Paper short abstract:

This paper highlights narratives of homecoming that are developed in the novels of Bosnian-American writer Aleksandar Hemon. Literary analysis brings to the fore how Hemon's texts negotiate and subvert dominant models of narrating belonging, longing, and return.

Paper long abstract:

This paper provides analyses of two works of fiction by the Bosnian writer Aleksandar Hemon, who left Sarajevo in 1992 and has lived in the U.S. ever since. Our main focus will be on the novels Nowhere Man and The Lazarus Project, both written in English, both abounding with autobiographical references, and both developing a disconcerting play on identities, notions of home, and homecoming.

We will argue that Hemon's novels are structured around the roots/routes dichotomy (Clifford) that calls into question the widespread notion of homecoming and return as helping to restore one's "true" identity. The protagonists' journeys back to their roots retrace their ways of having become who they are now; however, there is no way back to any past state.

Hemon's texts refer to various models of imagining and narrating loss, longing, and return - among others, to representations of the exilic experience by authors of the Russian diaspora. However, whereas in common imaginings of homecoming the hero usually retrieves the comfort of the secure and familiar and is reassured of his identity, Hemon's protagonists struggle for the safety of a home and a clear notion of who they are and of where they belong without ever finding them. The multifaceted, ever-changing "I" turns out to be the novels' main character. Eventually, it finds its identity not in its roots, in any defined place of origin, but en route - in its never-ending project of searching for who it is.

Paper short abstract:

This contribution traces literary ways of questioning/handling/dealing with the motive of 'home' in transformation contexts. It focusses particularly on narratives of 'homecoming' after political system change and biographical inquiries into the notion of “belonging”.

Paper long abstract:

The breach of 1989 is one of the most prominent cases of political system change: it broke into biographies, families, life-worlds, places and induced "worlds in transition". The same is true for social contexts agitated by war: they breathe the breaches even many decades later and, which is the focus of this intervention, fuel unexpected and ambivalent configurations of (dis-) embedding and belonging. It seems characteristic for transformation spaces that "home" was/is lost - but also (re-) claimed and thus called into existence at the same time. We find it as a figure of mind meandering through novels, poems, tales and narratives of (dis-) embedding, of losing and of returning, but also referred to as an official category generated to manage the highly political notion of belonging. Thus the process of 'homecoming' after political system change may incite a biographical inquiry at the outcome of which return might be in vain and displacement the actual "home".

Throughout this intervention we seek to trace different - literary - ways of questioning, chasing, interrogating, grasping, losing, in short: handling/dealing with the motive of 'home' in transformation contexts. In linking up narratives of (dis-) embedding which refer to different geographical and historical contexts, we aim at identifying common grounds and differing angles illuminating the inherent shifts and ambivalences of such a "literature of no-mans-land" (Igor Stiks) by tracing also different generational perspectives.

Paper short abstract:

Expressions of the language-related dimension of homecoming will be traced in various types of narratives/counter-narratives: biographical accounts of homecoming in fictional works, linguistic biographies of migrants and narrative interviews such as those in the corpus “Emigrants’ German in Israel”.

Paper long abstract:

The starting point of this paper is the assumption that homecoming as a form of remigration and transborder experience (cf. Čapo Žmegač et al. 2014) is a process that comprises specific linguistic aspects. We look at the concept of homecoming as a narrative or counter-narrative (cf. Bamberg/Andrews 2004) of an essentially language-related experience which can involve the following linguistic dimensions and aspects: mother tongue/first language vs. second language/language learning, monolinguality vs. multilinguality, linguistic coherence/security vs. linguistic diversity/insecurity, as well as all the implications that these phenomena have for the experience and construction of identity. Different manifestations and expressions of the language-related dimension of homecoming will be traced on the basis of linguistic approaches in various types of texts: biographical accounts of homecoming in fictional works, linguistic biographies of mono-, bi- and multilingual migrants, narrative interviews such as those in the corpus "Emigrantendeutsch in Israel" [Emigrants' German in Israel]. The findings of the linguistic analyses of the (counter-)narratives of homecoming are then related to the theoretical concepts of "Spracherleben" [language experience, Busch 2013], "Sein-in-der-Sprache" [existence in the language] and multilingual identity (Kresić 2006). Finally, it is argued that the linguistic criterion should be included in typologies of migration in general and in approaches describing processes of homecoming in particular.

