ABSTRACT
Globalisation is commonly associated with processes that complicate both our understanding of national and ethnic affiliations and our theorisation about such established concepts as nation and nation-state. Indeed, in the age of widespread human mobility and information fluidity, the meanings of place, space, community and nation are unstable and contestable. This is especially pertinent when one considers the fates of those who, by free will or force, seek to live outside the place they would normally call ‘home’. One phenomenon of buoyant global capitalism is how, for the people of the diaspora, transnational identity seems ‘empty’ or lost in the time and space between themselves, their homeland, and their place of residence (Vertovec and Cohen 1999: xiii).
