50 Rooms. Image: Natasha Davis. All rights reserved.Displacement marks our times. According to the UNHCR, there are currently 65.6 million people forcibly displaced worldwide. The New York Times ‘Refugees and displaced people’ section is filled with new articles about displacement in different regions of the world on an almost daily basis. At the same time, voices that problematise mobility and migration, not because of concerns with the plight of displaced populations, but out of protectionism and a desire to contain populations are becoming louder. The up- and unrooted are both considered suspect.
Last year, Theresa May infamously stated that “if you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere” to insist on national ties and obligations. Already in 1992, Liisa Malkki, a Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University noted that it is our sedentary bias, our belief that mobility and migration are the exception rather than the rule, which fuels this distrust of the mobile. Writing about refugees, she argues that “refugees’ loss of bodily connection to their national homelands came to be treated as a loss of moral bearings. Rootless, they were no longer trustworthy as ‘honest citizens’”.
Refugees’ loss of bodily connection to their national homelands came to be treated as a loss of moral bearings.
