Paper short abstract:

From my multisite ethnography, the paper considers how long-term Punjabi migrants in Italy and their families of origin devise and enact home-making at a translocal level. With a narrative approach, the piece interprets this diaspora's attempts at viably bridging sedentarism with mobility.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing from my multisite ethnography, the paper considers how long-term Punjabi migrants resettled in Italy and their families of origin devise and enact practices of home-making at a translocal level.

Basing my arguments on participant observation, life-stories and photographic data, I thread the tales of two Italian Punjabi households as they shift kin and possessions back and forth in order to inhabit their houses 'here and there', in presence and absence. Charting my hosting families through Lombardy's hamlets and the Hoshiarpur district, I explore how diasporans imagine, build and (un)timely reside in far-apart but connected domestic spaces.

On one hand, housing schemes of tenancy or ownership are often fiddly for immigrants, due to administrative and informal sociability reasons in wealthy northern Italian areas marked by swelling cultural diversity and social inequity. On the other, diaspora investments in the real estate market impinge on the urban and rural development of the burgeoning Indian Punjab, as expats and returnees seek out city flats in gated residences or countryside family lodges. Simultaneous long-distance strategies for 'homing' signal diverse public engagements with properties, landscapes and communities. Yet, hybrid arrangements of domestic aesthetics and ethics within the privacy of one's house(hold) reveal the contradictory commitments that genders and generations may infuse their homes with.

With a narrative approach, the piece aims at describing these attempts at transnational home-making as an allegory of the motley diaspora's search for bridging sedentarism and mobility, in my informants' words for gaining some "unbound settledness".