalisation: these are all transnational networked systems. They are not the same by any means, but they all make a scope to what we might call world-making. Now, when you think about these systems, there are distinctions. For example, the question of law and the question of the possibility of citizenship of various kinds (at that time, of course, not all countries were nations), the system of law, the system of regulation, the system of the emergence of a group called the people, the growth of the bourgeoisie, the growth of certain notions of rights – these all belong to the moment of the Enlightenment.

Then you get to the second issue, which is the Empire. At that point, the Enlightenment begins to conquer the world with the idea of progress. That concept of progress – which is used as a governmental process or a governmental set of administrations across the colonial world – is really Westernisation or modernisation, which is a way of erasing the histories of India or Africa and their own assessment of what the modern moment was. So, there, you begin to have the concept of progress developing.

Global freedom and the growth of ethnonationalism

© Photo by RossiAgung

Then, in the post-colonial and anti-colonial world, you have the notion of freedom – a notion of global freedom, as you began to have in what was known as the Bandung Conference, where all the post-colonial countries tried to address the notion of a global freedom. As soon as you started talking about global freedom, nationalist movements and nationalist bourgeoisies created a problem.

So, we go from law and rationality in the Enlightenment, roughly, to the question of progress, and then to the question of independence. Then, with Stiglitz we begin to think about post-colonialism and the issue of the international financial structures and also the international governmental and political forces. And finally, you begin to have a kind of neo-colonialism within post-colonialism.

With the liberalisation of markets, the Soviet Union coming apart, you begin to get a sense of globalisation and a sort of notion of the triumphalism of market capitalism, which was always a suggested form of modernisation, so it was a form of progress. And then, of course, when that begins to happen, slowly with that boast of progress – with the boast of the success of the West and Western ideologies of liberalism – you start having the growth of ethnonationalism and majoritarian tyrannical authoritarian rule, as we have it today, almost across the world.

Minorities as the excluded group

Now, what is fascinating is that in each of these moments, as we shift from these different paradigms, there is a group that is being created. Every time somebody talks about a new national territory, you have displaced people, migrants and minorities. You have displaced people like migrants and minorities at the same moment as we announce progress or feel like we’ve achieved progress. You have this displaced population that is being continually produced. By being produced, it is creating a greater sense of authoritarianism amongst the governments and the leaders. But at the same time, the continual production of these groups of people, minorities, makes us question the notion of the nation, the notion of progress, the notion of development.

And now what do we see? Minorities as the excluded group. We have them all over the world: Muslims in India, Mexicans in the US, Kurds in Turkey, Hindus in Pakistan, Palestinians in Israel, refugees always, women invariably, LGBTQ groups inevitably, dissidents always in a minority and always persecuted, and migrant workers routinely used and abused and dismissed. So, the lesson of all these global movements is something that I see as being symptomatically readable in the production of minorities.

The barbarians emerge from within

At the very end of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt puts it beautifully – and very tragically because she says something like this: that whenever there is a vaunting boast that we have a global civilisation, the barbarians always emerge from within. There is no outside to this system. Barbarians come from within to reduce others to a state of savagery, as she puts it.

This notion of an internal dynamic where progress and barbarism come together, where civility and barbarism work together, is a kind of condition of claims to a global vision from the Enlightenment through the Imperial period, even in the nationalist period, where the construction of every nation is the dispelling of a minority or the incarceration of a minority. Today, with the great vaunting invocation of a kind of global financial market, global cosmopolitanism, we have the ethnonationalists who are targeting largely migrants and minorities and producing new minorities. So, this is a way of bringing a long history to bear on our relatively short contemporary moment.

Dignity as part of agency

© Photo by corgarashu

We talk about rights very much and very properly by referring to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we applaud the fact that dignity of the human being – irrespective of caste, creed, religion, location or history – is something inherent. The Declaration has an inherent notion of dignity; the value of dignity.

Now, what I’m very interested in – in the troubled world we live in, where displacement and homelessness (over 70 million people are displaced in our world today) are so important – is that dignity is not necessarily inherent or not only inherent in the human being, but in individuals, groups, who are pushed up against the hard rock face of life, who are denied every vestige of dignity. So, dignity belongs as much to the person as it belongs to the performance of even a desperate act of disappointed hope. Because dignity is part of an agency. It’s part of what you do, not part of who you are.

This is the distinction I make between my concept of dignity in extremis and the internalist concept inherited from the Enlightenment and from Kant that you have in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as well as in many conventions and discourses of rights. This is where I take a different view. This is a view, of course, that James Baldwin takes when he talks about taking the risk. Those who are the most oppressed in a way have the ethical stamina but also, he says, the ethical responsibility to take the risk of freedom, the risk of equality, the risk of justice. And sometimes they die. And when they die, we worship their memory. Their memory is, for us, a kind of future directive. And sometimes they live, and they inspire us.

Discover more about

post-colonialism

Bhabha, H. K. (2011). Our Neighbours, Ourselves: Contemporary Reflections on Survival. De Gruyter.

Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The Location of Culture. Routledge.

The limits of global freedom: where is home in today's world?