Domestic Intersections in Contemporary Migration Fiction

Book excerpt: Homing the Metropole presents a new approach to diasporic fiction that reorients postcolonial readings of migration away from processes of displacement and rupture towards those of placement and homemaking. While notions of home have frequently been associated with essentialist understandings of nation and race, an uncritical investment in tropes of homelessness can prove equally hegemonic. By synthesising postcolonial and intersectional feminist theory, this work establishes the migrant domestic space as a central location of resistance, countering notions of the private sphere as static, uncreative and apolitical. Through close readings of fiction emerging from the African, Caribbean and South Asian diasporas, it reassesses our conception of home in light of contemporary realities of globalisation and forced migration, providing a valuable critique of the celebration of unfixed subject positions that has been a central tenet of postcolonial studies.