Diaspora and home: interrogating embodied precarity in an era of forced displacement

This chapter aims to situate the conceptualisation of ‘diaspora and home’ within contemporary geopolitics and experience of forced migration. In effect the aim is to evaluate the conceptualisation through the current Syrian refugee crisis. Diasporic migrations are attempted in a more and more precarious world (Waite, 2009); one where structures of ‘home’ and ‘citizenship’ are precarious materialities, post-migration. The chapter outlines the political actions that are shaping the possibilities for migrants and the rendering of their ‘rights’ ‘status’ and ‘access’ to safe haven as being continually in flux, and remade. Forcibly displaced peoples, despite there being no guarantee of settlement, are risking death, disconnection and indeed a loss of a ‘liveable life’ in the process of migration. To outline the ways in which new-grammars of conceptualising diaspora-migration in a precarious world, the chapter ends with an account from artist-activist projects. The projects cited capture the very nature of diaspora in process in refugee camps and sites of shelter for refugees coming from Syria. Political interventions by artists situated at refugee camps at Calais (France) and Lesbos (Greece), highlight the dehumanisation of FDPs. The artists cited here are at the vanguard of witnessing a new holocaust of the 21st century; one that results from a cultural and political erasure of our responsibilities towards those migrating away from suffering, wars, and genocide.