Multidisciplinary Representations of Home and Homeland in Diaspora

This collection explores our fascination with homes across time, cultures, and disciplines while unpacking the relationship between private yearning and public belonging, illustrating the limitations and fluidity of identity and affiliation through the idea of homes and ancestral homelands.

While rooted in comparative literature and critical art history in the context of diaspora studies, the book’s approach intersects with cultural geography, gender and sexuality studies, critical race theory, architecture, urban studies, film studies, nationalism, postcolonial theory, sociology, and migration studies. Conceived as relational and changing, the collection emphasizes that home/homeland studies are plural and fluctuating concepts encompassing multi-local affiliations, places, gender roles, languages, practices, relations, and power.

In this tangled site of contesting national discourses, affiliations, nostalgias, and ideologies, we can uncover valuable insight into how we construct the story of ourselves through traveling bodies, spaces, homes, and mixed geographies.

Jean Amato is a professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology, SUNY, working in Chinese and English, her research centers on ancestral home/homeland in twentieth-century Chinese, Diasporic, and Chinese American Literature and Film. Co-editor of Home and Homeland in Asian Diaspora: Transnational Reflections in Art, Literature, and Film (2024), she is co-editing two interdisciplinary anthologies on homeland and diaspora studies and publishes extensively on this topic.

Kyunghee Pyun is a professor of art history at the Fashion Institute of Technology, SUNY, focusing on visual culture, the history of art collecting, and the intersectionality of technology and art. She co-edited Fashion, Identity, Power in Modern Asia (2018); Interpreting Modernism in Korean Art (2021); American Art from Asia (2022); Expanding the Parameters of Feminist Artivism (2022); Dress History of Korea (2023); and Home and Homeland in Asian Diaspora: Transnational Reflections in Art, Literature, and Film (2024).