RHOME : SYMPOSIUM 2017

REPRESENTATIONS OF HOME 2
Conflict and/or (Be)longing: Thinking with Stories and Images
Venue: School of Arts and Humanities, University of Lisbon, 16-17 November 2017

 

People not only think about stories; far more consequentially, people think with stories.
Arthur W. Frank, Letting Stories Breathe: A Socio-Narratology, 2010: 47.

The idea of home was something they lived so completely that they would have been at a loss to
define it. But they would have known to be inadequate phrases such as: ‘It’s where you’re from,’
‘It’s the place you live,’ ‘It’s where your family are.’
Deirdre Madden, One by One in the Darkness, 1996: 75.

In a world deeply marked by conflicts, persecutions, and scarce and/or poorly distributed
resources, where some are driven out of their homes by war and poverty, while others feel
that their (national) homes and ways of living are under threat, it is important to reflect
about the notions of home that underpin personal and communal behaviour.

This conference focuses on representations of home in literature and the visual arts as the
site where dynamics of conflict and/or (be)longing are played out. Home, particularly the
imagined home, is a quintessential space of refuge from an external, unknown and
potentially threatening, but also enticing, world. In Classical as in religious texts, home is
both a place of departure and of quest and arrival, and throughout history the longing for
home has persisted in the midst of the recurring challenges of belonging. Conflict has
also elicited concerted efforts to find viable frameworks for coexistence, as epitomized by
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), in the wake of the Second World
War, or the Paris Agreement on Climate Change (2016), in response to current concerns
about our collective home.

If homes are often sites of tension and conflict, to what extent does the imagined home
shape, and to what extent is it shaped by, our experience of homes?

We invite contributions that reflect on representations in literature and the visual arts of
the experience of home, the longing for home and the challenges of belonging. Topics
addressed may include but are not limited to:

• Home as a space of conflict and/or reconciliation;
• The challenges of (non)belonging;
• Home, community and the representation of gender identity;
• Longing for home and utopia;
• Home and exile;
• Home as refuge / seeking refuge from home;
• Home as prison / home at war;
• Home and trauma;
• Home and family;
• Home and nation;
• Home and language;
• Home and cosmopolitanism;
• Glocal homes / identities;
• Home and nature;
• Home and memory;
• Home and spirituality;
• Home and creativity;
• Home, objects and affect;
• Home and myth;
• Home in folktales and fairy tales.

The conference language is English. Speakers should prepare for a 15-minute
presentation followed by questions. Please send a 250-word abstract, as well as a brief
biographical note (100 words) to rephome@letras.ulisboa.pt by the 15th May 2017.

Proposals should list the paper title, name, institutional affiliation, and contact details.
You will receive notification of abstract acceptance or rejection by the 30th June.
Fees: € 100
Early bird (by 8 September) — € 80
Students (ID required) — € 40
Attendants without presentation who wish to avail of conference documentation — € 15
The registration fee includes coffee breaks and conference documentation.

Details about payment will be provided in due course.

Organising Committee:
Teresa Casal
Ana Cristina Mendes
Ana Raquel Fernandes
Jean Page
Margarida Pereira Martins
Maria Luísa Falcão
Mariana Pires
Marjike Boucherie
Mary Fowke
Paula Horta
Sara Paiva Henriques
Zuzanna Sanches

Scientific Committee:
Teresa Casal
Ana Cristina Mendes
Ana Raquel Fernandes
Isabel Alves
José Pedro Serra
Margarida Pereira Martins
Marjike Boucherie
Maria de Jesus C. Relvas
Paula Horta
Zuzanna Sanches

RHOSE : Open Seminars 2014

Representations of Home Open Seminars 2014:

• RHOSE 1: 24 Março, 14h00-16h00, sala 4

Ubuntu em Portugal

Eugénia Costa & Carolina Tomaz

[LINK]

• RHOSE 2: 7 Maio, 18h00-20h00, sala 7.1

Portuguese at Home in North America?

[LINK]

Teresa Cid

At Home in New Deal Photography? Notes on some photographs of Portuguese Americans

A contextualized reading of a couple of photographs of Portuguese American homes (and Portuguese Americans at home) belonging to the FSA documentary project will be the pretext for a discussion of issues of representation of immigration, ethnicity, class, individual and collective aims, and material culture.

Em casa na fotografia do New Deal? Notas sobre algumas fotografias de luso-americanos

Uma leitura contextualizada de um par de fotografias de lares luso-americanos (e luso-americanos no lar) pertencentes ao acervo do projecto documental do New Deal servirá de ponto de partida para uma discussão sobre aspectos ligados a representação de imigração, etnicidade, classe, propósitos individuais e colectivos, e também cultura material.

