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Paper short abstract:

Using a self-reflexive approach in my autoethnographic film, The Spaces in Between, I argue that a desire to return to a past and spatial dislocations of the present can be negotiated in the imaginary of a future which locates 'self' in fragmentations of displacement, identity, and transformation.

Paper long abstract:

The idea of home has multiple meanings. For some it's a memory, a longing for a past, a place of belonging, and for others home is fragmented in nationality, citizenship and documents. As Kakali Bhattacharya (2017) in her essay 'Coloring Memories and Imaginations of "Home": Crafting a De/Colonizing Autoethnography', argues that romanticized notions of home represent a colonial and patriarchal notion of home, thereby, concealing experiences of trauma, oppression, and alienation thus, making the idea of returning to a home complicated and unsettling.

Building on Bhattacharya's argument, in this paper, I use an autoethnographic practice-based approach by holding two subjectivities - that of the camera and of the subject - to explore how the notion of home becomes fragmented due to borderlands, immigration laws, spatiotemporal distances, documentation, and nationhood. By using the metaphors of the meeting of land and sea as both a site of a peaceful union and as a site of a violent clash as Gloria Anzaldua (1987) puts it, I seek to use autoethnography to navigate through the fragmentations of the idea of home. As a result, using a self-reflexive and non-linear approach for my film, The Spaces in Between, I argue that the various temporalities of the memories of past, the spatial dislocation in the present can be negotiated in the imaginary of the future in which the 'self' is neither here, nor there, neither an insider, nor an outsider. Instead, the self is in a space of belonging that also includes displacement, identity, and transformation.