Die Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaftliche Fakultät lädt herzlich ein zum Vortrag „Ain’t No Place Like Home: Home and Homelessness in U.S. Culture“ von Prof. Dr. Julia Faisst (Universität Regensburg).
Wann: 18.05.2022, 18:15 bis 19:45 Uhr
Wo: Online via Zoom.
Wenn Sie teilnehmen möchten, melden Sie sich bitte per E-Mail unter dekanat-slf(at)ku.de an. Sie erhalten dann die Zugangsdaten für den Zoom-Vortrag.
Abstract:
This talk presents and draws on selected parts of my habilitation Precarious Belongings: The Unmaking of the American Home, 1980s-Now (Eichstätt 2021), which examines how U.S. American literature and visual culture of the past forty years have negotiated the home as a precarious construct. While more people than ever acutely face eviction or live on the streets, the home has become one of the most palpable sites onto which racial, class, and gender inequalities are grafted. Drawing on cultural negotiations of residential habitats divided by class and race, my study investigates real estate inequality and housing discrimination in light of recent housing crises following real estate booms—from the savings and loan crisis in the 1980s and 90s to the housing crisis in 2007-08 and its aftermath.
Acknowledging that the home has morphed from asset to liability, the project explores how home has come to be defined by increasing racial and class-based inequality in media including novels, drama, poetry, photojournalism, digital art, and film. It revolves around various sites of precarious residential belonging, including un-housing and homelessness, displacement and forced evictions, the vacant home, and home in the time of Covid-19. As I argue, it is precisely its sense of elusiveness that makes home such a popular topic in the cultural imagination. The importance of home becomes most palpable—and critically relevant—when it becomes precarious. This renders not only the home but also homelessness an ideal site to think about anxieties associated with home and belonging.