Emily Ashby

Espírito Santo Across the Sea: (Re)interpretations of Salient Azorean Traditions in the New World

What does an immigrant people consider most important about their culture, and how do they adapt it to their new home? This work explores the literature, religious rites, and community-base traditions brought over by 20th-century Azorean immigrants to North America, and the ways in which the performance of these was shaped by their new country. Focus will be placed on the traditions that survived the move and why these were held as particularly representative of “Azorean-ness,” the relationship that successive generations have to these frequently distorted practices, and how they are a lens through which Azorean decedents and non-Azorean community members perceive an archipelago to which they have a tenuous connection.

O Espírito Santo atravessa o oceano: (Re)interpretações de tradições açorianas salientes do Novo Mundo

O que é que um povo imigrante considera importante sobre a sua cultura, e como é que se adapta ao seu novo lar? Este trabalho explora a literatura, os ritos religiosos e as tradições comunitárias trazidas para a América do Norte por imigrantes açorianos do século XX, e o modo como a encenação das mesmas foi moldada pelo novo país. Será dada especial atenção às tradições que sobreviveram à translocação e às suas marcas de uma “açorianidade” particular, à relação que gerações sucessivas têm com estas práticas frequentemente distorcidas e ao modo como são uma lente através da qual descendentes açorianos e membros da comunidade não açorianos percebem um arquipélago com o qual têm uma ligação ténue.

• RHOSE 3: 23 Maio, 10h00-12h00, Anf. III

“Identity Is a Slippery Fish”

[LINK]

Zuzanna Sanches

“Identity is a Slippery Fish”: Eva Trout in Search of the Lost Home

This seminar will be devoted to Elizabeth Bowen’s last novel Eva Trout or Changing Scenes (1968). Eva Trout epitomizes a search for home while exploring different physical and mental territories of belonging. Living in a boarding school, moving from a hotel to a hotel and eventually renting a house in Kent, Eva ceaselessly projects her fantasy and a primary need of identification onto different physical spaces and foster families. To her, living homeless is “Nothing but a deck of cards” and yet her diasporic existence seems to be the core of her identity. In the seminar we will look at the differences between the static and the dynamic representations of home and belonging, making a thorough analysis of the novel and the psychoanalytical tools that can help us delve into the importance and credibility of Home.

“Identity is a Slippery Fish”: em busca do lar perdido

Este seminário tomará como ponto de partida o último romance da Elizabeth Bowen intitulado Eva Trout or Changing Scenes (1968). Eva Trout é um símbolo de busca de lar enquanto explora os diferentes territórios de pertença emocional e espacial. A viver numa escola com internato, a mudar de um hotel para outro e, finalmente, a alugar uma casa em Kent, Eva vai projectando a sua fantasia e a necessidade primária de pertencer aos diferentes espaços físicos e às famílias adoptivas. Para Eva viver significa estar sem-abrigo que por sua vez é como “um baralho de cartas”; no entanto, a diáspora dá sentido à vida de Eva. Neste seminário analisaremos as diferenças entre as representações estáticas e dinâmicas de lar e de pertença enquanto o nosso enfoque crítico incidirá sobre o romance e também sobre as ferramentas psicanalíticas que nos ajudarão a analisar a importância e a credibilidade da ideia de lar.

Mary Fowke

Immigration, Migration and a Yaffle of Fish: if appropriate, Home and (Inner) Conflict

“Home is peace and haven, the end of expectation. … To finally rid myself of that limbo of longing, I will set out to find home in this book”. This seminar will take a close look at Lawrence O’Toole’s Heart’s Longing: Newfoundland, New York and the Distance Between (1994), a Canadian memoir which explores the subject of inner conflict as experienced through emigration. We will look at attachment and belonging and how these relate to age and time as well as to place and people, both through Lawrence O’Toole’s memoir and those of other emigrants who write about psychological states and dislocation.

• RHOSE 4: 30 Maio, 12h00-14h00, Cave E

“There Are no Daffodils in Canada”

[LINK]

Marijke Boucherie e Sara Paiva Henriques

The Canadian poet and novelist Jane Urquhart has been praised for her “compelling depiction of the sense of place in human lives”, as Alice Munro wrote. In this seminar, we want to observe the way Urquhart relates to the tradition of English Literature in order to build a new sense of home in the alien and complex landscape of Western Ontario. Ultimately what is at stake is the search for a new way of speaking, a “Canadian literature” where the past makes way for new forms capable of construing a place where, as one of Urquhart’s character puts it, one “never will find Wordsworth’s daffodils” (The Whirlpool, 1990).

“Não há narcisos aqui: Jane Urquhart e o sentido de lugar na vida e na literatura”

A romancista Jane Urquhart é conhecida pelo modo peculiar como consegue evocar paisagens naturais e humanas que ligam as personagens ao “seu” lugar, o sítio da sua mais íntima identidade. Chegadas a um novo país – o Canadá e, em Urquhart, sobretudo o Oeste de Ontário – as personagens são confrontadas com o desafio de construir um novo sentido de si com imagens e referentes do passado que não servem para identificar nem a realidade nova nem as emoções que evocam. Em Urquhart trata-se pois de encontrar uma nova maneira de falar, usando tradições ancoradas na tradição inglesa agora obrigadas a emigrar para formas novas.