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Transnational Feminist Politics: Being at Home in the World By Mechthild Hart, DePaul University When we talk about global feminist politics we open a Pandora's box of discourses on "globalization." Many writers from a host of different academic disciplines describe what they consider core meanings and main economic, political, social, or cultural structures and characteristics underlying the term globalization. This term is mostly used to summarize the operations of advanced global capitalism and its concomitant processes of social and ecological exploitation and destruction, of growing disparities between the rich and the poor within one particular nation, or between entire regions or parts of the world. In other writings the emphasis on global pillage shifts to the cultural side of globalization, as proclaimed by terms such as "global village." Some of these writings emphasize how the world market has a tendency to homogenize the cultural landscape in a troublesome, imperialist way. Others accuse the market of playing with and exploiting regional and cultural differences by turning specific cultural insignia into marketable consumer items. Another growing body of literature addresses the issue of migration. In the wake of continued and growing economic and social globalization a number of academic discussions have begun to take a careful look at corresponding terminology, such as "international" or "multicultural" by unpacking the various meanings of these terms, and by introducing others, such as "multi-national" or "transnational" (Pries 2002, Kivisto 2001). These terms are inseparable from notions of dislocation, or of voluntary, semi-voluntary or enforced moves or displacements, and they signify a multi-layered, complex history of colonialism, neocolonialism (Mohanty 1997), or global capitalism, the force behind, for instance, labor export propagated by the IMF or Worldbank (see Chang 2000). Immigrants may therefore be refugees, in involuntary exile, or people who seek new opportunities for themselves and their families in the U.S., their host country. Others may be return migrants, or transmigrants (Pries 2002). Depending on the writer's disciplinary academic background and political concern, however, notions of economic livelihood at times only provide the political-economic background for analyses that focus on migrants' different relations to their homeland (or home country), and on shifting or multiplying cultural, linguistic, and political identities. Explicitly feminist writers deplore the absence of the category of gender not only in debates of globalization, but also in what is generally referred to as the anti-globalization movement. Despite their critical intent, both are seen as at least in part mirroring the continued power of primarily masculinist, hierarchical, that is, Western frameworks of interpreting and responding to what is characterized as the global capitalist "crisis." At the same time, feminist criticism does not necessarily spare women's own attempts to establish international, global connections or networks, as class-privileged or Western women may be quite blind to the neo/colonial tendrils that ensnare their efforts to build global connections (see, for instance, Mindry 2001). Feminist writers are also critical of globalization theories because they tend to ignore the concrete, lived experience of people who have to move, or decide to move, to different places or countries. More recent ethnographic studies of populations affected by moves of the global market are welcomed, although they are also criticized for tending to screen out the powerful transnational, global mechanisms and forces that underpin the specificity of particular population's everyday struggles.[1] In this paper I address what I see as the biggest challenge confronting a global feminist movement. Not only do we have to take into account the ever-increasing physical and mental mobility of individuals or large groups of people across places, countries, or continents. We also have to reckon with the other side of translocal or transnational mobility: of leaving one's home or home country, of being dis-placed. We all need a homeplace of some sorts that provides an anchor for our sense of belonging and our need for safety and protection. Moreover, we are also creatures of the earth, and we do have a body that comes out of another body, that grows and dies. Earth and body are separate as well as connected, "mobile" and place-bound. How we live on and with the earth affects how we live in and with our bodies. The physical, biological, ecological foundation of life is shaped, worked on by the culture in which it is embedded. Cultural interpretations of body and soil flow out of and return to this separateness/connectedness. They influence or guide their use, which may be in an exploitative and destructive, or in a respectful, giving way that allows to unfold its abundance. The title of my essay is to bring together these multiple connections and disconnections. Home "Home" is a complex, ambiguous, conflict-ridden, if not paradoxical notion and reality. It can be experienced in culturally and individually different ways, and with multiple connections to place and time. It can metaphorically demarcate individual and social or national identities that are embedded in personal or social-political relations of power. There has been a growing interest in the meaning of home as evidenced by numerous books and articles on the subject. The definitions or meanings of home that emerge from these texts are as diverse and multi-faceted as the particular disciplinary as well as social-political frameworks within which they operate. These writings can, however, be grouped into those that address issues related to the 'Big Home' and those that focus on the 'Little Home' (Magat 2000). Writers in the first group describe the anguish associated with national relocations or displacements, living in exile or in a diaspora, or transnational migration. A homeplace, homeland, or home country may be real or figurative, and these terms may refer to a place one was forced to leave and longs to go back to, or to a place of ultimate return. Questions relating to national, social, and individual identities are particularly prominent in these writings. Analyses of the 'Little Home,' on the other hand, are more likely to address the presumably mundane tasks and experiences associated with daily living, but they reveal how these experiences are fully embedded in problematic normative assumptions and larger social power relations. "Doing home," for instance, has strong patriarchal underpinnings (Bowlby, Gregory, and McKie 1997). Other writers emphasize how a physical homeplace provides safety, especially in a hostile social environment, and how doing home therefore includes work that benefits the well-being of an entire community (hooks 1990). Another group of writers describes how the