Toward a migrant politics of location

Resumo

This article offers a discussion of the concept of home in contemporary times and how it is closely related to an immigrant’s feeling of displacement or sense of placelessness. After brief theoretical considerations on how the concept of home was built traditionally upon a binary world view, the authors move on to undermine a romantic view of home as a place of security and to propose a new politics of location that is based more on confrontation and that has the self as the very site of home. Finally, it is our claim that the construction of this migrant concept of home involves as well a negotiation with one’s memories. As a form of illustration, the article discusses the fictional representation of Dominican immigrants in the United States through an analysis of Loida Maritza Pérez’s novel Geographies of Home.