PhD thesis final - Royal Holloway, University of London

Chapter 2- Conceptual frameworkexpatriates‘ belonging in Dubai describes the latter form of this engagement, in whichshe relates expatriates‘ practices of belonging to their domestic home-making practicesby tidying, sorting and disposing of objects to dispossess the residential space ofmeaning attached by previous residents in order to transform the space into a privateand comfortable retreat for them (Walsh 2006b). Also, Tolia-Kelly (2004) argues thatSouth Asian migrants‘ daily engagement with visual culture as material memory athome in England often helps them to reaffirm their identities, making it a useful practicefor fulfilling their longing for being at home.Furthermore, material culture is significant in migrants‘ practices in generating a feelingof being at home because it can shorten the spatial distance from home/homeland byconnecting two places and ignoring the difference between them (Nowicka 2007). Inthis instance, objects that can help migrants to connect back to home or reproduce thesensual landscape of home through vision, sound, smell and taste, etc. are of particularconcern within the scholarship of migrant belonging. For example, interest has beenincreasingly drawn to the role the mass media and communications technology (e.g.transnational media, Internet) play in migrants‘ experiences of being in the homelandwithout physically being there (Lee 2001; Ehrkamp 2005) and in helping them todefend the domestic space as a realm of cultural autonomy (Lee 2001; Morley 2001;Tsagarousianou 2001). In addition, food is also identified as useful for enablingmigrants to feel close to home sensually through, as Miller (2001) describes,experiencing the smells and taste of their natal home or homeland. Moreover, asPetridou (2001) argues, food can also restore the fragmented world of the displacedthrough ‗reconstructing the sensory totality of the world of home‘ (p. 89).43