Week 7- Elaine Hong

In the article titled, "Diaspora Politics, Homeland Erotics, and the Materializing of Memory" by Louisa Schein, Schein discusses effects on the Hmong diaspora and their concepts of home. She undermines assumptions of a stable homeland. Her argument is to focus on  "the potential plurality of translocal migration trajectories, relations between representations of both migrant and homeland identities and their material effects, and the dynamics of sexuality and gender as desires and structured opportunities intersect" (Schein 723).

Her first theory to look at diaspora is through local migrations throughout China that serves as an origin for Hmong migration. Looking at diaspora through a generalized lens, nostalgia of the homeland limits ideas of home to a stagnate point, one that serves  as a point of comfort and a grounding point for individuals. However, with the Hmong diaspora, home was always migrating. There is no central location in which this community can certainly ground themselves. Nostalgia and memories of home then become "decentered lateral connections" (Schein 707) among people and land. For Hmong people, ideas of suffering, struggle, resistance, and displacement then become center of points in which this community lay their origins in.

Question: Do you agree with Schein on ideas of placing one's origins?