Domicide,Chronic Homelessness and Black Feminist Homemaking in Toni Morrison’s Home

Abstract

Toni Morrison’s Home follows Korean War veteran Frank Money on his journey back to the American South to rescue his sister Cee from medical abuse. While much of the scholarship on Home tends to centre on themes such as trauma, eugenics, violence and incarceration, it may at times overlook Morrison’s more nuanced interrogation of the novel’s eponymous theme of home, potentially reducing it to yet another conventional trauma-recovery narrative. Drawing upon Alison Blunt and Robyn Dowling’s critical geography of home – with particular attention to homemaking and unmaking – this paper interrogates Morrison’s spatial imaginary of home for Black subjects. The tensions between homely and unhomely spaces, and between homemaking and unmaking, reveal an uncanny sense of homelessness rooted in both material and social-symbolic forms of domicide. Through an analysis of various enactments of domicide, the chronic homelessness it engenders, and erasure of home’s spatiality, we foreground the reparative labour of Black feminist homemaking – through which Morrison ultimately envisions a diasporic home as possible and transformative. As a politics of redress against domicide, this homemaking confronts and transforms racialised geographies, offering a foundation for the affirmation of Black subjectivity and identity, and for reimagined geographies of Black life and belonging. This geographical reading of Home facilitates a deeper understanding of the making, unmaking and remaking of home for diasporic subjects.