Making Home: Seminar Three

Making Home looks at the intersection of settler colonialism, forced and unforced migration, and domesticity. While home is often understood as limited to domestic space, this seminar series imagines home-making as both multi-sited and multi-scalar, intimately tied into the politics of local territorial claims and global geopolitical structures. Practices of home-making and unmaking extend from the materiality of site and place to the immaterial practices and ideological foundations that enable a claim or enforce dispossession. Thinking more deeply about homemaking as a territorial claim to belonging, this series asks: how does that claim function similarly/differently in the contexts of migration and colonialism?

This seminar looks at immaterial home-making by second generation British born South Asians, through the lens of British Asian dance music and its role in changing narratives around Britishness and belonging.

Paper's will be circulated a week ahead of the seminar.

Taariq Jazeel is a Professor of Human Geography at UCL. He works at the intersections of human geography, South Asian studies and postcolonial and critical theory. In broad terms, his research explores the spatial constitutions of nation, identity and belonging in South Asian contexts, especially in Sri Lanka, as well as the challenges of engaging non-western contexts. His published work has focused on aesthetic and environmental formations and their relationships to the politics of Sri Lankan nationhood, especially in relation to the country’s rich recent history of national emparkment and its ‘tropical modern’ architecture. He has also written on literary geographies and various diasporic and ‘multicultural’ formations, particularly in relation to British-Asian culture; on the postcolonial politics of geographical knowledge production and responsibility; and on geographical engagements with radical alterity. He is currently working on a project that examines the spatial politics and impact of British Asian dance music, specifically what became known as the 'New Asian Kool' or 'Asian Underground', between the mid-1990s and around 2010.