Volume 71, Issue 1 - Special Issue: Haunted by Homes; Guest Editor: Amina ElHalawani

In the 1980s, a chain of traumatic events in Iran, from an eight-year war to post-revolution political turmoil, forced hundreds of thousands of people to escape their homeland during a wave of mass imprisonment and executions. The exodus included a substantial number of artists, writers, and academics, targeted for their work and beliefs. Their experience gave rise to an important, and woefully overlooked, canon of exilic Persian literature that offers a nuanced and complex documentation of forced displacement, exilic transnational identity, and the troublesome concept of ‘home.’ This essay explores the work of first-generation exiled poets and the ways in which temporal fluctuations of memory and emotion interact with the geographical and corporeal impact of displacement. Drawing on theoretical frameworks of home, migration, and diaspora, the essay challenges ‘home versus exile’ as an oppositional binary, offering a broader definition of exile that rearticulates the meaning of home.

This article offers a meditation on the idea of home as expressed by four US poets belonging to different historical periods and socio-cultural backgrounds. At first, the poetic compositions I will discuss may startle readers in ways similar to what happened to Ludwig van Beethoven’s contemporaries as they first listened to his experimental and defamiliarizing late quartets. Emily Dickinson, Jennifer Elise Foerster, Richard Wright, and Agha Shahid Ali populate their homes with volcanoes, lice, faces hidden in gingerbread tins, and half-inch Himalayas. Moving alternately between macroscopic and microscopic dimensions, this article asks provocatively: How is the relation between movement and homemaking staged in these poems? To what extent do these poetic compositions bear the marks of homelessness and of imaginary homes? And finally, what should we make out of this unharmonious wholeness?

Starting with a reading of Christy Lefteri’s refugee narrative The Beekeeper of Aleppo , this article looks into the fragmentation and instability of the notion of home for refugees, highlighting the resort of the characters to a notion of homing as a practice of planetary dimensions. By looking at the role of bees and beekeeping in The Beekeeper of Aleppo and the Macedonian documentary Honeyland home is explored as a ‘verb’ rather than a static location. Moreover, this article also reflects on human and non-human kin, to use Donna Haraway’s term, in the creation of home spaces and relations. I would like to express my gratitude for the support I have received as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry while working on this paper.

This essay looks into the concept of an ancestral homeland in Remote Oceania, commonly referred to as Hawaiki (‘Avaiki; Havai‘i; Hawai‘i). Hawaiki intriguingly challenges Eurocentric notions of ‘home.’ Following the rapid settlement of the so-called Polynesian triangle from Samoa/Tonga at around 1000 AD, Hawaiki has emerged as a concept that is both mythological and real; genealogical and geographic; singular and yet portable, existing in plural regional manifestations. I argue that predominantly Pakeha/Popa‘ā research trying to identify Hawaiki as a singular and geographically fixed homeland is misleading. I tap into the archive surrounding the Ra‘iātean tahu‘a and master navigator Tupaia who joined Captain Cook’s crew during his first voyage to the Pacific to offer glimpses of an alternative ontology of home and epistemology of Oceanic ‘homing.’

This speculative meditation on homelessness takes as its starting point media photos of apartments in the Ukraine whose walls have been shot away by Russian artillery barrages or bombing raids. It suggests that these images of homelessness prompt us to address larger issues of being at home in the world. Beginning with twentieth-century meditations from Germanophone philosophy, proceeding via several Antipodean examples, and culminating with perspectives from the Global South, the essay urges us to turn our gaze towards modes of open-ended homeliness in the world that are vital for our ongoing habitation of the ‘environmental niche’ that is planet Earth.

Home ‘haunts’ in much fiction literature, as the contributors to this volume of ZAA reveal by engaging in fruitful conversation with the scholarship on migration, displacement, exile, settler colonialism, and human/non-human relations, on all scales from local to global. This commentary underlines the promise of more extended exchanges between art, humanities, and social sciences in home studies . This is critical to make sense of the myriad imaginaries, emotions, and moralities associated with home, while being alert to the underlying ideological interests and subtexts. Writing on home and displacement, at the intersection between multiple disciplines, yields unique insights into long-term historical processes and biographical developments that shape our perception of home as a natural state of things, and our unequal opportunities to make ourselves at home. I eventually outline three research pathways that would benefit from a more systematic transition from the ‘haunting’ to the ‘emergence’ of home. These concern the ways of using home as a discursive category, the sensorial embeddedness of home, and the intimately political significance of home.