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identification that renders the relationship between the two constituents not only
fragmented but oppositional as well.
I do not wish to imply here that home becomes an empty concept for immigrants
once they leave. On the contrary, the relationship between the ‘home and the ‘host’ is a
staple component in many migrants’ everyday experiences, but as I shall argue in this
paper, this relationship is never problematized or experienced in a uniform way. As long
as we persist in conceiving of north Africans in France, Turks in Germany, Asians in
England, or Hispanics in the US as unified and homogeneous and continue to believe that
their organized cultural spaces are necessary sources of collective identities, our
understanding of how these identities are formed and negotiated will remain regrettably
thin. Clearly, the spaces immigrants create constitute an important site where the initial
conflicts between ‘home’ and ‘alien’ are revealed, discussed and possibly resolved and as
such deserve our attention but beyond the visible aspects of difference. As Ayse Caglar
put it in an excellent article that reads more like a plea to put a halt to the ongoing
fixation with that which is visibly ‘ethnically different:
My point is that this evident visibility comes to dominate our own theoretical
horizons as anthropologists and sociologists almost as much as it does those
of the racists, ethnic brokers or politicians who seek to control, resist and
domesticate the spatializing process itself. To ‘write against culture’ in this
context, in which space is a powerful metaphor for sociality, is to locate other,
more invisible, processes that go towards the creation of culture and identity
(1997:177).
The media in this context, and particularly that produced in diaspora, constitute a
key site for identity formation. As Ien Ang put it: “It is by recognizing the irreducible
productivity of the hybrid practices in the diaspora that China; the mythic homeland, will
then stop being the absolute norm for authentic Chineseness against which all other
Convention