Co-convened by the Center for Gender and Diversity Research, University of Tübingen

Acknowledging the importance of defining “home” in discussions on “wellbeing”, this panel builds on notions of “home” proposed and discussed at the International Workshop “Literatures and Cultures of Homes in the Making”, organized by the Center for Gender and Diversity Research and the Interdisciplinary Centre for Global South Studies at the University of Tübingen, along with the Faculty of Arts, Alexandria University in December 2019. This panel, extending on the conversations at the workshop, views home as more than just a location: as a feeling, a thought, an ideal, evoked through interaction between human beings and their surroundings. It thus aims to look at narratives of “home” as subjectivities of being. As such, the panel will bring together four different papers, which put into conversation reveal variable manifestations of home narratives

Douanla’s paper focuses on the different female subjectivities that are forged through the complex interplay between the different scales and dimensions of home depicted in Werewere Liking’s Amputated Memory. Drawing on Blunt and Dowling’s concepts of home as multidimensional and multi-scalar as well as Michael Rothberg’s concept of Implicated Subjectivities, this paper argues that, amid the ambivalence surrounding female negotiations of viable forms of life, the novel clears up a promising space for an alternative politics of home and postcolonial entanglements. 

ElHalawani’s paper moves a step further away from social entanglement and into individual subjectivity. Through a reading of John Hughes’ The Idea of Home (2004) and Nada Awar Jarrar’s Somewhere, Home (2002), it argues that “home” for displaced individuals can best be seen in a series of processes of writing and erasure, or recalling memories and forgetting, creating an imagined space of comfort.

Amaral's paper discusses the temporal dimensions implicated in the notion of "home" in Elia Suleiman's filmography. More specifically, it shall discuss the strategies adopted by Suleiman, a filmmaker in exile, to look at his former "home" and homeland. This discussion will be based on Suleiman's semi-autobiographical films Chronicles of a disappearance (1996) and The time that remains: Chronicles of an absent present (2009).

Stösser’s paper pushes the notion of “home” even further away from simple locatedness, suggesting that in our contemporary world home is an existential dual state, a “real” space and a “virtual ‘home’” (McLean 2010) in the digital space, as presented in a novel like Adichie’s Americanah, whose media-savvy blogging protagonist exposes a form of digital transnationalism, demonstrating how we are situated not only socially, but also digitally. 

Through studying the notion of ‘home’ in a variety of literary works from the Global South, beyond the prism of territoriality and/or postcolonial studies, this panel seeks to come up with a means of dealing with home narratives of the South which acknowledges the subjectivity as well as the complexity of both being and belonging.