ABSTRACT
The chapter deals with belonging in migration, which encompasses the self, home, memory, journey, and intersectionalities with identities. The discourse on migration is dominated by a binary between living and leaving, where living at home is privileged over leaving; the latter often denigrated as abnormal and a rupture in the rhythm of social life. The chapter argues that while migration has been an ongoing historical process, the figure of the migrant is a modern conception. On the one hand, this figure is received as a “moral panic” among the hosts; on the other, any effort to normalise mobility runs the risk of undermining its exploitative and traumatic aspects. The chapter argues that apart from the traditional disciplines, women’s studies and scholarship on the partition, forced migration, marginalisation, experience, and pain and suffering have contributed immensely to enhancing our understanding of migration in its interdisciplinarity. The dominance of over-deterministic methodological frames of causal analysis has led to the neglect of migrants’ subjectivity towards belongingness and home in migration literature. Home is often conceptualised in binary to work, which the recent experiences of COVID-19 have ruptured by bringing into focus in academic discourse the issue of work from home and migrants’ lack of choice to live rather than longing to leave for home.
