RHOSE 45 – Between Exile and Dwelling: Home, Nostos, and Diasporic Belonging in Samuel Selvon’s Moses Trilogy

RHOSE 45 – Between Exile and Dwelling: Home, Nostos, and Diasporic Belonging in Samuel Selvon’s Moses Trilogy

by Professor Cristina Benicchi

This seminar explores the shifting meanings of home in The Lonely Londoners, Moses Ascending, and Moses Migrating by Samuel Selvon, focusing on domestic space in the construction of diasporic identity. The house emerges as an ambivalent site of exclusion, marginality, and migration, yet also of belonging and symbolic achievement. Drawing on postcolonial and spatial theory, including Gaston Bachelard and Henri Lefebvre, the seminar examines home as both material and affective. The notion of nostos underscores the tension between displacement and the aspiration to create meaningful forms of dwelling.