Multidisciplinary Representations of Home and Homeland in Diaspora by Amato, Jean; Pyun, Kyunghee;

Short description:

This collection examines our fascination with homes, blending comparative literature, critical art history, and diaspora studies. Emphasizing the fluidity of home/homeland concepts, it explores multi-local affiliations, gender roles, languages, and power in contested national narratives.

Long description:

This collection explores our fascination with homes across time, cultures, and disciplines while unpacking the relationship between private yearning and public belonging, illustrating the limitations and fluidity of identity and affiliation through the idea of homes and ancestral homelands.

While rooted in comparative literature and critical art history in the context of diaspora studies, the book’s approach intersects with cultural geography, gender and sexuality studies, critical race theory, architecture, urban studies, film studies, nationalism, postcolonial theory, sociology, and migration studies. Conceived as relational and changing, the collection emphasizes that home/homeland studies are plural and fluctuating concepts encompassing multi-local affiliations, places, gender roles, languages, practices, relations, and power.

In this tangled site of contesting national discourses, affiliations, nostalgias, and ideologies, we can uncover valuable insight into how we construct the story of ourselves through traveling bodies, spaces, homes, and mixed geographies.

Table of Contents:

List of Figures

List of Contributors

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. Beyond Borders: Diasporic Explorations of Homes and Ancestral Homelands

Part I: Homelands, Nations, and Migrations: hardening and softening of borders and boundaries 

2. Altneuland: Nationalism and Colonial Myth in Theodor Herzl, Franz Kafka, and Felix Salten.

3. The Search for a Home in Migratory Societies: Evaluating Hikmet Temel Akarsu’s Adoration for Abroad in the Context of Architecture and Migration.

4. Hong Kong: Home as Gong Wu Between the Local, the National, the Colonial, and the Global.

Part II Fluid Homes, Fluid Identities: Gender Roles and Multi-layered Notions of Home

5. The Identity of the Caribbean “Others”: Maryse Condé and the Women’s Question in Diaspora.

6. “Shameless Old Men”: Home, Domesticity, Queerness, and the Latvian American Writer Anšlavs Eglītis.

7. Intertextuality and Fragmentation in Rabih Alameddine’s I, The Divine: The Crisis of Transnational Identity and Immigration.

8. To Make Where You Are Your Home: Hatsuye Egami’s Migration and Writings in Japanese American Concentration Camps.                               

Part III Diasporic Imaginings of Homemaking and Community Building

9. Where Do We Belong? Glocal Blackness and The Family Unit in Diasporic African Literatures.

10. “London Is the Place for Me”: Language, Community Building, and Homemaking in Sam Selvon’s Moses Trilogy.

11. Longing for Dissonance: Writing Community in Loida Maritza Pérez’s Geographies of Home.

Part IV Transnational Return: Trajectories of Ancestral Homeland Narratives

12. Coming to Terms with the Hyphen: The Homecoming of a "Cultural Go-Between" in Andrew X. Pham's Catfish and Mandala.

13. Homing Laptop: Return to Reset via Chinese TV Series

14. A Tale of Home and Rupture: Friendship, Race, and Ignorance in Albert Wendt’s Sons for the Return Home. 

Conclusion

15. Mapping the Multidisciplinary Study of Home and Ancestral Homeland.

Selected Bibliography

Index