Conclusion: Unsettling Inventions

The six narrated homelands brought together in this project, like the six private homes with their complexly burdened protagonists, can be connected and compared but not homogenized. The similarities among them need to be understood in the context of a multitude of differences: in particular histories of colonial contact and nationalism in the homeland, including its relationship to indigenous peoples and to slaves; in the race, class, and economic status of the represented home and the specific focus of its exclusionary practices; in the forms and styles of patriarchal power, its cultural and personal roots and socially sanctioned expressions; and in the women protagonists themselves—the routine or traumatic events that leave them self-divided, their education in the values and practices of home and temptation by its pleasures, and their response to unique experiences of homelessness and exile. These and a multitude of related differences require caution in the general conclusions we formulate about transnational women writers.