ABSTRACT
Migration can be briefly defined as directed movement in the modern world, movement from one ‘home’ to a place which is expected to become a new ‘home.’ There has been little work done to theorise migration. The best is probably Ian Chambers’s discussion in Migrancy, Culture, Identity.1 In contradistinction to the definition that I have just given, Chambers writes that
to travel implies movement between fixed positions, a site of departure, a point of arrival, the knowledge of an itinerary. It also intimates an eventual return, a potential homecoming. Migrancy, on the contrary, involves a movement in which neither the points of departure nor those of arrival are immutable or certain. It calls for a dwelling in language, in histories, in identities that are constantly subject to mutation.2
