Home and Homeland in Asian Diaspora Transnational Reflections in Art, Literature, and Film

While many of us may strive to locate a sense of identity and belonging expressed via a home or ancestral homeland; today, however, this connection is no longer, if it ever was, a straightforward identification. This collection aims at mapping narratives or artwork of home/homeland that present shared, private, multifaceted, and often contested experiences of place, especially in the context of today’s migrations and upheavals, along with alarming degrees of increased nativism, racism, and anti-Asian violence. This volume includes papers by artists, filmmakers, and comparative scholars from diverse disciplines of literature, cinema, art history, cultural studies, and gender studies. Our goal is to help literary and art historian scholars in Asian diaspora studies, better decolonize and open up traditional research methodologies, curricula, and pedagogies.

1: Interdisciplinary Expressions of Home and the Ancestral Homeland in Asian Diaspora.- 2: Bao and Turning Red: Eating Chinese in Bloody Toronto.- 3: Representation of Comfort Women in Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life and Christina Park’s The Homes We Build on Ashes.- 4: Belonging Through Faith: Promised Home/Land in Min Jin Lee’s Free Food for Millionaires.- 5: Un/homing in an Indigenous Land: Chinese and the Indigenous in Ling Zhang’s “Toward the North.- 6: Homeland Films without Homeland: Examining Homeland in Soleen Yusef’s Haus ohne Dach [House Without Roof].- 7: A Sri Lankan Finding and Defining Home in Australia: Sunil Govinnage’s Writings.- 8: East is East (1997) as a Black Comedy of Asian Diasporic Homemaking in 1970s’ Britain.- 9: Home and Reformed Identities: A Study of Deepa Mehta’s Queer Diasporic Film Fire.- 10: Indian Womanhood as the Site of Home in Lakshmi Persaud’s Sastra.- 11:  She Who is Limitless, Without Borders: The Domain of Intimacy in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The  Namesake.- 12: NowHere and NoWhere: There’s No Place like Home in Beth Yahp’s memoir, Eat First, Talk Later.- 13:  Transkoreaning: Decolonizing Adopted Identity Through Artistic Practices and a Return to Home.

Kyunghee Pyun is Associate Professor of History of Art at the Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York. Her scholarship focuses on history of collecting, reception of Asian art, diaspora of Asian artists, dress history and material culture, and Asian American visual culture.  

Jean Amato is Professor in the English and Communication Studies Department at the Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York. Her research concentrations are theories of nationalism, diasporic studies, gender and the ancestral home and homeland in twentieth century Chinese and Chinese American literature and film.