homeplace can be a public, and mostly exploitative as well as abusive workplace. Writers from the black diaspora, such as Patricia Hill Collins (1998) investigate how race, class, and gender interlace in the lives of domestic workers. Others discuss how labor migration also has this other, private, hidden side of the public world of global finance, production, trade, and telecommunications. Kimberley Chang and H. M. N. Ling (2000) describe how being employed as domestic workers, or as sexual commodities in the entertainment industry, makes Filipinas the "intimate other" (ibid: 27). There are many hidden social, cultural, and political connections between analyses and descriptions of the Big Home and the Little Home, and there are some rather obvious ones. In this paper I join the two homes by linking "the turbulence of migration" (Papastergiadis 2000) to the universal need for a homeplace, and a critique of the social and ecological devastations resulting from the predatory moves of global capital to the concern for nondestructive, life-affirming ways of being in the world. Regardless of the local and cultural specificity of many different political struggles, all share a rather solid common ground: our physical, material, bodily rootedness in nature, the earth, and all her gifts and challenges. And this is also my main question, one I propose to place at the center of a locally specific but also translocal, transnational feminist politics: Can we be at home in the world and on the earth, can we create such a home that is place-bound and moving, socially (culturally) and geographically specific and all-encompassing at the same time? The gift paradigm Globalization is an abstraction. It abstracts from the concrete specificity of people's lives and chances for survival due to the global restructurings of the capitalist market economy. As Katz (2001) writes, this abstraction is not altogether wrong. It illuminates the encompassing, all-inclusive power of the market imperative whose tentacles reach deeply into all forms of life and living. At the same time, she suggests that feminists create a counter-abstraction, one that provides points of connection between the many different struggles feminists, women, people, are engaged in all over the world. Katz sees such a counter-abstraction as being rooted in people's struggles for escaping, or changing, the devastating consequences of economic-political upheavals. These struggles are taking place in specific places and under historically and culturally specific circumstances that include equally specific social and economic power relations. However, they are also always answers to overarching political-economic neo/colonial relations of power, dominance, exploitation, and destruction. In terms of conscious political work, they are therefore grounded in a common, shared interest in not only resisting these power relations but also stopping their move toward global destruction, countering them with alternative ways of living and acting in the world. I want to move Katz's suggestions a bit further by giving a specific name to this counter-abstraction, and by presenting it as a specific paradigm. A paradigm refers to the perceptions, values, and thoughts that form a particular world view, and it determines which questions we ask regarding what is true or right, which ones we don't, and how we propose answers and put them into action. Here I want to take up Genevieve Vaughan's notion of the gift paradigm. In For-Giving (1997) Vaughan develops this complex and highly intricate but tremendously powerful paradigm for thinking and acting, resisting and creating in a world that operates according to the individualistic, competitive, and hierarchical exchange structure of the global market. She describes how both the exchange paradigm and what she calls "the gift paradigm" shape the predominant, globally and imperialistically imposed world view that structures, or seeps into, our language and culture, and how people live and survive in this world. In Vaughan's framework the gift-paradigm is an unfolding of the principle of the Mother. However, the Mother is not understood "as biological or instinctual, but as conscious creative human practice" (ibid:367). A mother's direct, non-calculated response to her child's needs is paradigmatic for what Vaughan describes as the essence of gift-giving, putting into action the "female value" of unilaterally providing the satisfaction of the other's needs. The good of others is the ultimate life premise of the mothering model. Vaughan describes many different dimensions of a mutually inclusive gift-giving and gift-receiving process where "I give so that you may give." This turn-taking is characterized by attributing value to the other and creating community bonds, since "the true continuing source of ourselves is interactive and comes from other-orientation" (ibid:283). "Male values" such as self-interest, self-aggrandizement, competition, dominance, and hierarchy represent the ego structure of the predominant, all-encompassing exchange paradigm. The logic of exchange indulges in the freedom from other-orientation. It is "availability-driven," not "need-driven"(ibid.:286). It is ruled by effective demand, not the need of the other. The macro economy artificially creates scarcity by backgrounding the human needs of the many and by exercising the "destructive power of acquisition by force" (ibid.:172). Mother Earth becomes an endless resource where the few privatize her gifts and supplement them or bring them into forced interaction with the gift of free and cheap labor of the many. Giving and sustaining life's quality is not only pushed aside. It is also incorporated, constrained, absorbed by the cultural, linguistic, and psychological rules and dominance of exchange. Because exchange is dependent on the gift, gift labor is necessary for profit where the many give to the "one," not to each other (ibid.:294). Capitalism needs the hidden gift and corrals free nurturing into the exchange paradigm. Vaughan describes many different psycho-social and linguistic mechanisms that result from the forced coexistence of the two logics where giftgiving is coopted, instrumentalized, distorted. Vaughan's analyses are rooted in a passionate call for unburying the giftgiving principle of life, culture, and language, and for re-discovering the logic of a paradigm that is older and more fundamental than the exchange paradigm. Where the latter creates the un-community of competing, warring and killing "masculated" egos, the gift paradigm entails the possibility of creating and maintaining peaceful and abundant communities. Vaughan has a clear political-pragmatic agenda. She stresses the importance of collectively re-constructing and building a gift economy because gift-giving subverts the economic structure of exchange and calls for a collective rather than individual solution. The hope for such a solution lies in global, transnational feminist movements