Paper short abstract:

"Extalgia" facilitates new understandings about how the absence of the dispersed is commemorated and curated in homeland memory through the expression of suffering and creativity by stay-at-homes.

Paper long abstract:

Since Johannes Hofer's coinage in the 17th century of the term ''nostalgia'', which he used to describe the pathological suffering of Swiss soldiers serving abroad, various disciplines engaging with migration have focused on this experience to the extent of ''theoretical closure''. I argue that the discursive attitude has prevented a systematic consideration of the simultaneous suffering and creativity that are provoked in stay-at-homes when their loved ones are dispersed to other lands. It is this experience of homeland suffering and creativity about the dispersed loved ones I have termed ''extalgia''. The paper draws upon insights from the Ogu cultural practice of effigy carving in the representation of departed twin children to underscore how dispersal from the homeland provokes suffering and creativity in the left-behind. I illustrate further the networks of suffering and creativity that are implicated in extalgia through a textual discussion that mobilizes African and African diaspora writing to animate the complex spatio-temporal trajectory of the term. The paper concludes that extalgia facilitates new understandings about how the absence of the dispersed is commemorated and curated in homeland memory through the expression of suffering and creativity by stay-at-homes, and challenges us to transcend the legible frames of exile to a holistic reading of exile as a spectrum. Ultimately, the paper invites other scholars to consider the various ways in which the concept of extalgia is dramatized in other contexts across the globe, particularly concerning the conceptual and practical borders and networks between extalgia and the time-honoured notion of ''nostalgia''.