RHOME 2017
Representations of Home in Literatures and Cultures in English
RHOME 2017
Representations of Home in English Speaking Literatures and Cultures
In a world deeply marked by conflicts, persecutions, and scarce and/or poorly distributed resources, where some are driven out of their homes by war and poverty, while others feel that their (national) homes and ways of living are under threat, it is important to reflect about the notions of home that underpin personal and communal behaviour.
This conference focuses on representations of home in literature and the visual arts as the site where dynamics of conflict and/or (be)longing are played out. Home, particularly the imagined home, is a quintessential space of refuge from an external, unknown and potentially threatening, but also enticing, world. In Classical as in religious texts, home is both a place of departure and of quest and arrival, and throughout history the longing for home has persisted in the midst of the recurring challenges of belonging. Conflict has also elicited concerted efforts to find viable frameworks for coexistence, as epitomized by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), in the wake of the Second World War, or the Paris Agreement on Climate Change (2016), in response to current concerns about our collective home.
If homes are often sites of tension and conflict, to what extent does the imagined home shape, and to what extent is it shaped by, our experience of homes?
We invite contributions that reflect on representations in literature and the visual arts of the experience of home, the longing for home and the challenges of belonging. Topics addressed may include but are not limited to:
• Home as a space of conflict and/or reconciliation;
• The challenges of (non)belonging;
• Home, community and the representation of gender identity;
• Longing for home and utopia;
• Home and exile;
• Home as refuge / seeking refuge from home;
• Home as prison / home at war;
• Home and trauma;
• Home and family;
• Home and nation;
• Home and language;
• Home and cosmopolitanism;
• Glocal homes / identities;
• Home and nature;
• Home and memory;
• Home and spirituality;
• Home and creativity;
• Home, objects and affect;
• Home and myth;
• Home in folktales and fairy tales.
Keynote speakers:
Rhian Atkin (Cardiff University, UK)
Simone Lazaroo (Murdoch University, Australia)
José Pedro Serra (University of Lisbon, Portugal)