Women on the Verge of Home

Smithgr

Description

This book explores the idea of "home." Using feminist scholarship and ethnographically grounded readings of historical, literary, and cultural texts, contributors interrogate the comfortable and stable contours of home and ask what it means to women in different social, class, sexual, ethnic, and racial contexts in different times and places. Giving voice to diverse women's understandings of home, the book includes stories of elite white U.S. and Canadian women, rural poor and peasant white women in the United States and France, a British Caribbean freed slave woman, and others.

FOREWORD
Ruth Behar

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

1. Introduction: Women on the Verge of Home
Bilinda Straight

2. Still Life
Kathleen Stewart

3. A Long Way from Home: Slavery, Travel, and Imperial Geography in The History of Mary Prince
Elizabeth A. Bohls

4. My Shafiqa: Concerning the Travels and Transgressions of a Southern Egyptian Woman
Katherine E. Zirbel

5. Cold Hearths: The Losses of Home in an Appalachian Woman's Life History
Bilinda Straight

6. Liminal Space and Liminal Time: A Woman's Narrative of a Year Abroad, 1938–1939
Caroline B. Brettell

7. Desire, Migration, and Attachment to Place: Narratives of Rural French Women
Deborah Reed-Danahay

8. Foreign Spirits inside the Family: Vodu Home on the Ex-Slave Coast
Judy Rosenthal

9. Concepts of Home
Gina Ulysse

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

INDEX

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 24 février 2005
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780791483770
• Langue: English

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I N D A S T R A I G e d i t o r with a foreword by Ruth Behar

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Women on the Verge of Home

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W O M E N O N T H E

V E R G E O F H O M E

edited by B I L I N D A S T R A I G H T

with a foreword by R U T H B E H A R

S T AT E U N I V E R S I T Y O F N E W Y O R K P R E S S

Cover photograph of Marie Stover, circa 1930.

Published by S TATE U NIVERSITY OF N EW Y ORK P RESS A LBANY

© 2005 State University of New York

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

For information, address State University of New York Press 90 State Street, Suite 700, Albany, NY 12207

Production, Laurie Searl Marketing, Anne M. Valentine

Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data

Women on the verge of home / edited by Bilinda Straight. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7914-6353-2 (alk. paper) — ISBN 0-7914-6354-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Women. 2. Home—Psychological aspects. I. Straight, Bilinda, 1964–

HQ1233.W5974 2005 305.4—dc22

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2004045338

In memory of my grandmother,

Ida Marie Stover Miller Vance.

And for all women who have had to question

the “ideal comfort” of Home.

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F OREWORD Ruth Behar

A CKNOWLEDGMENTS

O NE

T WO

T HREE

F OUR

F IVE

Contents

Introduction: Women on the Verge of Home Bilinda Straight

Still Life Kathleen Stewart

A Long Way from Home: Slavery, Travel, and Imperial Geography inThe History of Mary Prince Elizabeth A. Bohls

My Shafiqa: Concerning the Travels and Transgressions of a Southern Egyptian Woman Katherine E. Zirbel

Cold Hearths: The Losses of Home in an Appalachian Woman’s Life History Bilinda Straight

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WOMEN ON THE VERGE OF HOME

Liminal Space and Liminal Time: A Woman’s Narrative of a Year Abroad, 1938–1939 Caroline B. Brettell

Desire, Migration, and Attachment to Place: Narratives of Rural French Women Deborah ReedDanahay

Foreign Spirits inside the Family: Vodu Home on the Ex-Slave Coast Judy Rosenthal

Concepts of Home Gina Ulysse

L IST OF C ONTRIBUTORS

I NDEX

109

129

149

175

181

185

Fore

word

In classical anthropology, the ethnographer traveled to “the field,” a place always elsewhere, to bring back stories of how life was lived way over there. Of course, “the field” existed in relationship to a place we were supposed to already know, the place we called “home.” We continually interrogated “the field” and the project of “fieldwork,” assuming there wasn’t any need to ques- tion what “home” and “homework” might signify. But now this distinction between “the field” and “home,” which was at the center of our intellectual paradigm, no longer holds because the world order on which it was based has ceased to exist. Borders are crossed and recrossed daily, as exile, migration, expulsion, displacement, diaspora, homelessness, and the trauma they bring about describe the human condition for millions of people. Anthropologists can’t have an exclusive claim on the dialectic between “elsewhere” and “home” because it’s rampant in contemporary life. As a result, something vexing and exciting has happened in anthropology. Going to the field now often means taking a return trip to a lost home, or staying where you are and trying to figure out what’s there in front of your eyes, or examining the broken home down the road to understand our complicity in its brokenness. Anthropology, once only able to reflect on exotic locales, is lately becoming an area where some of us, at least, are giving ourselves per- mission to interrogate the sweetness and terror of our homecomings. If I had to summarize the essence of this book, that’s what I’d say it’s about—the sweetness and terror of our homecomings. These essays—all by anthropologists, except for one by an English literature specialist who special- izes in women travel writers—are haunted by an inescapable sense of ambiva- lence about home. This is to be expected because anthropologists, if I can gen- eralize about a group of people who are especially uneasy about making any social generalizations, are folks who come to the discipline because they’re searching for home. Many are unsure about where home is or what it is; oth- ers are critical of the home they come from and seek the purifying ritual of

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