Paper short abstract:

My paper explores narratives of homecoming as evolved from an internet forum, where migrants narrate their visit to home country. I examine how migrants envisage their visit, how they describe a real-life experience of being there, and finally, how projections take the form of a counter-narrative.

Paper long abstract:

My paper will investigate the notion of homecoming as evolved from entries in an internet forum on post-enlargement migration. Since 2004 I've been collecting data from on-line issues of the influential Polish paper 'Gazeta Wyborcza', which widely discussed migration issues. Both migrants and those who stayed home reacted to the newspaper articles by posting their own opinions, which quite often took the shape of personal accounts of migrants' experiences. I shall focus on narratives concerning regular trips of post-enlargement migrants to their home country.

My methodological point of departure is a concept of 'projections', a distinctive category of short stories, which serves as a model for an ideal homecoming in my data. First, I shall present how migrants envisage and plan their visit to Poland. Secondly, I shall focus on how migrants describe their experience of being there, when their expectations were not met. Finally, I shall point at those entries where projections take the form of a counter-narrative of an ideal homecoming even before migrants' planned visit home. I shall conclude by connecting the discourses of migration with those of the post-communist transformation in Poland.

Paper short abstract:

The available studies on the repatriation has shown that returning home is a more complicated and stressful process than adjusting to a “host” country. The longer the time of exile, the more fraught with difficulties is the return home.

Paper long abstract:

During the final phase and the aftermath of the Greek civil war (1946- 49) about 50.000 thousands of Greek men and women fled for Eastern Europe. The complex conditions of this massive exit and its consequences have been the subject documented and discussed by historians, social scientists and some of the people directly involved. However, much less is known about the conditions under which a large number of political refugees eventually returned to Greece.

The work I propose to present concerns the repatriation of Greeks from (former) Czechoslovakia, a procedure more complicated and stressful than simply adjusting to the host country. I attend to meanings as well as hopes and fears attached to the notion of "home" as a place of origin to which one yearns to return to and to the problems that these political refugees had to confront with after their repatriation. For better or worse, the past cannot come to life through memory. Therefore, refugees came to Greece, but they did not actually return. As repatriates, they found it hard to reconcile with new state policies and with social changes that had accumulated during their absence.

Paper short abstract:

Essays written for Uganda's Primary Leaving Exam capture cultural narratives of anguished schoolchildren's conflicted futures. Children who pass exams leave home for secondary school to pursue a modern life. Those who fail must return home to a bleak dysfunctional traditional village life.

Paper long abstract:

Two opposing cultural narratives shape the significance of home-leaving and home-returning for Ugandan schoolchildren in essays written for Uganda's watershed high-stakes Primary Leaving Examination. These essays are examined through the lens of a nation-wide rite that affects all Ugandan schoolchildren. Alternative narrative and counter-narrative frames are adopted by individual children who personally locate themselves within the wider exam experience as learners, victims and citizens.

In 1996, children wrote exam essays on the assigned topic of whether the PLE should be "abolished," and described two significantly dissimilar exam prospects for their own future. Because of this forced choice, this collection of 374 exam essays offers starkly opposing narrative and counter-narrative perspectives regarding the PLE's impact. Children who visualized a promising future framed their stories in confident progressions: passing exams, leaving home for secondary school, attaining a prosperous modern life. Children who dreaded failure told of exam oppression that obstructed personal aspirations, created physical trauma and family dysfunction, corrupted government officials, and forced failing children to return to traditional village life. Many children blamed their failure on "exam fever," a metaphoric and sometimes literal disease that shaped many of the counter-narratives. This study explores how children incorporated scenarios, story fragments, rumors, anecdotes, and rhetorical devices (metaphor, irony, hyperbole) into two contrasting exam frames that included their own identity. Essays are explored both as individual cultural artifacts, and as a composite of voices that comprise the wider cultural milieu of what it means to be a Ugandan child.