Homelands

The word homeland evokes thoughts of pleasure and pain, belonging and exile, flight and shelter. Is home a place, a state of mind, an imagined community, a commodity, or, as Charlotte Perkins Gilman writes, a fundamentally “human institution?” James Baldwin suggests we can only know home by its absence, while for Robert Frost it’s the place “they have to take you in.” For some, the idea of home promises shelter, identity, authenticity, and stability, while for others it evokes loss, exile, oppression, constriction, and the impossibility of return. The idea itself has shaped and been shaped by gender, race, class, geography, religion, and ethnicity while being deployed to both offer protection and propagate terror.


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