RHOME 2023 - Past Conferences

RHOME 2014

REPRESENTATIONS OF HOME IN ENGLISH-SPEAKING LITERATURES AND CULTURES

The first Symposium on Representations of Home in English-Speaking Literatures and Cultures asks questions about how personal and communal identities have been represented and negotiated in countries that were once part of the British Empire. In recent decades, the political architecture of ‘home’ has been reconfigured in many of these countries, from Canada’s 1988 Multiculturalism Act, to post-apartheid South Africa’s constitution, post-1998 Peace Agreement Ireland, and the official apology to Australia’s Indigenous peoples (2008). Indeed, the same can be said for the United States in the wake of the civil rights movement, and for post-imperial and post-devolution Britain.

If empire-building, decolonisation and subsequent social and political upheavals involved voluntary and involuntary migrant flows, how have they (re)shaped notions of home and belonging? In a globalised world of unequal migration policies, growing interdependence, and instant interconnectivity, is home here and/or elsewhere? Does it reside in the past, in a backward movement in time and space, in an ‘imaginary homeland’ of sorts, or is home a movement toward the future? Is it a static unified concept, or a place in the making? How have literature and the visual arts articulated and contributed to changing social and cultural experience? Concurrently, how do literary and culture studies map such shifts and changes? How are ‘home’ and ‘elsewhere’ played out in how we engage with our object of study?

We will be discussing how these and the following issues are addressed in different parts of the English-speaking world:

• Home and language
• Home and place
• Home and conflict
• Home and the body
• Imaginary homelands
• Home and spirituality
• Home/lessness and (be)longing
• Home and identity

Provisional programme: 15 July 2014

Final programme: 15 October 2014

Organising Committee: Teresa Casal, Jean Page, Luísa Falcão, Margarida Martins, Marijke Boucherie, Paula Horta, Sara Henriques, Zuzanna Sanches.

 

REPRESENTATIONS OF HOME
IN ENGLISH-SPEAKING LITERATURES AND CULTURES
University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies (ULICES)
Faculty of Letters, University of Lisbon
13-14 November 2014

THURSDAY, 13 NOVEMBER 2014
ROOM 5.2
14H00-14H15 – OPENING SESSION
14H15-15H15 – PLENARY

CHAIR: TERESA CID

• Smaro Kamboureli (U Toronto): Between Here and There: Belonging and Unbelonging in Canadian Literature

15H15 -16H45 – Panel 1 – Home & language

CHAIR: RITA QUEIROZ DE BARROS

• Carolina P. Amador-Moreno (U Extremadura): The representation of home in Irish emigrant letters: a corpus-based study
• Alcina Maria Pereira de Sousa (U Madeira/ULICES) & Alda Maria Correia (Nova U/ULICES): Living in between a house and a home: Where’s the comfort zone anyway? Dislocated Identities in Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Cisnero’s The House of Mango Street
• Erzsébet Barát (U Szeged): Women protagonists fighting “internal” othering in Europe: The intersection of linguistic and cultural boundaries

16H45-17H00 – COFFEE BREAK
17H00-18H30 – PANEL 2 – HOME & CONFLICT

CHAIR: ANA CRISTINA MENDES

• David Callahan (U Aveiro): Home as Hiding: Interiority with Landscape in Contemporary Australian Literature
• Martin Renes (U Barcelona): First Nation Sovereignty and settler imposition: Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance and Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book
• Yousef Awad (U Jordan): Displacement, Belonging and Identity in Susan Muaddi Darraj’s The Inheritance of Exile

 

FRIDAY, 14 NOVEMBER 2014
ROOM 5.2
9H30-10H30 – PLENARY

CHAIR: ISABEL FERNANDES

• Teresa Cid (ULICES): At Home in New Deal Photography? Notes on some photographs of Portuguese Americans

10H30-11H00 – COFFEE BREAK
11H00-12H30 – PANEL 3 – HOME & VERBAL AND VISUAL REPRESENTATION

CHAIR: PAULA HORTA

• Jean Page (ULICES): The Jindyworobaks and the indigenous: finding home in the imagery and language of the Other
• Zuzanna Sanches (ULisboa/ULICES): The Art of Memories? Deirdre Madden and her Time Present and Time Past
• Veronica Metello (U Coimbra): Home and belonging as performed relations

 

12H30-14H00 – LUNCH
14H00-15H30 – PANEL 4 – HOME & PLACE

CHAIR: JOHN CAMPBELL

• Laura F. Bulger (CEL): This will never be where I belong
• Isabel Alves (UTAD/ULICES): Dwelling in a junkyard: Janisse Ray’s Ecology of a Cracker Childhood
• Mário Vítor Bastos (ULisboa/ULICES): Forms of Habitat in Australian Literature

15H30-17H00 – PANEL 5 – HOME & THE BODY

CHAIR: MARIJKE BOUCHERIE

• Cecilia Beecher Martins (ULisboa/ULICES): When your body is no longer your home
• Mary Fowke (ULICES): Emotions Borne: Domesticity’s Intimate Spaces Across Wide North American Distances
• Alexandra Cheira (ULICES): “I am a cold grey house”: houses as sites of female (stopped) energy in A. S. Byatt’s fiction

17H00-17H30 – COFFEE BREAK
17H30-18H30 – PLENARY

CHAIR: TERESA CASAL

• Vanessa Castejon (U Paris 13/CRIDAF): Home and “in between”: identities here, there and Down Under