Introduction

The book opens with a consideration of how immigrant homes are represented in recent journalistic accounts and then sets out the book’s overall aims and objectives, which center on an exploration of literary representations of immigrant homemaking. The introduction asserts the importance of focusing on domestic homes, rather than collapsing “home” into the figurative or metaphorical, or elevating it to the nation. Instead, the book is about foregrounding material home spaces and the “banal”, everyday activities that go on there. The chapter then goes on to situate the book within key bodies of scholarship, postcolonial and feminist/queer studies, problematizing their suspicion of home and accompanying celebration of displacement as an inherently progressive, liberatory and creative position. This sets up the rational for the book’s intersectional approach, which foregrounds material differences between migrants alongside positionalities of race, gender and sexuality. The chapter ends by considering how homes have been produced in the colonies – materially and discursively – as a backdrop to the book’s investigation of homes in the metropole.