Lacking Home: Lacan Reads Diaspora¹

ABSTRACT

Diasporic dislocations entail the loss of a real, imaginary or mythologized home – a stand-in for various losses in displacement – which causes mutations in diasporic subjectivities, necessitating their re-subjectivation. Drawing upon Jacques Lacan’s concept of lack, this article posits that home is a constitutive lack of diaspora – an extension of the primally lost object of desire – which is installed via the subjectivation process entailing Lacan’s three Oedipal ‘moments of crisis’ namely frustration, privation and castration. Contrary to the conventional understanding of loss of home as a pathological illness, the article further argues that this lack functions as a source of creativity, enabling diaspora to create various day-to-day cultural and social forms leading to their painful, yet rewarding acculturation in the hostland. This understanding of home as creative lack justifies the nature of diasporic anxieties as manifestations of an ontological void which are, impossible to cure, but viable to manage.

KEYWORDS:

• Home
• diaspora
• Lacanian lack
• desire
• subjectivity
• acculturation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The authors’ research interests include representation of home in cross-cultural diasporic fiction, particularly in the works of Bengali, Palestinian and Nigerian diasporic writers.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Muhammad Zameer Nawaz

Muhammad Zameer Nawaz is a PhD Student at International Islamic University Islamabad (IIUI). His research interests include critical theory, Lacanian psychoanalysis and diasporic fiction. This article is a part of his PhD thesis under the supervision of Dr Akhtar Aziz.

Akhtar Aziz

Akhtar Aziz is an Assistant professor at Department of English, Faculty of Languages and Literature, International Islamic University Islamabad. His main areas of interest are Discourse analysis, stylistics and critical theory.