that find and practice a commonly shared "approach to problems and solutions that proves the validity of the assertion of the caring values of women everywhere across all the patriarchal boundaries" (1998). Vaughan's analysis is of groundbreaking importance for such a feminist movement. At the same time, I also believe that we not only need to explore the manifold practical implications of gift-giving in our daily lives, work, and political struggles but also enlarge and strengthen the paradigm's tapestry by continuously weaving and re-weaving it with new colors and new threads. Here I want to take up what I see as a particularly powerful aspect of the gift-giving paradigm: to provide a counter-abstraction to the notion of globalization, thus serving as an intellectual and emotional-spiritual bridge across vast social, cultural, and geographic distances. I interweave this major thread with what I also see as a fundamental, universal reality. Global economic restructurings instigate or bring about new kinds of movements, trans/migrations, displacements, and diasporic ways of living. The contradictions and conflicts they harbor are the result of new constellations that affect an old, omnipresent aspect of human living: the universal need for a safe homeplace. This is also the place where the mothering principle Vaughan describes is often most directly and most forcefully acted out, especially by women, and especially with respect to children. In my own work I have only recently begun to make connections between motherwork (the focus of my writing) and the experience of "mobile motherhood" (Hoving 2001, 44) in the lives of many migrant workers. My recent study of the conditions of motherwork in Chicago's inner-city racial and economic ghettos (Hart 2002) has therefore taken on new meanings, moving my thinking into new directions. In this study I had conversations with mothers who lived in a place of social and physical isolation, a place shot through with direct violent responses to the structural violence of racial and economic segregation (of which the City of Chicago is one of the nation's most glaring examples). Earlier generations of Chicago's public housing residents were part of the Great Southern Migration to northern cities that promised more economic and cultural freedom. Slavery had combined the violent removal of millions of Africans from their original homelands via the gruesome Middle Passage with being bound to a particular place with being mobile capital that could be bought and sold according to their owner's purely economic motives. Later institutional practices established a variation of this violent mix by linking freedom from slavery to physical-geographical, economic, and social segregation. The relocation of the steel and automobile industry-originally the main job providers for inner-city residents-to cheap labor countries, and the subsequent move of new businesses or corporations to suburban areas trapped the inner-city poor in their place of residence. Many, if not most of the children thus became part of a growing economically superfluous population (Wilson 1996). Consequently, the mothers' stories were marked by hopelessness and despair. At the same time, the stories I heard from inner-city mothers were also replete with the theme of giving, not only to their own but also to the children of other mothers whose neglect at times bordered on abuse. Mobile capital produces, however, not only locally confined and economically superfluous populations. It also produces mobile motherhood. Within the context of this paper I can only give an outline of the challenges this poses to the gift paradigm: How is/can the mothering principle be practiced by women, or people in general, who are migrating all over the globe? How can bridges be built across transnational geographies based on an abstraction that is grounded in a homeplace, the land, the body? My attempt to start answering these questions moves into several directions simultaneously. Irrespective of specific social and cultural circumstances the migratory experience contains seeds for a new global nomadic consciousness, and such a consciousness enables us to make intense interconnections among people who may be dispersed over large geographical distances but with whom we share a political interest in building a better, livable world for all. Such a concern is not only lodged in the everyday need to survive or provide a living to oneself, one's family, or one's community. It is also lodged in the commonness of the physical foundations of life, the land and the body. It therefore simultaneously transcends the place-bound rootedness in a specific locale and a specific body by being voiced as a concern to preserve and sustain the physical foundation of all life in the most peaceful and dignified way. Vaughan's call for a gift-economy is not entirely new. As I discussed in previous writings (1991, 2002), motherwork represents a prime example of the vital necessity as well as overall social devaluation of what in a different theoretical-analytical framework is referred to as "subsistence work." This concept was at the center of the "Bielefeld Approach," where in the 70s a number of feminist sociologists and political economists started challenging Marxist critiques of capitalism and related theories of development. These feminist critics were themselves involved in various international "development" efforts, primarily in Venezuela, Mexico, and India. They pointed out that both, mainstream and Marxist theoreticians alike ascribe to a masculinist Western notion of progress and development by couching capitalism's direct material dependence on unpaid, unremunerated, non-commodified subsistence labor in terms of "pre-capitalist," "not-yet-developed" kinds of economic structures. With the advance of capitalism these economies, and corresponding forms of labor, would thus all wither away. As critics of this perspective point out, it is grounded in erroneous assumptions about the true workings of a capitalist economy, dismissing, or hiding, subsistence labor's-or in Vaughan's terms "gift labor's"-essential role in sustaining an exploitative commodity economy. Assuming a "subsistence perspective" would not only reveal this dependency, it would also valorize subsistence work (or gift labor). Moreover, such a perspective would reveal how the capitalist appropriation of subsistence work not only exploits its availability but also deforms, distorts, or destroys its very conditions. Above all, subsistence labor provides the fertile ground for a subsistence orientation that guides people's culturally specific practices. Very similar to the gift-giving paradigm's main characteristics, a subsistence orientation intricately interlaces the economic and the cultural, the physical-material and the spiritual-psychological.