Description
Book SynopsisAmericans 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.
Trade ReviewThomas 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 AtlanticThomas 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
