Homing and Hosting: Transnational Belonging across Italian Cultures
Often conceived as a private, intimate space, the “home” is also host to a variety of social, political, and economic dynamics that bring questions of domesticity to merge and interact with broad, even abstract, concerns. Taking as its point of departure the recent critical analysis of “home” as “a matter of search...an open-ended and possibly unaccomplished process” (Boccagni 2017), this session will address how “homing,” “hosting,” and “Italianità” speak to issues of identities, mobilities, and negotiations. Parsing “home” as a place and “homing” as a practice, this panel will concentrate on three major themes: translations and transitions, communities and environments, and hybrid homes and hybrid hosts.