[2] Within the context of this paper I want to claim that the reality and imaginary of migration (in all its manifold variations) not only challenges such a place-bound economic-cultural paradigm. It also opens up "zones of possibilities" (Gloria Anzald?a 2002, 544) for developing a translocal subsistence orientation and correspondingly complex, multiple, intersecting individual and collective identities. It is precisely the non-material dimensions of a nomadic consciousness that allow us to see and analytically-spiritually connect the various "points of elevation" Katz metaphorically describes in her call for constructing "countertopographies" to the topographies of power (2001, 1229). As I will describe later in the essay, such countertopographies can also provide the "contour lines" of a global home whose construction depends on a subsistence orientation, and on various kinds of physical and ideological subsistence labor that mutually influence or define each other. Nomadic journeying and nomadic consciousness The nomad, and the mobile mother, are the two images that bring together the way place-boundedness and displacement, homeplace and homelessness, rootedness and mobility are fully intertwined and define each other by their simultaneous presence and absence. A homeland, or a homeplace, takes on a different meaning when its absence is acutely felt in a host country that does not house one's children, and where people speak a foreign language. According to Rosi Braidotti (1994) a nomad is a construct, a myth, a figuration that trespasses, blurs or transgresses boundaries between experiences, categories, and identities, and that syncretizes them in a nomadic consciousness. The latter term is similar to Gloria Anzald?a's (1987) "mestiza consciousness." In both cases a synthetic whole results from an ongoing process of understanding difference within the framework of divisive and hierarchical post/colonial global market relations while simultaneously seeing intense interconnections. Anzald?a is of Mexican and Indian descent, and she is surrounded by the Anglo culture. Thus, the mestiza "learns to be an Indian in Mexican culture, to be Mexican from an Anglo point of view. She learns to juggle cultures. She has a plural personality, she operates in a pluralistic mode-nothing is thrust out, the good the bad and the ugly, nothing rejected, nothing abandoned. Not only does she sustain contradictions, she turns ambivalence into something else" (1987: 79). This something else is the mestiza consciousness that has the ability to unite "all that is separate" (ibid.:79). It is the result of the continuous, ongoing effort of syncretizing into a synthetic whole the different pieces and fragments of different loyalties and affinities, of externally imposed or self-given categorical attributes. Such a synthetic whole does, however, live in constant movement, does not lose track of contesting or conflicting voices associated with loyalties or affinities. Complexity and heterogeneity are preserved, as the mestiza tolerates ambiguity and contradictions. Anzald?a's writings are exemplary for a discussion of hybridity that does not get lost in "difference-talk" (Friedman 1998: 91), nor does it de-politicize or romanticize the multi-locality of people moving across the global landscape-a conceptual trap clearly laid out for the privileged few. Anzald?a's descriptions of "nepantla" strongly resonate with my own moving back and forth between different worlds, always living in an in-between place. The nepantla signifies the painful as well as transformative experiences of being "torn between ways" or "pulled between opposing realties." Above all, the notion of nepantla refers to the experience of living between cultures which "results in 'seeing' double, first from the perspective of one culture, then from the perspective of another" (2002: 547-549). This makes one live in a "zone of possibility," because in nepantla you experience reality as fluid, expanding and contracting. In nepantla you are exposed, open to other perspectives, more readily able to access knowledge derived from inner feelings, imaginal states, and outer events, and to "see through" them with a mindful, holistic awareness. Seeing through human acts both individual and collective allows you to examine the ways you construct knowledge, identity, and reality; and explore how some of your/others' constructions violate other people's ways of knowing and living. (544) Living in an in-between place, inhabiting an existential juncture is difficult-to say the least-but it is also a method that "provides passage to that unfastened, differential juncture of being-la conciencia de la mestiza." It holds the promise of allowing "an evolutionary seeing, interpreting, and changing of the planet" (Sandoval 2002: 24). The black diaspora also contains elements that can be syncretized into a new, future-oriented nomadic consciousness. Living in the black diaspora means, however, living within historical and geographical parameters that are quite different for Mexican-Indian return migrants. They remain in physical contact with their home country and with the cultures of the country (or countries) they migrate to. The very notion and reality of a black diaspora speaks, however, of a homeland, a land of origin, that is geographically somewhere else. It is absent as well as thoroughly present. As Hall writes, for the Caribbean culture Africa "is the ground-bass of every rhythm and bodily movement. This was-is-the 'Africa' that 'is alive and well in the diaspora'" (ibid.:230). By being present and absent at the same time "Africa must at last be reckoned with by Caribbean people, but it cannot in any simple sense be merely recovered" (ibid.:231). The Africa of the diaspora is no longer the original Africa. Rather, it is a "spiritual, cultural and political metaphor" which is the "result of a long and discontinuous series of transformations"(ibid.:231). Hall describes how Africa creates a sense of belonging to a past to which all access originally had been cut off. Thus, Afro-Caribbeans can make no "final and absolute Return" (ibid.:226) to an original homeland which is continuously re-told "through politics, memory and desire" (ibid.:225). As an integral part of cultural identity and imaginary it is the destination of symbolic homeward journeys of the displaced.[3] Being born of dispersal and fragmentation the Afro-Caribbean cultural identity is not simply of once piece but moves along two intersecting vectors: the vector of similarity and continuity, and the vector of difference and rupture (ibid.:226). Hall places this "'doubleness' of similarity and difference" at the center of his notion of hybridity: "The diaspora experience as I intend it here is defined, not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception of 'identity' which lives with and through, not despite of difference; by hybridity." It is especially the sentence following this quote that contains visions of a promising future: "Diaspora identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference" (ibid.:235). A cultural identity that is forged at points where similarity and difference intersect is therefore "a matter of 'becoming' as well as of 'being.' It belongs to the future as much as to the past" (ibid.:225).