Women on the Verge of Home

by Bilinda Straight (Editor), Ruth Behar (Foreword by)

Overview

This book explores the idea of "home." Using feminist scholarship and ethnographically grounded readings of historical, literary, and cultural texts, contributors interrogate the comfortable and stable contours of home and ask what it means to women in different social, class, sexual, ethnic, and racial contexts in different times and places. Giving voice to diverse women's understandings of home, the book includes stories of elite white U.S. and Canadian women, rural poor and peasant white women in the United States and France, a British Caribbean freed slave woman, and others.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780791483770
Publisher:	State University of New York Press
Publication date:	02/24/2005
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	203
File size:	883 KB

About the Author

Bilinda Straight is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Western Michigan University.

Table of Contents

FOREWORD
Ruth Behar

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

1. Introduction: Women on the Verge of Home
Bilinda Straight

2. Still Life
Kathleen Stewart

3. A Long Way from Home: Slavery, Travel, and Imperial Geography in The History of Mary Prince
Elizabeth A. Bohls

4. My Shafiqa: Concerning the Travels and Transgressions of a Southern Egyptian Woman
Katherine E. Zirbel

5. Cold Hearths: The Losses of Home in an Appalachian Woman's Life History
Bilinda Straight

6. Liminal Space and Liminal Time: A Woman's Narrative of a Year Abroad, 1938–1939
Caroline B. Brettell

7. Desire, Migration, and Attachment to Place: Narratives of Rural French Women
Deborah Reed-Danahay

8. Foreign Spirits inside the Family: Vodu Home on the Ex-Slave Coast
Judy Rosenthal

9. Concepts of Home
Gina Ulysse

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

INDEX