1 Belongings in a Globalising and Unequal World: rethinking translocations By Floya Anthias Introduction Displacement has become the most powerful imagery for the modern world. Displacement already presupposes its opposite, which can be thought of as being ‘in place’. Stuart Hall (2000) has argued (in his interview with Nira Yuval-Davis quoted in the introduction of this volume) that the multicultural question is the most important question facing the world today. This is defined as the problem of how people with very different cultural traditions, ways of life and understand- ings can live together. I believe that this is, of course, important. But we could usefully turn this question on its head and ask instead: under what conditions do people with different languages, cultures and ways of life fail to live in harmony? And I think turning the question on its head brings more clearly into focus the structural and political conditions involved and acts to contextualise the new ‘multicultural question’ historically and structurally (although such an analysis will take us in a different direction and this chapter is concerned with another set of issues). Current debates around borders, security and social cohesion have reinforced the importance of engaging critically with the notion of belonging and its centrality to people’s lives as well as political practice (Yuval-Davis et al., 2005). They have also reinforced, however, the need to move beyond the politics of belonging and relate to the continuing importance of unequal social resources (which are increasingly, and I believe problematically, being discussed using the notion of social capital) and to think in what have been termed ‘intersectional ways’. I want to contribute to this debate by trying to avoid the problems of a thor- oughgoing deconstruction, where the only thing we are left with is the idea of a multiplicity of identities when discussing issues of belonging. In this chapter, I will signpost a number of related issues – a kind of state of play – drawing out their implications in terms of finding a way forward. I will move towards developing an intersectionality approach that is tied to the idea of translocational positionality (see Anthias 2001; 2005). YUVAL-01.qxd 3/31/06 7:47 PM Page 17