Introducing a dialogue about "what Is Home", this special issue is dedicated to the Politics of Home and gives an academic intervention on home and its representation. It includes several contributions by members of our Department (Krebs, Mettinger, Potter) and other researchers.
Starting with the brutal but statistically unlikely criminal intrusion into the home (Marie Krebs), the perpetrated violence continues inside the house (Schätz/Robnik), found within supposedly happy moments (Behrendt) and naturalised care work (Lückl). These gendered homemaking-practices are then burst open through fantastic curses (Cheira) which also make ‘others’ historically homeless — unless they are able to eventually inherit a house (Harms). In the case of a country house, any judgement of (undeserved) heredity is media-effectively rejected like an unwanted guest (Pankratz). Guests are, after all, always also enemies, whether they are (un)welcome in a country or council estate (Elke Mettinger). The utopia of a Heimat based on solidarity is therefore difficult to imagine but is necessary to counter exclusionary rightwing discourses (Kruschwitz) and capitalist-colonial systems that, circling back to the beginning, actually intrude into and dispossess homelands, houses, and bodies (Kevin Potter).
Sarah Heinz is Full Professor for English and Anglophone Literatures at the Department of English and American Studies, University of Vienna. Her research focusses on the connection between literature, the self, and cultures. She is interested in the contingent and shifting subject positions that a cultural context can construct and in the ways in which such identities can be represented, contested, and developed by literary texts.
Kristin Aubel holds a Master’s degree in Applied Literary and Cultural Studies from TU Dortmund University, Germany. After teaching in Dortmund and Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany, she is now a University Assistant at the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Vienna, Austria. Her research interests include myth, identity construction, migration literature, magical realism, fantasy, and superhero comics.
