Alone Across Cultural Worlds: Internal Homelessness and Borrowed Belonging

Diaspora is commonly understood in terms of geographic displacement, migration, and the loss of homeland. This paper explores a less visible form of displacement: the experience of being psychically alone across cultural worlds. For some racialized immigrants and their descendants, the culture of origin may be associated with traumatic failures of recognition, while the adopted culture simultaneously marginalizes them as foreign or other. When failures of recognition recur across familial, cultural, and racial worlds, an enduring experience of being alone in the world may result – of having no secure relational or cultural location in which one’s subjectivity can find a home. I suggest that this internal homelessness can produce a psychic life organized around adaptation and the labor of manufacturing belonging. I introduce the term borrowed belonging to describe forms of attachment to people, institutions, achievements, places, practices, and dominant cultural forms that provide a provisional sense of social location when belonging is not securely felt as one’s own. Through psychoanalytic theory, Asian diasporic experience, and clinical reflection, the paper explores how a person may become highly adapted and socially embedded while remaining psychically homeless, and considers the relational conditions through which belonging might become less manufactured and more genuinely inhabited.