Points of origin: a visual and narrative journey
Chapters
Overview
Overview
abstract
'The questions you pose, belong to generations, and so it goes. ' Scholars have observed that 'diaspora' represents more than a fixed identity, a passive experience, or a theoretical term. It is a practice as well, including conscious action, negotiation, and articulation. The visual and literary arts have served as an important platform for this practice of identification, as it is often through the process of creating artistic narratives that diasporic identities also take shape. The flexibility of artistic mediums is conducive to the fluid and often ambiguous nature of diasporic subjectivities – with their shifting relationships to place, myth, and memory. It allows individuals and groups the space to imagine and long for their places of belonging, particularly when their desire to belong is not satiated by their current locale. Questions of home and belonging can be complex for diasporans who migrated from their place of birth, but even more so for their children and descendants. For those who were born or raised in the diaspora, it can be difficult to feel settled when they have such ambiguous ties to both their countries of citizenship and origin. Often their social, cultural, and political lives are spread across multiple places, some of which they have never been to outside their imagination. While it may be challenging to live in this liminal space of 'in-betweenness' , it can also be a beautiful and productive place ripe for creative thought and expression. It is a place from which one can observe the world through a lens of curiosity – a lens that can shift its perspective and proximity with greater ease than most. Points of Origin is a collection of images and poems that explores the constant negotiations of diasporic identity through the experience of nostalgia. Using photography and poetry as a language, it celebrates the movement of those who are removed from their points of origin and are reinterpreting their relationships to place, home, and self.
