Representations of Home Open Seminar timeline

Date: 24 March – 30 May 2014
Organization: ULICES
Venue: Faculty of Letters, University of Lisbon

RHOSE 1 – 24 March, 14h00-16h00, Room 4

Ubuntu em Portugal

Eugénia Costa & Carolina Tomaz

RHOSE 2 – Portuguese at Home in North America?

7 May, 18h00-20h00, Room 7.1
Teresa Cid

At Home in New Deal Photography? Notes on some photographs of Portuguese Americans

A contextualized reading of a couple of photographs of Portuguese American homes (and Portuguese Americans at home) belonging to the FSA documentary project will be the pretext for a discussion of issues of representation of immigration, ethnicity, class, individual and collective aims, and material culture.
Emily Ashby

Espírito Santo Across the Sea: (Re)interpretations of Salient Azorean Traditions in the New World 

What does an immigrant people consider most important about their culture, and how do they adapt it to their new home? This work explores the literature, religious rites, and community-base traditions brought over by 20^th-century Azorean immigrants to North America, and the ways in which the performance of these was shaped by their new country. Focus will be placed on the traditions that survived the move and why these were held as particularly representative of “Azorean-ness,” the relationship that successive generations have to these frequently distorted practices, and how they are a lens through which Azorean decedents and non-Azorean community members perceive an archipelago to which they have a tenuous connection.

RHOSE 3 – Identity Is a Slippery Fish

 23 May, 10h00-12h00, Theater III
Zuzanna Sanches

“Identity is a Slippery Fish”: Eva Trout in Search of the Lost Home

This seminar will be devoted to Elizabeth Bowen’s last novel Eva Trout or Changing Scenes (1968). Eva Trout epitomizes a search for home while exploring different physical and mental territories of belonging. Living in a boarding school, moving from a hotel to a hotel and eventually renting a house in Kent, Eva ceaselessly projects her fantasy and a primary need of identification onto different physical spaces and foster families. To her, living homeless is “Nothing but a deck of cards” and yet her diasporic existence seems to be the core of her identity. In the seminar we will look at the differences between the static and the dynamic representations of home and belonging, making a thorough analysis of the novel and the psychoanalytical tools that can help us delve into the importance and credibility of Home.
Mary Fowke

Immigration, Migration and a Yaffle of Fish: if appropriate, Home and (Inner) Conflict

“Home is peace and haven, the end of expectation. … To finally rid myself of that limbo of longing, I will set out to find home in this book”. This seminar will take a close look at Lawrence O’Toole’s Heart’s Longing: Newfoundland, New York and the Distance Between (1994), a Canadian memoir which explores the subject of inner conflict as experienced through emigration. We will look at attachment and belonging and how these relate to age and time as well as to place and people, both through Lawrence O’Toole’s memoir and those of other emigrants who write about psychological states and dislocation.

RHOSE 4 – There Are no Daffodils in Canada

 30 May, 12h00-14h00 – Room E
Marijke Boucherie e Sara Henriques

There Are no Daffodils in Canada

The Canadian poet and novelist Jane Urquhart has been praised for her “compelling depiction of the sense of place in human lives”, as Alice Munro wrote. In this seminar, we want to observe the way Urquhart relates to the tradition of English Literature in order to build a new sense of home in the alien and complex landscape of Western Ontario. Ultimately what is at stake is the search for a new way of speaking, a “Canadian literature” where the past makes way for new forms capable of construing a place where, as one of Urquhart’s character puts it, one “never will find Wordsworth’s daffodils” (The Whirlpool).