IDENTITY, AFFECT, AND CULTURAL CITIZENSHIP IN DIASPORIC CONTEXT.

• Author: Saxena, Shilpi

1. Cultural citizenship-an introduction

   Over the past few decades, a massive and diversified system of migration has emerged and developed on different levels: national, regional, and global, resulting in the expansion and acceleration of cross-border interactions. Although transnational migration is not altogether a new phenomenon, it has connected different cultures and communities, which further leads to immigrants' dilemma of negotiating home, belonging, and membership within nation-states. It is therefore worth exploring a range of pressing questions-the relationship between collective and individual, social and political, difference and democracy, culture and nation that seeks to intervene in current debates on citizenship.

   Within the context of increased cultural diversity and globalization, the concept of 'cultural citizenship' has emerged as an interdisciplinary concept that emphasizes the right of the minorities to be different and to be respected as such, without revoking their rights of membership or belonging to the participatory community (Rosaldo 1994, Rosen 1997). In this sense, the cultural understanding of citizenship is concerned not only with the struggle for legal and political rights, but crucially with recognition, respect and visibility for a wide range of cultural practices. What becomes defining here is a call for cultural respect or in the words of Miller, 'the positive acknowledgment of difference in and by the mainstream' (2001: 2). This mediated dimension of citizenship that is central to the struggles for recognition and difference is appropriate for cosmopolitan societies. However, this intervention is in no way Utopian, nor does it celebrate culture as a quick-fix solution for the concerns associated with the notions of home, nation, identity and belonging. Instead, it focuses on how cultural citizenship that migrants create through participation, performances, and allegiances facilitates and offers new possibilities for diasporic affiliations. In contrast to the conventional notion of citizenship that frames national identity within neatly bounded spatial boundaries, the concept of cultural citizenship offers a relatively flexible framework for dealing with the questions of home and belonging, thus shifting focus from the fixity of 'roots' and 'origins' to the fluidity of 'routes' and 'itineraries'. It is within the context of these shifting patterns of diaspora narratives that the present study is located.

   Addressing the relationship between cultural identity and citizenship, it explores the affective dimensions of migration, home, and belonging, so as to provide a deeper understanding of human predicaments in a mobile world. It attempts to pursue two critical questions: First, how shifting sociopolitical contexts affect migrants' life and how they respond to their shifting circumstances; Second, how various emotional cultural practices that migrants deploy to perform citizenship provide new forms of affective relations and belonging in relation to increasingly complex patterns of localization and globalization. In particular, it demonstrates that a focus on cultural questions and their relation to citizenship is central in an era dominated by popular forms of culture and complicated by postcoloniality and postmodernity. By seeking to examine citizenship in a new perspective, this paper also explores the postcolonial affect in terms of colonial residue, spatial dispersion and identity crisis and how citizenship practices facilitate migrants in sustaining bonds and keeping in touch transnationally.

2. Emotional geographies of home and belonging

   In much of the diasporic narratives like 'Beauty and the Beast', 'A Wicked Old Woman', 'The Coral Strand', and 'Dynamite' authored by Ravinder Randhawa (1) an Asian Diasporic author reflected the concept of home, an evocative notion, which further opens up venues for questions pertaining to race, ethnicity, country of origin, documents and citizenship, nationality. 'Where do you belong to?' or 'Where are you really from?', such naive questions that are always laden and definitional in some way induce emotions, intimacy and feelings that play a major role not just in creating 'sustained ties with peoples and institutions across the borders but also in constructing the idea of diasporic belonging. Despite the conceptional rise of transnationalism, the nexus between emotions and migration has not been explored in detail, especially not within the migrant and diaspora literature.

   However, there has been a growing interest in studying the nature of emotions, affects, feelings and sentiments over the last decade. The existing research on the emotionality of migration has highlighted the critical role of emotions and affect in comprehending the dynamics of home, identity, and belonging. (Ahmed 2004, Anthias 2006, Yuval-Davis 2006, Rottger-Rossler 2018, Wise and Velayutham 2017, Houen 2020). This renewed focus on the role of emotions, affects and feelings in migration sheds light on how the notion of transnational affect and emotion is instrumental in understanding the experience and impact of migration, as well as in understanding the shifting contours of modern citizenship. It is therefore worth examining the affective and emotional dimensions of home and belonging in connection with the emerging paradigm of 'cultural citizenship' which plays a crucial role in the construction and formation of diasporic affiliations. This article extends the research by exploring cultural citizenship as a process that needs to be rethought and reformulated as a site of multilocality that opens up opportunities for diaspora to negotiate complexities of diasporic formations and to form multi-local dwelling, roots, and belongings. The study contributes to the growing scholarship on affective migration by examining tangible effects of emotions at play in such spaces: in particular, shame, pride, loss, ambivalence, homesickness and alienness in an identity that is inextricably related to the ancestral homeland, and which may be leading to the disruption of belonging among diaspora.

3. Reflection of identity and cultural citizenship in diasporic context

   When studying processes of migration from an emotional perspective, the notion of belonging has emerged as a dominant lens through which to explore the personal and social dynamics which influence migrants' ability to develop a...