Home and Away: Lived Experience in Performative Narratives

Home and Away explores how performative writing serve as a process that critically interrogates space/place in relation to personal, social, cultural, and political understanding. By combining aesthetic expression and inquiry with critical reflection, the contributors in this volume use a variety of narrative strategies—autoethnography, mystoriography, creative cartography, the lyric essay, fictocriticism, collage, the screenplay, and poetics—to position place as the starting point for the aesthetic impulse. The anthology showcases the power and potential of performative writing to illustrate the ways we interact with and in place; provides examples of the ways one can express lived experience; and demonstrates the ways discourses overlap while extending our understanding of identity and place, whether one is home or away. Although the chapters are fixed by their literary form in this volume, many of chapters are best realized in a performance or shared publicly via an oral tradition. This collection will be of great interest to students and scholars in performance, communication studies, and literature.