Unveiling the (trans)national in the home space: an auto-ethnography

Homes are spaces permeated by global flows. Homes of international migrants anchor objects and people with their norms, values and ideas that originate in different countries. From an auto-ethnographic perspective, I scrutinize selected objects in my own flat to ask what a transnational perspective can tell us about home spaces in the globalized condition. I argue that the power of nationalism is best visible when we study how migrants maintain connections to other spaces, times, and people in their homemaking. To demonstrate how transnationalism highlights the significance of gendered, classed and racialized nationalism for homemaking, I discuss three objects: a bookshelf, a tea pot, and my floor. Each of them helps me to reflect upon a different aspect - nationally shaped upbringing and heritage, raptures which become significant because of national closures, and racialised and gendered cultural norms and expectations towards home space and homemaking.

doi: 10.4337/9781800882775.00055 ISBN: 9781800882768