Faculty Brown Bag with Stephanie Anderson

Please save the date—Friday, December 2nd at 12 noon—for a Brown Bag Talk titled "Understanding and Expanding the American Homeplace" with Stephanie Anderson.

Spending time in North Carolina introduced me to a new word: homeplace. Until recently, I rarely encountered “homeplace” outside of Southern books; it did not live in the High Plains lexicon I grew up with, or the South Florida vocabulary that surrounds me in adulthood. I discovered that “homeplace” carries real weight—feelings both comfortable and complicated, and notions both welcoming and exclusionary. On one hand, “The Homeplace is where you come from and where you hope to return to. It’s where you find warmth and familiarity,” according to a Southern brewery with the same name. On the other hand, writers and scholars like Lauret Savoy, Robin Wall Kimmerer, J. Drew Lanham, bell hooks, and others confirm that the “warmth and familiarity” part of “homeplace” is not always extended to BIPOC citizens. From the first contact with Indigenous tribes to this very moment, many white Americans want to limit the definition of homeplace, and who may have one, and who may claim America as their homeplace. Others seem bent on destroying the planet that is our collective homeplace. White silence, systemic racism, extractive economies, and other oppressive forces converge to make a seemingly simple idea, homeplace, anything but simple. Yet “homeplace” also invites reconciliation and healing, provided this country can bring itself to approach the center of any homeplace, the fire, and meet the eyes of every person gathered there and say, Welcome home. 

image by You Com Media; licensed under CC0 / public domain declaration

image credit: brown paper bag by clikr, licensed under CC0 / public domain declaration