We all live and work at certain address, a place.
Places are difficult to describe but not impossible to express.
The address is precise and clear, while the place is indistinct, relative, difficult to describe.
How is a place built in our minds?
What can be used as a symbol of a place?
Can a picture/video represent a place?
Or is an address is enough to represent?
David Eng and Shine Han begin their book by noting this dichotomy, as today “we are bombarded today by celebratory discourses of multiculturalism and diversity in the face of intensifying racial discord and violence [while lacking] sufficient critical resources to analyze and explore the social and psychic conditions that give rise to such contradictions”) (i). On one hand, the experience of diaspora is better than ever as globalization has created a multicultural approach in many countries that embraces the melting pot theme of America. On the other, the sense of globalism and a lack of true home creates a bizarre and alienated society (which may also be a cause of the racial violence cited by the authors). Major dichotomies are important in this piece and in the current world. While the world seems more accepting of foreign or ‘non-native’ people, we are all becoming increasingly foreign and unfamiliar to one another through the common psychological rootlessness of this global modernized and technocratic society.
