“Home” as a Set of Dissonant, Multivocal Narratives: Self-Ethnographic Vignettes on the Microphysics of Colonialism in the Belgian Congo and Its Aftermath

My “origin” in the colonial story inspired me to conduct, over the past few decades, research on the intersection of sex, race, and power in the Belgian Congo through the exploration of relevant scholarly literature; colonial archives in the Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA) in Tervuren, Belgium; and documents and papers in the former Ministry of Colonies, now housed at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Brussels. I have interviewed both of my parents (my father died in 2006) and my immediate Belgian and Congolese relatives in Belgium, the Congo (Democratic Republic of Congo [DRC]), and the United States. In this article, I explore the productive tension between the endogeneity and the exogeneity of my multisited positionalities/positionings during ethnographic fieldwork and archival consultations. In doing so, I share vignettes of my individual trajectory in Blackness while engaging in the observation of my participation in several situations, which led to this set of dissonant, multivocal self-ethnographic narratives that problematize the ordinary concept of “home.” This should allow for the discussion of the nature and methodologies of ethnographic fieldwork. Hopefully, this article can contribute to a better general appreciation of researchers’ respective contributions to, and embodied emotional immersions into, the intersubjective construction of the ethnographic/historical facts that we try to make sense of.