From Judy Garland we learned “there’s no place like home.” If only we, like her fictional character in The Wizard of Oz, could just click our heels a few times and find ourselves at home.

But beyond the silver screen, navigating our way home is rarely that simple. Thanks to globalization, refugee flows, the dissolution of nation-states and the advent of new ones, and drastic cultural changes in the definition of family, it is increasingly difficult to locate and define home. As we partner up with the Asian American Writers’ Workshop for this issue of InTheFray Magazine, we examine the complex meaning of “home” — for both those who have left one country to resettle in another and those who feel like outsiders in their country of origin.

We begin with three narratives about the immigrant experience, illuminating the multitude of ways in which assimilation — and the lack thereof — shapes notions of home and identity. In her photo essay, Open Wounds (which will be published on Monday, July 19), Lajla Hadzic documents the destruction of Sarajevo, Bosnia, nearly 10 years after civil war and genocide displaced 2.2 million people. Despite international reconstruction efforts, Hadzic reveals that bombed buildings, deforested parks, and ramshackle housing projects are the rule rather than the exception, leaving millions of Bosnians homeless — both literally and figuratively. San Diego Union-Tribune reporter and first-generation American Elena Gaona, meanwhile, shares her struggle to carve out a sense of belonging in the United States while her cultural traditions reside primarily in Mexico in This is my country. Rounding out this series of personal narratives, InTheFray contributing editor and Indian émigré Radhika Sharma describes the role that her senses of sound and taste play in shaping her post-emigration identity and how they help her gauge the extent of her Americanization in I liked tea.

Just north of the U.S. border in Canada, the struggle to retain a sense of self continues. As I suggest in Strangers in a strange land, my review of David Bezmozgis’ Natasha and Other Stories (this month’s selection from Off the Shelf), Soviet Jews, once persecuted for their religion, struggle to fit into the Canadian Jewish community as their more privileged brethren question — even belittle — their brand of Judaism. As Ayah-Victoria McKhail elucidates in Seduced by the Stars and Stripes?, cultural identity is also political. The narrow reelection of Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin’s Liberal Party last month may have jeopardized cross-border cooperation on President Bush’s National Missile Defense program — and Canada’s close alliance with its neighbor.

Back home in the United States, three authors meditate on our politics of exclusion. Richard Martin eloquently explores the double bind  experienced by queer men in prison in his poem GAY LIT. ITF columnist Afi Scruggs in “I don’t care that it is not signed by a senator,” argues that introductory footage from Michael Moore’s acclaimed film Fahrenheit 911 illuminates the importance of electing black officials and of holding democracy accountable to its less privileged constituents. Finally, on Monday, July 19, InTheFray columnist and Managing Editor Henry P. Belanger will serve us a little of his home-style political wisdom as he questions whether the “revelations” in Robert Greenwald’s guerilla documentary Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism are really all that groundbreaking in Confessions of a Fox News junkie.

Happy reading – and don’t forget to pick up your copy of The Working Poor, Off the Shelf’s featured book for August!

Laura Nathan
InTheFray Editor
Austin, Texas
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Laura Nathan-Garner