Belonging, home, and place: critique and the task of retrieval

Ideas of belonging, home, and place (or being-in-place) have, in one form of another, been the focus for much critical attention over the last fifty years or more from many different thinkers. That attention has frequently been so critical, however, that it now seems to be assumed, in some quarters, that these ideas are irretrievably problematic such that they cannot have any real role in contemporary discourse. The sort of criticism at issue here is sometimes more directed at one of these notions than another – at belonging or home, for instance, rather than place as such – but since all of these ideas are closely interconnected, and since both belonging and home are indeed tied to the idea of place and being-in-place, any criticism of one invariably tends to involve all of them, even if only implicitly. In this brief discussion, my aim is to work through some of the arguments and claims that arise here, and to set out the reasons why it seems to me that, far from abandoning these ideas, the task of their rethinking and retrieval remains an absolute necessity – a necessity even for the possibility of any critical engagement with them. Indeed, my claim is that these notions have never really been abandoned at all and that the commonplace language of abandonment has led to their uncritical acceptance in other forms.