A powerful examination of soulful journeys made to recover memory and recuperate stolen pasts in the face of unspeakable histories. Survivors of the Armenian Genocide of 1915 took refuge across the globe. Traumatized by unspeakable brutalities, the idea of returning to their homeland was unthinkable. But decades later, some children and grandchildren felt compelled to travel back, having heard stories of family wholeness in beloved homes and of cherished ancestral towns and villages once in Ottoman Armenia, today in the Republic of Turkey. Hoping to satisfy spiritual yearnings, this new generation called themselves pilgrims—and their journeys, pilgrimages. Carel Bertram joined scores of these pilgrims on over a dozen pilgrimages, and amassed accounts from hundreds more who made these journeys. In telling their stories, A House in the Homeland documents how pilgrims encountered the ancestral house, village, or town as both real and metaphorical centerpieces of family history. Bertram recounts the moving, restorative connections pilgrims made, and illuminates how the ancestral house, as a spiritual place, offers an opening to a wellspring of humanity in sites that might otherwise be defined solely by tragic loss. As an exploration of the powerful links between memory and place, house and homeland, rupture and continuity, these Armenian stories reflect the resilience of diaspora in the face of the savage reaches of trauma, separation, and exile in ways that each of us, whatever our history, can recognize.

In this provocative examination of collective identity in Jordan, Linda Layne challenges long-held Western assumptions that Arabs belong to easily recognizable corporate social groups. Who is a "true" Jordanian? Who is a "true" Bedouin? These questions, according to Layne, are examples of a kind of pigeonholing that has distorted the reality of Jordanian national politics. In developing an alternate approach, she shows that the fluid social identities of Jordan emerge from an ongoing dialogue among tribespeople, members of the intelligentsia Hashemite rulers, and Western social scientists. Many commentators on social identity in the Middle East limit their studies to the village level, but Layne's goal is to discover how the identity-building processes of the locality and of the nation condition each other. She finds that the tribes creates their own cultural "homes" through a dialogue with official nationalist rhetoric and Jordanian urbanites, while King Hussein, in turn, maintains the idea of the "homeland" in many ways that are powerfully influenced by the tribespeople. The identities so formed resemble the shifting, irregular shapes of postmodernist landscapes—but Hussein and the Jordanian people are also beginning to use a classically modernist linear narrative to describe themselves. Layne maintains, however, that even with this change Jordanian identities will remain resistant to all-or-nothing descriptions. Linda L. Layne is Alma and H. Erwin Hale Teaching Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Originally published in 1994. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Although they represented only a small portion of all displaced persons after World War II, Jewish displaced persons in postwar Europe played a central role on the international diplomatic stage. In fact, the overwhelming Zionist enthusiasm of this group, particularly in the large segment of young adults among them, was vital to the diplomatic decisions that led to the creation of the state of Israel so soon after the war. In Finding Home and Homeland, Avinoam J. Patt examines the meaning and appeal of Zionism to young Jewish displaced persons and looks for the reasons for its success among Holocaust survivors. Patt argues that Zionism was highly successful in filling a positive function for young displaced persons in the aftermath of the Holocaust because it provided a secure environment for vocational training, education, rehabilitation, and a sense of family. One of the foremost expressions of Zionist affiliation on the part of surviving Jewish youths after the war was the choice to live in kibbutzim organized within displaced persons camps in Germany and Poland, or even on estates of former Nazi leaders. By the summer of 1947, there were close to 300 kibbutzim in the American zone of occupied Germany with over 15,000 members, as well as 40 agricultural training settlements (hakhsharot) with over 3,000 members. Ultimately, these young people would be called upon to assist the state of Israel in the fighting that broke out in 1948. Patt argues that for many of the youth who joined the kibbutzim of the Zionist youth movements and journeyed to Israel, it was the search for a new home that ultimately brought them to a new homeland. Finding Home and Homeland consults previously untapped sources created by young Holocaust survivors after the war and in so doing reflects the experiences of a highly resourceful, resilient, and dedicated group that was passionate about the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. Jewish studies, European history, and Israel studies scholars will appreciate the fresh perspective on the experiences of the Jewish displaced person population provided by this significant volume.

