Interdisciplinary Anthologies on Home and Homeland

CALL FOR PAPERS: Interdisciplinary Anthologies on Home and Homeland

• Jean Amato, Associate Professor; Comparative Literature; Fashion Institute of Technology, SUNY
• Kyunghee Pyun, Associate Professor; Art History; Fashion Institute of Technology, SUNY

We are putting together two anthologies on the representation of home and ancestral homeland in visual art/literature/film/performing arts. Pyun is an art historian; Amato is a scholar of comparative literature and film whose research centers on homeland studies, diaspora and cultural geography.

• Anthology 1: Homemaking in Diaspora: Multidisciplinary Representations of Home and the Ancestral Homeland
• Anthology 2: Representation of Home and Ancestral Homeland in Diasporic Asian Literature and Art

We are soliciting essays for two anthologies. We will propose which anthology is more suitable for your paper topic. This volume includes papers by comparative scholars from diverse disciplines of literature, cinema, art history, archeology, cultural studies, and gender studies. Our goal is to help literary and art historian scholars in particular, better decolonize and open up traditional research methodologies, curricula, and pedagogies. As we have developed these projects based on three conference panels, we have one set of papers focusing more on Asian diasporic authors and artists and the other from a broader geographic and multidisciplinary boundary. Our definition of Asia is broad, including both South, Southeast, East, Northeast, Central, and West Asia in addition to Polynesian islands.

Recent global events have fostered a sense of home and belonging that is undoubtedly in a state of upheaval, threat, and transformation. Standard classifications – when explored in individual academic silos such as nation, region, ethnicity, community, borders, sexuality, gender roles, religion, class, and citizenship – all reveal insights into the power dynamics of identity formation. These discipline-specific inquiries, however, rarely acknowledge the pervasive and universal pull of the idea of home with all its fluid entanglements. Our bridge-building, interdisciplinary volume will reflect on how the diverse, layered, rich, and fluid representations of both our homes and ancestral homelands can reframe our way of viewing the material and imaginative geographies of our lives—both locally and globally, from domestic to transnational scales, and on micro and macro levels. “Home” has become a fluid and complex process of re-negotiation, rather than a given definition, which makes this topic such an intriguing, inclusive, and timely tool for an interdisciplinary humanities collection. Designed as a catalyst, our project will connect, assemble, and disseminate innovative and intersectional curricular approaches to the study of home and homeland, balancing out a gap in interdisciplinary scholarship on home in the humanities.

Please send a 250-word abstract and a 150-word bio by March 20, 2022 to jean_amato@fitnyc.edu. Selections will be finalized by May 1, 2022. Essays should be 5000-7,000 words in length, MLA format and must be submitted by September 1, 2022 for consideration. Images: Approximately 3 per essay.

• Text deadline: September 1, 2022
• Image permissions: October 1, 2022
• Publication date: March 2023
• The references in the final paper submission should be parenthetical in the style of MLA
• Place of publication and “University Press” should be spelled out in the works cited pages.

Submissions might address some of the following questions:

• In what way is a home the smallest unit of a territorialized sense of belonging?
• Can our homes function as microcosms that echo, resist, or reproduce political, cultural, national and capitalist ideologies?
• What is the relation of cosmopolitanism to patriotism, or what does it mean to write of being at home in the world? Do writers/artists or filmmakers have the space to engage in this concept?
• How is a home defined by what is not home? Or what doesn’t feel like home?
• How are our homes interdependent and overlapping public and private realms that define and shape each other?
• How can ideas of home or ancestral homelands reinforce binaries such as private/public, west/east, male/female, colonizer/colonized?
• In this time of globalization, what does it mean to think and write “home” within these varied contexts?
• In what way are ideas of ethnicity, home, belonging and nation individual choices that seem to be always in process?
• How do artists or authors unpack the myth of the home or ancestral homeland as the place that never changes?
• How do home and away define each other? Do we have to leave a home/homeland to be able to understand what a home is?
• How can the question “Where are you from?” imply where someone is not?
• How are our ideas of home remapped by migrations?
• What are the intersections between the embodied experience of our built homes with imagined narrative worlds?
• How has Covid-19 changed ideas of public and private, domestic routines and spaces?
• How do works address real-world homes that have been uprooted by socioeconomic conditions?
• How is the sense of home connected to the production of a place?
• When we look at domestic space, how can we interrogate the private and public hierarchies of affiliation or belonging at play in the everyday actions and domestic spaces we call home?
• How do works challenge conventional uses of domestic spaces and/or manipulate our conceptions of inclusion and exclusion?
• How do depictions of domestic space partition bodies, space, and movement in terms of gender?
• How can our negotiations with home and belonging reveal iterations of power – from the global or national to the local or domestic?
• How do works of art and literature reveal the public and private renegotiations involved in any “return” journey to an ancestral home?
• How does “memory” of an ancestral homeland operate when remembered across migrations, languages, host lands and border crossings?
• Often our ideas of home and homeland are often depicted as emblems of belonging, how are women or maternal figures often called upon to embody this belonging?
• How are the female figures (or often mother characters) usually positioned in the home as the stable icons or embodying stasis, often marking the beginning or end of a male quest or journey?
• Discuss how a work addresses the dichotomy of the ‘outer’ and the ‘inner’ domains of traditional society along gendered binaries.
• How are sexual and gender norms spatially and ideologically constructed in domestic space in specific works?
• How do women conceptualize domestic space, particularly hybrid, border, and marginal spaces, against a backdrop of globalization and  urbanization?
• How do works challenge or reinforce presumed heteronormative givens that often limit representations of domestic space and sexuality to heterosexual and cisgendered identities?
• How are gender roles, the body, female purity, shame, and desire conditioned, policed or reinforced along patriarchal or nationalist narratives through representations of the domestic sphere?
• How is queer intimacy revealed or concealed in domestic or public cinematic and narrative spaces?