Reveries of Home: Nostalgia, Authenticity and the Performance of Place

Reveries of Home considers understandings of home in the world today and the means by which feelings of homeliness are secured. In particular, the volume explores the relationship between the phenomenon of globalisation and the ways in which home-making entails acts of practical and symbolic emplacement in landscapes felt to be meaningful and authentic. A series of case-studies, from Norway and West Africa, the mid-western USA, Egypt, Scotland and elsewhere, offer an illustrative array of homes made in rural communities and urban worksites, in personal life-histories and the policies of diasporic groups, in ceremonial revivals and mundane routines: in postcards, house furnishings, dreams, clothes and smells. Home-making appears as a kind of work; and it is ongoing, for ‘place’ and being ‘emplaced’ are not givens. Instead, home-making exists in time: in moments of individual and collective performance which are both mundane and memorial. Reveries of Home offers a set of cases and a set of arguments that reveal the close connections that remain between home and identity, even in a world of movement.