How is Home,a Performance Autoethnography in Four Parts

Abstract

How Is Home,¹ a Performance Autoethnography in Four Parts,² is a contemplative, interpretive, account on the nature of home. It is a multiple-voiced work. The nature of the empiricism used in this piece works to connect ethnographic detail in a meaningful way, toward the end of a telling of the production of emotions, symbol, and affect combined to display a sense of the way a life is built and undertaken through subjectivity. This work enables a glance at how notions of identity are formed and encountered, then rewoven through understanding, toward a libratory end. This story is my own, extended through imagination, a story of understanding my own identity as an Iraqi–Iranian–Jewish–American woman in post 9/11 United States. Ideas of Gaston Bachelard, Gloria Anzaldua, and Homi Bhabha are used to enrich and prop up my notion of home in this piece, which is always shifting, and momentary. Disciplinary oppression occurs in many ways in the present day United States, infused by the wily discourses produced through neoliberal global corporate machinations, tinged by its large events’ (wars, economic depressions, bank bailouts, austerity measures, etc.) impact on our systems of affect. In certain ways, the languages and actions in this new/old world can leave people with very little. This work works, through meaningful interventions in autoethnography, to correct that, as the meanings of our everyday lives, whether in the present moment or of memory is where much can be mended. I welcome you, dear reader, to join me, in my place, at home.