This collection explores our fascination with homes across time, cultures, and disciplines while unpacking the relationship between private yearning and public belonging, illustrating the limitations and fluidity of identity and affiliation through the idea of homes and ancestral homelands.

While rooted in comparative literature and critical art history in the context of diaspora studies, the book’s approach intersects with cultural geography, gender and sexuality studies, critical race theory, architecture, urban studies, film studies, nationalism, postcolonial theory, sociology, and migration studies. Conceived as relational and changing, the collection emphasizes that home/homeland studies are plural and fluctuating concepts encompassing multi-local affiliations, places, gender roles, languages, practices, relations, and power.

In this tangled site of contesting national discourses, affiliations, nostalgias, and ideologies, we can uncover valuable insight into how we construct the story of ourselves through traveling bodies, spaces, homes, and mixed geographies.