The Political Flows and Social Engagements of Home and Place

Session Submission Type: Paper Session: Traditional Format

Abstract

This panel explores the theme of home/not home by focusing on place and the ways in which it is imbued with sociopolitical power and meaning, including labor, migrational flows, nomadic movements, and race. Place speaks to the physical space of home itself, but also the ways in which relationships of power demand that subjects encounter and inhabit space differently. These papers discuss discrete spaces that involve more than home itself, but gesture toward the conditions under which belonging is felt. Panelists consider the shifting rhetoric of place, space, and time, arguing that attention to place is critical in understanding how power moves, settles, and makes legible home/not home. Through these sites, this panel explores power relationships through home/not home, considering labor time in capitalism’s “unhomely economy,” a South Dakota turkey plant and its refugee labor, racial inequality in Ferguson, Missouri, and nomadic drift and the political possibilities of (un)belonging.

Rosemary Hennessy’s paper discusses capitalism as an unhomely economy, considering the differences between abstract and experiential time amidst capital production. Hennessy analyzes Tillie Lerner Olsen’s novel Yonnondio and its discussion of migrant labor time in the spheres of production and reproduction. Olsen’s novel acts as a point of departure for considering the places and temporalities of capitalism and the feminized and affective labor on which it depends.

Carly Thomsen’s paper explores home/not home through transnational indigeneities and the ways in which discourses of home, place, and local community are represented and constructed by and for diasporic indigenous workers, specifically indigenous refugees from Myanmar in rural South Dakota. Thomsen’s research demonstrates how it has become increasingly common for rural officials to publicly invite businesses and the (im)migrants that will largely perform the low-waged labor upon which they rely. Home as a category becomes mystified amidst transnational flows of labor and capital production.

Kelly Sharron’s paper gestures toward the political histories imbued in the geography of St. Louis County, Missouri, arguing that Ferguson’s very existence is steeped in racial inequality. Ferguson, and the other 89 municipalities that make up St. Louis County, are the result of restrictive zoning practices that maintained segregation through place. Connecting this political geography to the present, Sharron argues that Ferguson has a history of unequal distributions of power and life chances made Michael Brown’s death possible.

Abraham Weil’s paper considers the underlying subjects that space and home conjure, seeking to gesture toward political transformation. Bringing together Dionne Brand’s floating diasporic subjects and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s nomad, Weil explores the political possibilities in unbelonging and refusal to resist raced, gendered, and colonized understandings of home that so often emerge through displaced encounters.

This year’s theme invites us to question the home as a constitutive category through indigeneity, but also to provoke our commitments to home, place, and location. This panel explores the meaning of place, its relationship to home/not home, and the subjects who move through them with attention to public, private, urban, rural, and those places that confound or shuttle between these configurations.

Sub Unit

• American Studies Association Annual Meeting

Chair

• Adriane Bezusko, University of Texas, Austin (TX)

Individual Presentations

• Home Time: Reclaiming the Homely in the Work of Tillie Olsen - Rosemary Hennessy, Rice University (TX)

• Local, Global, Rural: Diasporic Indigenous Workers in a South Dakota Turkey Plant - Carly Thomsen, Middlebury College (VT)

• Ferguson, Missouri: The Legislation and Enforcement of Race, Place, and Home - Kelly Sharron, University of Arizona (AZ)

• All the Way Home: Diasporic Unbelonging and Nomadic Drift - Abraham Weil, University of Arizona (AZ)