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Ideas defer to no border—least of all the idea of belonging. So where does one belong, and what does belonging even mean, when a border inscribes one’s identity? This dilemma, so critical to the ethnic Mexican community, is at the heart of Homeland, an intellectual, cultural, and literary history of belonging in ethnic Mexican thought through the twentieth century. Belonging, as Aaron E. Sánchez’s sees it, is an interwoven collection of ideas that defines human connectedness and that shapes the contours of human responsibilities and our obligations to one another. In Homeland, Sánchez traces these ideas of belonging to their global, national, and local origins, and shows how they have transformed over time. For pragmatic, ideological, and political reasons, ethnic Mexicans have adapted, adopted, and abandoned ideas about belonging as shifting conceptions of citizenship disrupted old and new ways of thinking about roots and shared identity around the global. From the Mexican Revolution to the Chicano Movement, in Texas and across the nation, journalists, poets, lawyers, labor activists, and people from all walks of life have reworked or rejected citizenship as a concept that explained the responsibilities of people to the state and to one another. A wealth of sources—poems, plays, protests, editorials, and manifestos—demonstrate how ethnic Mexicans responded to changes in the legitimate means of belonging in the twentieth century. With competing ideas from both sides of the border they expressed how they viewed their position in the region, the nation, and the world—in ways that sometimes united and often divided the community. A transnational history that reveals how ideas move across borders and between communities, Homeland offers welcome insight into the defining and changing concept of belonging in relation to citizenship. In the process, the book marks another step in a promising new direction for Mexican American intellectual history.

In this illuminating book, anthropologist Kirstin Erickson explains how members of the Yaqui tribe, an indigenous group in northern Mexico, construct, negotiate, and continually reimagine their ethnic identity. She examines two interconnected dimensions of the Yaqui ethnic imagination: the simultaneous processes of place making and identification, and the inseparability of ethnicity from female-identified spaces, roles, and practices. Yaquis live in a portion of their ancestral homeland in Sonora, about 250 miles south of the Arizona border. A long history of displacement and ethnic struggle continues to shape the Yaqui sense of self, as Erickson discovered during the sixteen months that she lived in Potam, one of the eight historic Yaqui pueblos. She found that themes of identity frequently arise in the stories that Yaquis tell and that geography and location—space and place—figure prominently in their narratives. Revisiting Edward Spicer’s groundbreaking anthropological study of the Yaquis of Potam pueblo undertaken more than sixty years ago, Erickson pays particular attention to the “cultural work” performed by Yaqui women today. She shows that by reaffirming their gendered identities and creating and occupying female-gendered spaces such as kitchens, household altars, and domestic ceremonial spaces, women constitute Yaqui ethnicity in ways that are as significant as actions taken by males in tribal leadership and public ceremony. This absorbing study contributes new empirical knowledge about a Native American community as it adds to the growing anthropology of space/place and gender. By inviting readers into the homes and patios where Yaqui women discuss their lives, it offers a highly personalized account of how they construct—and reconstruct—their identity.

This "profound and provocative" work by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Disgraced and American Dervish followsan immigrant father and his son as they search for belonging—in post-Trump America, and with each other (Kirkus Reviews). "Passionate, disturbing, unputdownable." —Salman Rushdie ​ A deeply personal work about identity and belonging in a nation coming apart at the seams, Homeland Elegies blends fact and fiction to tell an epic story of longing and dispossession in the world that 9/11 made. Part family drama, part social essay, part picaresque novel, at its heart it is the story of a father, a son, and the country they both call home. ​Ayad Akhtar forges a new narrative voice to capture a country in which debt has ruined countless lives and the gods of finance rule, where immigrants live in fear, and where the nation's unhealed wounds wreak havoc around the world. Akhtar attempts to make sense of it all through the lens of a story about one family, from a heartland town in America to palatial suites in Central Europe to guerrilla lookouts in the mountains of Afghanistan, and spares no one—least of all himself—in the process. One of the New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2020 Finalist for the 2021 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction A Best Book of 2020 * Washington Post * O Magazine * New York Times Book Review * Publishers Weekly