Article:
Beyond Sedentarism and Nomadology: Yaa Gyasi’s HOMEGOING and the Ambivalent Desire for Home

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dc.creatorHeinz, Sarah
dc.date.accessioned2021-06-09T08:39:53Z
dc.date.available2021-06-09T08:39:53Z
dc.date.issued2020
dc.description.abstractHeim und Heimat sind auratische Begriffe, die häufig mit positiven Emotionen und Erlebnissen wie Behaglichkeit, Wärme oder Sicherheit verbunden werden. In solchen Assoziationen wird Heim/at zu einem stabil existenten Ort, einer organischen Gemeinschaft und einem angeborenen Gefühl, d.h. zu einer angeblich natürlichen Erfahrung, die von außen bedroht werden kann. Solch eine ‚sesshafte‘ Metaphysik sieht Mobilität als Pathologie oder Bedrohung und lehnt Heimatlosigkeit, Bewegung und alternative Modelle von Heim/at ab. Diese Konzepte von Heim/at sind von nomadologischen Ansätzen hinterfragt worden. Heim/at wird hier als gefährliche Fantasie und Ideologie verabschiedet, während eine radikale Heimatlosigkeit, Mobilität und nomadische Subjektivität zu einer Quelle für Widerstand gegen Essentialismus und staatliche Kontrolle werden.de
dc.description.abstractHome is an auratic term that is often connected to positive feelings and experiences like comfort, warmth, or safety. In such associations, home is set up as a pre-existing space, an organic community, and an inborn feeling, i.e. an allegedly natural experience that can become threatened by hostile outside forces. Such a sedentarist metaphysics sees mobility as a pathology or threat and rejects both homelessness and alternative notions of home. However, ideas of home have been ‘mobilised’ in nomadological approaches to home and mobility. Here, home is reassessed as a dangerous fantasy, and a radical homelessness and nomadic subjectivity turns into a progressive source of resistance to essentialist sedentarism and state control. This binary opposition has led to certain impasses in the discussion of home that the article traces, to then propose a third way of conceptualising home in a close reading of Yaa Gyasi’s novel HOMEGOING (2016) along the lines of Brah’s notion of a ‘homing desire’ (1996). Using the initial two protagonists, the two sisters Effia and Esi, and their respective chapters as representative examples for the novel as a whole, the close readings show that Effia’s story critically comments on organic, sedentarist notions of home, while Esi’s story underlines that celebrations of nomadism and homelessness are equally problematic. For both characters and their descendants, home is elusive, fluid, and far from unproblematic, but at the same time, home is something longed for and desired.en
dc.identifier.doihttp://dx.doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/16172
dc.identifier.urihttps://mediarep.org/handle/doc/17016
dc.languageeng
dc.publisherDe Gruyter
dc.publisher.placeBerlin
dc.relation.isPartOfissn:2451-1765
dc.relation.ispartofseriesKulturwissenschaftliche Zeitschrift
dc.rights.urihttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0
dc.subjectHeimatde
dc.subjectRomande
dc.subject.ddcddc:791
dc.subject.personYaa Gyasi
dc.subject.workHOMEGOING
dc.titleBeyond Sedentarism and Nomadology: Yaa Gyasi’s HOMEGOING and the Ambivalent Desire for Homeen
dc.typearticle
dc.type.statuspublishedVersion
dspace.entity.typeArticleen
local.coverpage2021-06-09T11:01:42
local.identifier.firstpublishedhttps://doi.org/10.2478/kwg-2020-0030
local.source.epage132
local.source.issue1
local.source.spage119
local.source.volume5
local.subject.gndhttps://d-nb.info/gnd/1147321620
local.subject.gndhttps://d-nb.info/gnd/1110919603
local.subject.gndhttp://d-nb.info/gnd/1147321620
local.subject.wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q30600501
local.subject.wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q27757818

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