[4] Isabel Hoving's (2001) analysis of texts written by Caribbean women moves Hall's discussion of the intersection of transformation and difference to another level. Hoving elaborates on the hybrid and diasporic nature of Caribbean literature. She describes how the "miraculously multiple writing by Caribbean women" illustrates "a diasporic, transatlantic, multilinguistic practice" (ibid.:2) and a strong transnational orientation (ibid.:12). Throughout her scholarly investigation Hoving keeps questioning the traditional masculinist interpretations of journey and home, and she describes how the texts she examines give examples of specifically feminine discourses of mobility. Women's sexuality, and particularly their link to motherhood, makes women relate to home, exile, and movement according to quite different patterns (ibid.:15). Mothering makes women certainly "less enchanted by promises of experiences of travel." Nevertheless, Caribbean women's diasporic, transatlantic, multilinguistic experience underlies the development of new concepts such as "bound motion" (ibid.:15), or "mobile motherhood" (ibid.:44). These notions break with the gender-specific character of travel metaphors, and with the concomitant association of femininity with inactive, immobile space (ibid.:42). Moreover, they hold the promise of integrating the importance of place with the mobility of a transformative space, a space where life can take roots and unfold freely, unencumbered by cultural-patriarchal constraints. In her study of Barbadian migrants to England Mary Chamberlain (1994) frequently refers to a "culture of migration" where most families include a model of immigration that has its roots in economic necessity and in the mobility and freedom it gives to individual family members. Family loyalty is, however, of prime importance for making intergenerational migratory moves possible while at the same time keeping intact a relatively stable sense of identity. Migration stories are often stories of children left behind, "back home," in the care of a relative who provides steady care and attention, and a relatively stable physical environment, that is, a homeplace. Chamberlain tells the stories of several adults, women as well as men, and she remarks that mothers who decide to migrate to another country mostly leave their children in the care of a grandmother. In other words, the children are not considered, and treated, as equally mobile as their parents. Thus, mobile motherhood cannot simply be equated with mobile childhood. Chamberlain focuses on migratory moves and only mentions in passing that children were left back home, or in what bell hooks would refer to a homeplace. Hooks specifically addresses the importance of a homeplace for diasporic living because it is the place "where black people could affirm one another and by so doing heal many of the wounds inflicted by racist domination" (1990.: 42). She stresses the primary role of women in creating and sustaining such a place. Home is the place where all women, especially mothers, are expected to care for and give to others, and where they are socialized into perceiving and responding to the needs of others. Regardless of the oppressive, patriarchal undercurrent of these expectations, home is the place where identities are shaped and children are nurtured. As Lemke-Santangelo (1996) points out, children are "the freshest link in the web of reciprocal obligation" (ibid.:146). Their universal need for being cared for can therefore provide the concrete, physical-spiritual foundation for making connections between people and places separated by vast geographical, geopolitical, and cultural distances, and for translating these connections into reciprocal obligations to safeguard, repair, or rebuild the conditions of life, that is, our future. Vaughan's writings here connect with hooks' description of black women's primary role in creating a safe and nurturing homeplace, and in carrying that work into the community. Hooks rightfully chides those men who practice one of the mainstays of Western masculinity: subordinating women. Not only do they therefore threaten collective black solidarity and, consequently, the "survival as a people" (1990: 48), they also diminish, or deny, the general, all-encompassing importance of the work black women do for their families, communities, and society at large. Hooks describes how it is black women who make and live the political agenda for collective struggles, and who give the home, and the work performed in it, its radical political dimension. African-American history is replete with stories of women who constructed homeplaces under the most difficult circumstances, and who took care of "all that truly mattered in life . . . the warmth and comfort of shelter, the feeding of our bodies, the nurturing of our souls. There we learned dignity, integrity of being; there we learned to have faith. The folks who made this life possible, who were our primary guides and teachers, were black women" (ibid.:41-42). Patricia Hill Collins (1990) uses the term "community othermothers" to describe the tremendous individual and collective struggles involved in this other-orientation that Vaughan considers the core of the mothering principle.[5] In my own life the experience of having and being a mother has been at the center of my political agenda to create with others a mothering society, and to make gift-giving the paradigm for local and global practical working and living. I have been moving between cultures, urban and rural landscapes, languages, sexualities, and classes. Nevertheless, what home means to me essentially keeps me moving between two different spaces. One is the political space occupied by my critical awareness of the difficult, terrifying political history of Germany, my home country. I therefore keep returning to my own cultural and political heritage, each time with a new perception and understanding of its history. I fully embrace the lived experience of my place of origin, my home culture, as the constant standard of reference. Although I do revisit my home country, it is not my place of final return, the homeland I long to go back to. The other meaning of home derives from my autobiographical beginnings. It is space I inherited from my mother and have carried with me, inside me, during my journey through various cultural or political landscapes. My mother is home to me, whether I am with her or far away. She lives home for me, I am rooted in her. I came out of her body. She gives home the physical, bodily, place-bound resonance of all its multiple meanings. My mother also anchors this experience in the necessity and importance of everyday living and care. Since my parents were very poor my mother had to work extremely hard to get her family