Where do you come from?
Where are you going?
When you think of “displacement,” what helps you find steadiness?
In your heart, what truly feels like “home”?
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."
Here, it is necessary first to define this pair of core concepts. "Place" is a "meaningful space" that carries personal and collective history, emotion, and identity. It is concrete, perceptual, and sustains our bonds of blood, geography, and culture. "Space," however, is a homogeneous, quantifiable geographical category, emphasizing flow, efficiency, and connection. The tide of modernity is systematically reshaping the former into the latter.
Thus, the stability of hometown, the ultimate symbol of "Place," is disintegrating. Under the dual forces of urbanization and globalization, its physical entity may be vanishing (as in the hollowing out of villages), and its meaning drifts endlessly. It is no longer the straightforward nostalgia of a rural society.
Zhang Kejiu once wrote: "A letter comes on the west wind from a home a thousand miles away, / Asking me when I will return? / Wild geese cry when maple leaves red, / Men are drunk on the yellow chrysanthemum, / The sound of leaf rain in an autumn dream." In those times, nostalgia had a clear return date and tangible scenery.
But now, hometown is not merely a place we cannot return to... We hold return tickets in our hands, yet have become spiritually homeless.
We have thus become, in a sense, "Lotus-eaters"—not unwilling to return, but finding that certain, returnable "hometown" is fading away. We taste a sweet yet bitter loss in the mist named "the past." "You gaze at the view from the bridge, / While someone watching the view gazes at you from a tower."—We and our hometowns have become distant reflections in each other's scenery.
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.
