Haunting Homes and Emerging Dilemmas of Being in the World: A Commentary

Home ‘haunts’ in much fiction literature, as the contributors to this volume of ZAA reveal by engaging in fruitful conversation with the scholarship on migration, displacement, exile, settler colonialism, and human/non-human relations, on all scales from local to global. This commentary underlines the promise of more extended exchanges between art, humanities, and social sciences in home studies. This is critical to make sense of the myriad imaginaries, emotions, and moralities associated with home, while being alert to the underlying ideological interests and subtexts. Writing on home and displacement, at the intersection between multiple disciplines, yields unique insights into long-term historical processes and biographical developments that shape our perception of home as a natural state of things, and our unequal opportunities to make ourselves at home. I eventually outline three research pathways that would benefit from a more systematic transition from the ‘haunting’ to the ‘emergence’ of home. These concern the ways of using home as a discursive category, the sensorial embeddedness of home, and the intimately political significance of home.