Homeless in Unhomeliness

The title of this collection of essays and critiques, written over a period of a decade (more or less), ubverts the title of its longest and probably most important piece, which constitutes its first section, ‘At Home in Unhomeliness’—a postcolonial reframing of the question of literary universalism, as such may be read in the tradition of Philippine anglophone poetry.

While the avowed intention behind this book’s title is to refunction and invert the trope of domiciliary belonging—a trope that has understandably been immensely privileged in postcolonial literature—the different pieces in this collection hopefully demonstrate its acute salience to the postcolonial condition, as a whole. While we must celebrate the instances of transcultural agency that are apparent in our postcolonial performances, we must also never lose sight of the historical determinations within which this agency precariously exists. This book, while merely a gathering of critical pieces—and not a full-length study—hopefully illustrates the many possible vicissitudes and implications of this ‘theme.’ As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has now and then reminded us, this condition is the exact same space where global—and, increasingly, cosmopolitan—neocolonialism’s seductions and contradictions have come to stake their resolute home.