Home in America: On Loss and Retrieval

Thomas Dumm

Published by Harvard University Press 2019

Home in America

On Loss and Retrieval

Thomas Dumm

https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674243781

Overview
Contents

About this book

Americans encounter their homes in ways comforting and haunting: as an imagined refuge or a place of mastery and domination, a destination or a place to escape. Drawing on literature, personal experience, and the histories of slavery, incarceration, and homesteading, Thomas Dumm offers a meditation on the richness and poverty of the idea of home.

Reviews

Thomas Dumm has endowed new intellectual life in the politics of location. This is a wise, sensitive, poetic, and relentlessly thoughtful inquiry into the meanings of being at home today. Among other things, it offers a convincing and elaborate answer to Adorno’s old assertion that the highest form of morality involves systematic estrangement from the possibility of feeling at home in your own home.
-- Paul Gilroy, author of The Black Atlantic

Thomas Dumm offers a series of reflections that is at once compelling and convincing, yet subtle and challenging—not just intellectually, but personally. This book is as much a meditation on our contemporary human condition as it is a scholarly contribution.
-- Davide Panagia, University of California, Los Angeles

Home in America is a beautiful book on a central paradox in American life: the fact that our home-oriented society finds it impossible to be present, to be and remain where we are, even as we claim to seek just that. Dumm zeroes in on a long dark history of the American home, a place of love and comfort, but also of slavery, rape, and abuse. While reading, I kept thinking that people don’t write books like this anymore, in this style that bespeaks the very longing that the book expresses, a kind of slow, meditative process of thinking rarely practiced these days. It allows us a deep connection to the moment, to being here, at home. This is a book we are sorely in need of.
-- James Martel, San Francisco State University

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Preface Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Prologue: Dad Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. Habitations of the Human Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	28
2. Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	74
3. Henry David Thoreau’s Walden Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	112
4. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little Houses Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	154
5. Emily Dickinson’s House of Possibility Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	190
6. Herman Wallace’s Dream House Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	214
Epilogue: Mom, Revisited Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	243
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	265
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	285
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	291

Language: English
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Audience: General/trade;
Pages
- Main content: 240

eBook

Published: November 19, 2019
ISBN: 9780674243781