England as a New Homeland: Re-Imagining Home, Memory, and Belonging in the Diasporic Experience

A home is often imagined as the place where one stands, and ideally where one’s heart finds rest as well. Yet what is lost can rarely be restored in its original form; instead, people recreate versions of it less tangible than towns or villages, existing instead as unseen, inner landscapes shaped by memory. These imagined places, these mental Indias or homelands, arise particularly within diasporic writing in English, where the idea of “home” has expanded and transformed alongside the history of human civilisation. Within diasporic life, identity becomes an unsettled state, marked by adaptable qualities that shift according to the demands and pressures of the Western world. These identities are nourished by intersecting narratives, locations, and senses of belonging. Diasporic individuals feel a persistent desire to rebuild their own vision of home, carving out an inner imaginative territory. This process requires them to reshape their internal worlds, where buried memories of the past operate as the emotional core of nostalgia that inspires the reinvention of a dreamed homeland. As a result, diasporic identity becomes layered with contradictions, marked by ambiguous feelings of ownership and connection that generate ideological struggles for those attempting to understand themselves. In the novels examined in this study, England appears repeatedly as the shared geographical backdrop. Rather than simply recovering what is lost, these narratives highlight how diasporic writers challenge and resist rigid spatial and temporal constructions that once defined identity and belonging.