engleski

Literary “Home-trackers”: Narratives of return in the era of post-socialist transformation

The text combines anthropological inquiry and literary analysis of the figure of the „homecomer“ in fictional as well as autobiographical literature. Both types of literature reveal a quest for and an urge to assert identity and belonging through narratives of authors who themselves are migrants or live in exile. The text presents and discusses examples of how identity, belonging and displacement are being narrated away from home, and what homecoming to a place of departure entails. Homecoming appears not as a progression from being alien/foreign/strange to regaining familiarity and locality, but rather as a „home-tracking“: the lost intimacy of „home“, of social relations, behavioural routines and codes of conduct that once seemed taken for granted cannot be found again in real places, but only in memory, and thus are accessible only through dealing with the past, and through narration. Znanstveni doprinos: The combination of anthropological and literary analysis of fictional and autobiographical literature allows to gain a deeper understanding of migrant and post-migrant experience, of the challenges people face when they return „home“. It conveys that homecoming is an ongoing process rather than a completion, a constant moving between here and there, before and after, between intimacy and strangeness. Likewise, belonging shows not to be given but equally a creative act.

Exile, return, belonging, home, fictional literature

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