Introduction: Welcome Home

Abstract

This volume begins a critical examination of how theater and performance have historically interrogated and redefined notions of home. Theater and performance scholars have used various spatial paradigms to consider how places, landscapes, and cityscapes perform, and how our engagement with and movement through these spaces impact the meanings they generate. Through an examination of home as a unique category within the spatial turn, the chapters in this collection engage questions of domesticity, dislocation, rootlessness, rehabilitation, and relocation—with a specific focus on performances of house, home, hometown, and homeland. Calling a place home is an act of possession as well as one of marking and making meaning. This volume recognizes “home” as a dynamic signifier that evidences the changing relationship between individual subjects and material, civic, psychic, regional, and national space. As our contributors reveal, performances of domesticity creatively critique, rupture, and sometimes, reinforce culturally embedded narratives that constitute our spatial identities. The chapters in this collection analyze how the different identities we may adopt or inhabit—woman, husband, citizen, patriot, tourist, local, parolee, refugee—are constituted by our ideas about, physical engagements with, and performances of domestic place. By interrogating the politics of space within specific case studies, our authors demonstrate not only how spaces of house, home, and hometown function within our everyday lives, our local communities, and our national conversations, but also how theater and performance are essential to that work.