Our era is an age of unprecedented "great mobility." Capital, information, images, and people traverse global networks at speeds and scales never seen before. Yet, within this vast and intricate panorama, the most ancient inquiry deep within each individual's heart is reflected: Where lies my hometown? Where rests my heart? This project themed "Hometown and Displacement," seeks to move beyond mere nostalgia and delve into the theoretical depths of this core modern predicament. It is, in essence, the process through which a "Place"—imbued with warmth, memory, and relationships—is continually transformed into an abstract, anonymous, and functional "Space."
The stability of hometown, the ultimate symbol of "Place," is disintegrating.We have, in a certain sense, become “Lotus-eaters”—not because we are unwilling to return, but because the “homeland” to which we could once return, stable and clearly defined, has drifted farther and farther away. In a fog called “the past,” we taste a sweetness tinged with bitterness, a gentle kind of being lost. “You watch the scenery from the bridge, while someone upstairs watches you watching the scenery.” Between us and our homeland, we have become distant reflections in each other’s view.
The identity crisis and cultural weightlessness born from such “drifting” are felt even more intensely among immigrant and diasporic communities. Rilke’s cry in Autumn—“Whoever has no house now will never have one. / Whoever is alone now will long remain so.”—speaks to a deep existential anxiety about dwelling. Thus, they attempt to rebuild a homeland through music and poetry, like a soft, plaintive whistle whose direction is not toward a geographic point, but toward Yeats’s “Lake Isle of Innisfree,” a poetic dwelling “built with clay and wattles made,” rooted in the inner landscape.
Yet the discussions included in this issue attempt to reveal that “homeland” and “displacement” are not a simple binary. In the contemporary world, “homeland” itself is becoming fluid, a continuously constructed everyday practice. Through literary writing, musical creation, visual documentation, and even the rebuilding of new senses of locality in digital communities, we try to draw a complex “map of the heart” on shifting terrain, anchoring the coordinates of the spirit. It marks a transformation from passive “drifting” to active “constructing,” a modern courage to find home where there is none.
We invite readers to reflect with us: as stable “places” are increasingly permeated by fluid “spaces,” how should we understand belonging? Does displacement necessarily mean loss — or could it also carry the potential to create new connections and new identities?
Ultimately, the quest for homeland is a quest for identity. Philosophers argue; poets sing.
Let’s go, the road, oh the road, is filled with red poppies.
——Lynn
We invite readers to reflect with us: as stable “places” are increasingly permeated by fluid “spaces,” how should we understand belonging? Does displacement necessarily mean loss — or could it also carry the potential to create new connections and new identities?
English