Is calling Americans ‘unhomed’ flattening what marginalization actually is?
Passage from Ece TemelKuran’s Nation of Strangers
I recently watched an interview by Mehdi Hasan with Ece Temelkuran, where she discussed themes from her book Nation of Strangers. One passage stood out, she describes millions in the U.S. as becoming “strangers in their own country” and learning to survive like the “unhomed.”
Temelkuran drastically extends her own experience of political estrangement, shaped by the aftermath of the 2016 Turkish coup, into “unhomedness” and maps it onto the U.S. context. This is theoretically problematic, a clear case of category collapse.
“Unhomed,” a term grounded in displacement and marginalization, is being repurposed to describe political dissent within one’s own country, collapsing fundamentally different conditions.
In the U.S., marginalization is not about political perception alone. It is structured through race, ethnicity, language, legal status, and intergenerational exclusion, material constraints that shape access to work, mobility, and belonging. This stands in sharp contrast to political alienation within a largely homogeneous society, e.g., Türkiye, where language, culture, and social embeddedness remain intact even in opposition to the government.
There is also a more uncomfortable dynamic at play. Some globally mobile commentators take their own experience of political alienation and reframe it using the language of marginalization that carries strong moral weight in U.S. discourse. In doing so, they borrow from frameworks developed to explain race, migration, and structural exclusion.
At that point, “unhomed” is stripped of its meaning, political dissent is elevated and treated as equivalent to actual displacement, collapsing fundamentally different conditions.
Question: So the question is not whether political dissent produces alienation, it does. The question is whether this kind of conceptual stretching is theoretically productive? At this point, this becomes a self-serving co-opting of a term rooted in displacement, migration, and structural marginalization, recast to describe political dissent within one’s own country, erasing distinctions it should be clarifying.