Book Section
The question of home is a complicated one. While home is emplaced, the notion of home does not simply point to just a location. This chapter thus utilizes what I call the trope of the ‘vignette’ to look at the concept of home in order to identify some aspects of what constitutes and/or (re)creates it for displaced individuals. It does so by performing a close reading of key moments in the film Salt of this Sea by Annemarie Jacir and the collection of essays The Idea of Home by John Hughes.
Keywords: Home; Homing; Vignettes; Affect; Displacement; Displaced persons; Memory
Title
Seeking Home
Subtitle
Vignettes of Homes and Homing
Author(s)
Amina ElHalawani
Identifier
Description
The question of home is a complicated one. While home is emplaced, the notion of home does not simply point to just a location. This chapter thus utilizes what I call the trope of the ‘vignette’ to look at the concept of home in order to identify some aspects of what constitutes and/or (re)creates it for displaced individuals. It does so by performing a close reading of key moments in the film Salt of this Sea by Annemarie Jacir and the collection of essays The Idea of Home by John Hughes.
Is Part Of
Place
Berlin
Publisher
ICI Berlin Press
Date
11 October 2022
Subject
Home
Homing
Vignettes
Affect
Displacement
Displaced persons
Memory
Rights
© by the author(s)
Except for images or otherwise noted, this publication is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Language
en-GB
page start
213
page end
226
Source
The Case for Reduction, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Jakob Schillinger, Cultural Inquiry, 25 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2022), pp. 213–26

References

  • Salt of this Sea, dir. and written by Annemarie Jacir, performances by Suheir Hammad, Saleh Bakri, Marwan Riyad Ideis, and Sylvia Wetz (Trigon-film, 2008)
  • Ahmed, Sara, ‘Home and Away: Narratives of Migration and Estrangement’, in Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Postcoloniality (London: Routledge, 2000), chapter 4: pp. 77–94
  • Boccagni, Paolo, Migration and the Search for Home: Mapping Domestic Space in Migrants’ Everyday Lives (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)
  • Casey, Edward, Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993)
  • Certeau, Michel de, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. by Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984)
  • Darwish, Mahmoud, ‘Athens Airport’, in Darwish, Unfortunately, It was Paradise: Selected Poems, trans. and ed. by Munir Akash and Carolyn Forché with Sinan Antoon and Amira El-Zein (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), p. 12
  • Darwish, Mahmoud, ‘Edward Said: A Contrapuntal Reading’, trans. by Mona Anis, Cultural Critique, 67 (2007), pp. 175–82 <https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2007.0026>
  • Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987)
  • Fadda-Conrey, Carol, Contemporary Arab-American Literature: Transnational Reconfigurations of Citizenship and Belonging (New York: New York University Press, 2014)
  • Heidegger, Martin, ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, in Heidegger, Poetry, Language and Thought, trans. by Albert Hofstadter (New York: Perennial Classics, 2001), pp. 141–59
  • Hughes, John, The Idea of Home: Autobiographical Essays (Artarmon: Giramondo Publishing Company, 2004)
  • Majaj, Lisa Suhair, ‘Departure’, in Majaj, Geographies of Light (Washington, DC: Del Sol Press, 2009), pp. 43–44
  • McAuliffe, Marie, and Binod Khadria, eds, World Migration Report 2020, ed. by (Geneva: International Organization for Migration, 2019) <https://publications.iom.int/books/world-migration-report-2020> [accessed 23 July 2022]
  • Said, Edward, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000)
  • Soja, Edward W., Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Spaces (Cambridge, MA and Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996)
  • Hammad, Suheir, Breaking Poems (New York: Cypher Books, 2008)

Cite as: Amina ElHalawani, ‘Seeking Home: Vignettes of Homes and Homing’, in The Case for Reduction, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Jakob Schillinger, Cultural Inquiry, 25 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2022), pp. 213-26 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-25_11>