Youna KimThere is a need to consider the evolving nature of diasporic embeddedness and identity
formation among contemporary, subordinate, and especially female, nomadic subjects, who are
potentially constantly on the move, mentally and physically, while developing home-making
practices as part of their life politics that enable them to go on with, and at times meaningfully
sustain, their mobile lives within the mediated networks of meaning and mediated social relations.
Processes of place-making, such as home-making, can be conceived as a matter of embodied
practices that shape identities and enable resistances (Gupta and Ferguson 1997). Place-making
always involves a construction, rather than merely a discovery, of difference. Identity is a mobile,
often unstable relation of difference, emerging as a continually contested domain of place and
power. Place and space are both dynamic and historical, shaped by power relations. Space itself
is a complex social construction, constituted through social relationships and made productive
in social practices with multiple, hegemonic, sometimes contradictory, and conflictual characters
(Lefebvre 1991). Nowadays, the production of space and the practices of home-making inevi-
tably involve the media. Through practices of media use, place gets instantaneously pluralized,
while raising questions about exclusion and difference, as places are frequently constructed on
acts of exclusion (Moores 2012). Home-making practices are therefore key to understanding
migrant claims to belonging. The dialectical sense of belonging and exclusion is integral to the
experience of media space and to the formation of migratory identity with its own constraints
and paradoxes that are yet to be known and understood in detail.
Banal racism
My room is small, the UK television is in my closet. It’s just not interesting ... Why
try to know them when they don’t try to know us (Koreans)? While living abroad we
look for something better. I don’t belong here.
No quality food, no feelings of caring for others ... There are differences between
us (Japanese) and them ... I stop fighting (racism), because it was my choice to move
here, because my English is not good enough. I cannot even express frustration to
outsiders as they say, “You live in attractive London!” My friend, who is depressed in
Paris, hears the same, “You live in Beautiful Paris!”
I am always a foreigner, angry whenever people say bad things about China and
look down on Chinese people. I come to know us (Chinese) better while living abroad
... If I have time to watch UK television, I would rather watch Chinese through the
Internet. That’s why my English has not improved ... The Internet is super! Every day,
the first thing I do is to open the Chinese website (Sohu) and read news.Great Britain was the centre of the 1990s boom in talk about cosmopolitanism, during which
“cosmopolitan Britain” became standard speech evoking a positive orientation towards European
integration and engagement with the rest of the world; commercial cosmopolitanism came on
the heels of the re-branding of Britain itself in the late 1990s as Cool Britannia in the cultural
and financial life of British cities, London in particular (Calhoun 2008). In a changing Europe,
built on economic models of mobility and integration, mobile transnationals appear not to face
discrimination; however, seductive world cities (like London) are also national capitals, which
exclude even the most privileged of foreigners on the “human dimension” (Favell 2008). Many
women in this study encounter an ambiguity about various and implicit forms of racism, and
how to interpret their diasporic existence, that finds acceptance, belonging, and respect difficult
to attain. Everyday banal racism (“not like hitting but staring or just ignoring”) can be a sign of
rejection that one will never belong (“always a foreigner”). The sojourning attitude as a perpetual