nourished and clothed. All the tasks and responsibilities she had to perform on a daily and nightly basis blended into each other. They were a necessary and meaningful part of caring for the lives of her children and her husband. My mother provides the spiritual space of unconditional love and acceptance. She teaches me that the mobility of being a nomad does not mean being homeless. Rather, it means carrying home with me as my "essential belonging" (Braidotti 1994: 16), thus being capable of re-creating it in diverse places, anywhere. At the same time, this new home has to be more than a resting place for the individual traveler. It also has to be, or become, a practicing ground for gift-giving and receiving, in the fundamental, deeply rooted personal and political sense of these words. Writing this section of the essay brought to life my most poignant and most painful memory of feeling lost, without a home. I remember sitting on my bed in my comfortable apartment, in a country that was no longer alien to me, sobbing "I want to go home." I was separated from my child, and although I did not want to go where she lived, I wanted to be united with her, look at her, cook for her, brush her hair. Leaving her felt like crossing a bridge over a precipice, a bridge that was leading nowhere. I felt desolate, physically mutilated. My child did not want to leave her "green house" because in her soul, in her body and mind, house and home were inseparable. Although I tried to persuade her I did not want to force her to come along with me, and only many years later did I realize that my leaving made my child feel homeless, disoriented, and alone, despite her father's presence and care. Only many years later did I dare tell my adult daughter about my pain, my sense of homelessness, did I dare face her pain when she said "It was you who made the green house my home. When you left, I no longer had one." Before I had left the green house I had a disturbing and telling dream. I dreamed that there were two of me in the same room, one packing her suitcase, the other embracing her child. My packing the suitcase was the result of a clear decision, an absolute necessity. And I became a mobile mother who for a long time lived in an in-between space, who kept crossing bridges that led over precipices, raging rivers and traffic-jammed highways. I also knew that once crossed I could never uncross them and remain the person I left behind. The new person would have wounds that took a long time to heal and left big scars. But she would also be enriched by new visions, orientations, desires, projects. Anzald?a (2002) vividly describes how such crossing of a life threshold affects one's entire being: To pass over the bridge to something else, you'll have to give up partial organizations of self, erroneous bits of knowledge, outmoded beliefs of who you are, your comfortable identities (your story of self, tu autohistoria). . . . The bridge (boundary between the world you've just left and the one ahead) is both a barrier and a point of transformation. (557)Because crossing thresholds is such an integral part of life Anzald?a reaches the powerful conclusion that "'home' is that bridge, the in-between place of nepantla, and constant transition, the most unsafe of all spaces" (ibid.:574). What makes it unsafe and a homeplace at the same time is the fact that "a decision made in the in-between place becomes a turning point initiating psychological and spiritual transformation, making other kinds of experiences possible" (ibid.:569). Anzald?a's understanding of home is tied to her multiple identities. They are the result of being born to parents from different cultural origins, and of living and moving in between different cultures, thus transcending the place-bound notion of home or home country. She forges the pain caused by geographically, culturally, and psychologically mobile and conflicting affinities and loyalties into a source of personal and collective empowerment, as represented by the term 'mestiza consciousness.' Leaving the Earth When Paula Gunn Allen speaks of a migration-conscious Pueblo mind (1998) her words resonate with the core meanings of a mestiza consciousness. However, American Indians were forcefully displaced from their homeland. Although they may still live on what used to be their original homeland, it has become a parcel grudgingly allotted to their nation by the rulers of their home country. The stories of American Indians are similar to the stories of mobile mothers, where movement and living in place do not cancel each other out. They speak of nomadic, migratory moves of body and soul that transcend the enforced moves and dislocations brought about by encounters with the Western "discoverers." Traditionally, American Indians were at home on the Earth, where the land, the sky, animate and inanimate beings were all interrelated in highly complex and fragile ways (Silko 1999: 33). By living on a homeland that was stolen by their home country American Indians are entangled in numerous contradictions and conflicts. Deborah Miranda (2002) therefore urges non-Indians to listen to "what it's like to be an indigenous person alive in her contemporary, colonized homeland" (ibid.:194). And as she writes, "Our bodies and hearts carry a deep sting, an engulfing shame, and a contrary assertion of survivance, which sprang from this land, from a place stolen, defiled, yet still present beneath our feet every day of our lives. There is no metaphor for such pain" (ibid.:193).[6] Indians never had a country in the political sense of a nation state. This sealed their fate of being declared non-existent and their homelands empty. The actual inhabitants who interfered with white settlers' claims to their land were therefore considered worthy of being driven out or killed. Aside from systematic attempts by settlers to annihilate entire Indian tribes, those who survived suffered multiple displacements and enforced movements across the entire continent. In 1924 when Native Americans were officially given the rights of US citizens, they became citizens of a country that had stolen the very land on which they now allegedly enjoyed tribal, state, and federal rights (Chauduri 1992).