ABSTRACT
The chapter written by the author for Living the global city (1997) emphasized the emancipatory potential of global space in relation to individualized milieu. The chapter in this volume will focus on the social and cultural work of regrounding that inevitably follows the uprooting. What this involves is not just the outer reordering of opportunity spaces from the global to the more provincial but the inner reworking of global past and provincial future in the embrace between generative remembrance and disabling nostalgia. The chapter will draw on the classic social figure of the ‘homecomer’ in order to indicate this culture of inverse relatedness in its processual character. The ‘homecomer’ provides the strategically situated subject that links the global and the provincial not in an unproblematic sense of limitless global mobility, but by testifying to the disjunctive and situated character of global living and its limits. The argument will be grounded in case study material collected over the last couple of years.
