1st Edition
Multidisciplinary Representations of Home and Homeland in Diaspora
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.
List of Figures
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Beyond Borders: Diasporic Explorations of Homes and Ancestral Homelands
Jean Amato
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.
Iris Bruce
3. The Search for a Home in Migratory Societies: Evaluating Hikmet Temel Akarsu’s Adoration for Abroad in the Context of Architecture and Migration.
Nevnihal Erdoğan
4. Hong Kong: Home as Gong Wu Between the Local, the National, the Colonial, and the Global.
Ian Fong
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.
Trayee Sinha
6. “Shameless Old Men”: Home, Domesticity, Queerness, and the Latvian American Writer Anšlavs Eglītis.
Karlis Verdins
7. Intertextuality and Fragmentation in Rabih Alameddine’s I, The Divine: The Crisis of Transnational Identity and Immigration.
Arwa Albader
8. To Make Where You Are Your Home: Hatsuye Egami’s Migration and Writings in Japanese American Concentration Camps.
Masumi Izumi
Part III Diasporic Imaginings of Homemaking and Community Building
9. Where Do We Belong? Glocal Blackness and The Family Unit in Diasporic African Literatures.
Cristovão Nwachukwu
10. “London Is the Place for Me”: Language, Community Building, and Homemaking in Sam Selvon’s Moses Trilogy.
Carolina Palacios Guerra
11. Longing for Dissonance: Writing Community in Loida Maritza Pérez’s Geographies of Home.
Karen O'Regan
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.
Jeanne Devautour Choi
13. Homing Laptop: Return to Reset via Chinese TV Series
Sheng-mei Ma
14. A Tale of Home and Rupture: Friendship, Race, and Ignorance in Albert Wendt’s Sons for the Return Home.
Quynh H. Vo
Conclusion
15. Mapping the Multidisciplinary Study of Home and Ancestral Homeland.
Kyunghee Pyun
Selected Bibliography
Index
Biography
Jean Amato is a professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology, SUNY, working in Chinese and English, her research centers on ancestral home/homeland in twentieth-century Chinese, Diasporic, and Chinese American Literature and Film. Co-editor of Home and Homeland in Asian Diaspora: Transnational Reflections in Art, Literature, and Film (2024), she is co-editing two interdisciplinary anthologies on homeland and diaspora studies and publishes extensively on this topic.
Kyunghee Pyun is a professor of art history at the Fashion Institute of Technology, SUNY, focusing on visual culture, the history of art collecting, and the intersectionality of technology and art. She co-edited Fashion, Identity, Power in Modern Asia (2018); Interpreting Modernism in Korean Art (2021); American Art from Asia (2022); Expanding the Parameters of Feminist Artivism (2022); Dress History of Korea (2023); and Home and Homeland in Asian Diaspora: Transnational Reflections in Art, Literature, and Film (2024).