[7] At the same time, the criminal act of colonization never came to an end. Not only are American Indians the only Americans who are legally required to carry an ID card that recognizes their membership in a federally recognized tribe (Miranda 2002: 195), being ethnicized or racialized as "Indians" also seriously undermines their claim to political sovereignty and cultural autonomy (Barker 2002, 324). Here nomadic existence takes on very different connotations. It is less rooted in geopolitical realities that involve the crossing of physically marked national borders or military checkpoints. The borders that are crossed, or the boundaries that are busted, are the fences, the material and rhetorical corrals constructed by Western (American) categorizations. Not only do these fences directly violate the freedom to move, to self-determine, to live according to one's cultural values, but their very existence also contradicts the essence of American Indian culture and tradition. As Allen writes, [...]as our traditions have always been about liminality, about voyages between this world and many other realms of being, perhaps crossing boundaries is the first and foremost basis of our tradition and the key to human freedom and its necessary governmental accomplice, democracy" (1998:12).Allen describes herself as a half-breed, hybrid, mixed-blood woman, a typical representative of a people that carries "every variety of blood that has found its way to our ancient continent" (ibid.:6). Her writings in Off the Reservation (1998) portray boundary-busting and bordercrossing on many levels that together clearly become the fertile ground for developing and tending to the growth of a planetary mestiza consciousness. Allen sees this as the result of being colonized and dispossessed, and of retaining "'indianness' while participating in a global society" (ibid.:6). Indianness signifies "the profound knowledge of the true nature of earth, the land, and all that exists upon and within it." This knowledge is "the true site of conflict. The differing definitions of reality and the accompanying values those definitions imply are what is at stake. And the outcome is the fate of the planet and multitudinous forms of life thereon" (ibid.:9). Allen here articulates the "indianness" of the notion of home and homeland. She places the earth, the land, at the very center of its core meaning. Earth, or Mother Earth, signifies the material, bodily grounding of the spiritual meaning of home. Without such grounding the very foundation of our physical and spiritual being gets lost or destroyed. The global market system cannot afford such earth-bound values. The earth continues to be considered, and treated, as a freely available, cheap natural resource that can be used in whatever way contributes to the bottom line. This is the neo/colonial side of nomadism, border-crossings, or boundary-busting where the nomadic capital of borderless corporations tethers powerful scientific knowledge and discoveries to its ruthless plunder of the ecosystem. Not only are natural resources such as land, air, or water for the taking. So are living organisms. They can be hybridized or technologically engineered without the slightest "consideration of their existence as integrated beings" (Anzald?a 2002: 561). Modifying organisms by genetically crossing species boundaries means moving into and altering the interior of fundamental life processes. The ability to electromechanically shoot a foreign gene into a living organism makes living material itself quite mobile. What is now referred to as "life sciences" plays directly into the hands of agribusiness giants that restructure and control global agriculture. Above all, by patenting life mega-corporations are introducing a new version of colonialism. As Vandana Shiva remarked in an interview with In Motion Magazine (July 18, 1998), "Contemporary patents on life . . . are pieces of paper issued by patent offices of the world that basically are telling corporations that if there's knowledge or living material, plants, seeds, medicines which the white man has not known about before, claim it on our behalf, and make profits of it." Not only are people robbed of their land, but also of their indigenous knowledge. The logic of control and use of this knowledge has been pushed even further by robbing seeds of their very ability to propagate. "Terminator seeds" make the farmer entirely dependent on buying future seeds from an agricultural giant such as Monsanto (Lappe?L and Bailey 1998). Purely financial imperatives are behind biotechnology industry's welcoming of the fact that food crops can be genetically altered. Ecological biodiversity is replaced by large monocultures resistant to massive amounts of herbicides and pesticides. When the soil has become too poisonous to continue the mass production of food crops, nomadic capital moves somewhere else. The agbiotech industry therefore uproots local farmers and destroys the conditions for local food production. Borderless corporations don't create communities. Instead, they leave behind communities that are burdened with toxic wastes and embittered, disposable farmers or workers. [8] Transnational corporations also need a limitless supply of workers willing to cross multi-national borders in search of livelihood. Filipina domestic workers represent a striking example of such transnational bordercrossings. They have been uprooted from their home country and are being dispersed over vast geographical spaces (Europe, Asia, the Middle East, the United States). Their employment as domestic workers in foreign countries also makes them live with contradictions where the absence of their original home is stacked upon the presence of working in someone else's home. However, parts of their stories also resonate with the voices of a future transnational community and a new global consciousness. Many workers develop a dual loyalty to their home and their host country. They create "imagined communities" where they share experiences related to their work and to their separation from their family. Above all, they develop "transcontinental bonds" or "transnational family ties," and they create "multinational households in various forms" (Parre?Oas 2001: 1143, 1151, 1144; see also Chang 2000). Constructing a nomadic home The stories of trans/migrants, of people living on land stolen by their home country, or in a cultural diaspora, all contribute to the construction of topographies that counter the topographies of power. They remind us of the possibility of engaging in the political effort of constructing metaphorical countertopographies even if we do not share a common language or place of origin. In Katz's words, the metaphorical sense of topography "refers to a central aspect of most topographical maps-the contour lines. Contour lines are lines of constant elevation, connecting places at precisely the same altitude to reveal a terrain's three-dimensional shape " (2001: 1229). Translated into concrete political action, it is therefore possible to "imagine a politics that maintains the distinctness of a place while recognizing that it is connected analytically to other places along contour lines that represent not elevation but particular relations to a process (e.g., globalizing capitalist relations of production)" (ibid.:1129). The political impetus behind the construction of countertopographies is to connect different, specific places based on a common interest, and to "enhance struggles" in the name of such interests (ibid.:1130). Constructing a nomadic home is strongly related to the construction of countertopographies. Not only is the place-bound bodiliness of one's origin experientially, autobiographically linked with the locality of one's however transitory current physical dwelling. The two are, or can become, analytically connected as well. It is therefore the primary goal of the political project of nomadic becoming to "connect partiality and discontinuity with the construction of new forms of interrelatedness and collective projects" (Braidotti 1994: 5). These new forms, accompanied by an awareness of the "deeper relatedness" that lies "beneath individual separateness" (Anzald?a 2002: 569), need to be grounded in a concrete, tangible substance that combines mobility and rootedness. Moving across different transnational, geopolitical, and cultural spaces does not only mean gaining a critical distance to one's own location on the power map. It also means being engaged in the process of a nomadic becoming that translates into deeply felt interrelatedness with others who share the concern for creating a mothering society. My conversations with black inner-city mothers, and the fact that they welcomed my presence with freely giving me an abundance of stories, established one of those strongly felt connections between "friendly strangers"-a friendliness that was carried by our shared, deeply felt concern for the current and future well-being of children.[9] I have come full circle with the notion of nomad, this time by returning to its older cultural meaning. Nomadic "people of the land," such as the Maori in New Zealand, the tangata whenua, live on the land and regularly return to it. The land is sacred, it is the foundation of material and spiritual life, the fountain of life, where all life is one. As Anna Voigt and Nevill Drury remark in Wisdom from the Earth (1998) with respect to Australian Aboriginal peoples, they "have a complex and extraordinarily rich spiritual and social life, all of which is interwoven with the land. Because of this intimate connection to the land and all of its features, Aboriginal groups probably retain the most detailed knowledge of all the diverse regions on the Australian continent" (ibid.:128). To be a nomad therefore implies a purposeful motion that is guided by a thorough, profound knowledge of the land. To participate in the global challenge to sustain the complex, fragile web of life therefore also means to reclaim the gifts of Mother Earth, the great giver of life (Vaughan). In its most complex and elaborate form, a global nomadic consciousness is rooted in a world that cherishes its richness by continually giving back to the great giver, allowing, enabling her to continually give back to us. However, such turn-taking cannot ignore, or bypass the actual physical labor that gets us in touch with the earth, with dirt and excrement, with the bodily needs of growing, sick, or dying bodies. A feminist global movement needs to place at its very center the actual support of such labor, raising it to points of elevation, and turning it into the contour lines of genuine countertopographies. Being at home in the world means building bridges across vastly different landscapes. These bridges are, however, not erected to avoid contact with the landscape they allow us to cross. Moreover, building them is not the act (or responsibility) of a single individual. It is a common, collective endeavor where the workers tell each other stories from their lives and struggles in different cultural landscapes. They tell of the intimate knowledge of these landscapes, of forests, rivers, and mountains, and of paths, dwellings and cultivated fields, and of the labor associated with them, the "deep earthly wisdom" that is necessary to live in a place without destroying it (Berry 1999: 49). They also tell of different struggles that are grounded in the common concern of stemming the global tide of destruction. It is this shared concern that makes the building of bridges necessary as well as possible. Both, intimate, specific knowledge and common concern provide the material, the colors, the shapes, and the architectural designs of sturdy bridges that are solidly anchored in specific places, thus establishing a relationship across spaces and between places, between past, present, and future. Notes [1] For an overview and discussion of various theoretical frameworks as regards globalization and corresponding shifting boundaries between the global and the local see the summer 2001 issue of Signs, in particular the essays by Suzanne Bergeron and Carla Freeman. [2] See Maria Mies and Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen (1999), for a discussion of the main point of this approach. [3] The declaration "Next year in Jerusalem" made at the end of the Passover seder echoes this relationship between the Jewish diasporic experience and its spiritual anchor in a place that was left ages ago. [4] The term 'diaspora' connotes a host of different historical and cultural events and meanings. The meaning of black diaspora, for instance, shifts between a "victim diaspora" and a "cultural diaspora," and it also touches on core meanings of a "labor diaspora." For a detailed discussion of the term see Robin ( 1997). [5] There exists a large body of related literature on "community othermothers," "activist mothers," or "mother-activists." See, for instance, Collins (1993, 1994); James (1993); Jetter, Orleck, and Taylor (1997); Naples (1998). These writers describe how different groups of poor and working-class women placed the concerns and principles of making life possible at the center of their political struggles for better life conditions for their children, their community, and society at large. For a summary of these writings see chapter five in The Poverty of Life-Affirming Work (Hart 2002). [6] Palestinian experience is very similar to that of American Indians. The loss of a homeland is, however, also tied to stories of transnational migration, and thus to the power of "back home," and these notions are currently mired in the experience of a particularly painful, violent encounter with the State of Israel. See Abdelhadi and Abdulhadi( 2002). [7] Before, in 1916, the Secretary of the Interior Franklin Lane had developed "citizenship ceremonies" where he "made the delivery of land patents and commensurate status of U.S. citizenship under the provision of the General Allotment Act of 1887 a ceremonial event" (Barker 2002, 322). [8] Lappe?L and Bailey (1998), cover most of the arguments that speak for and against transgenic food production. There are numerous websites that monitor corresponding scientific and economic-political developments. See, for instance, , [9] I take the notion of "friendly stranger" from Pamela Cotterill's (1992) discussion of the problems and pitfalls of ethnographic research. References Abdelhadi, Reem, and Rabab Abdulhadi (2002). "Nomadic existence: Exile, gender, and Palestine" (an e-mail conversation between sisters). In This bridge we call home, edited by G. Anzald?a and A. Keating Routledge, New York and London. Allen, Paula Gunn (1998). 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