Wellington 2013 – «There’s no place like home»: The Anxiety of Mobility in the Works of Louise DeSalvo

Abstract

The often conflicting emotions associated with home and the tension between mobility and fixity are at the heart of autobiographical works that map Italian American writer Louise DeSalvo’s transition from working class girl to privileged «intellectual nomad» (Bruno 2002, 404). The essay is framed around the theorizing of home as a geographical space and idea and its relationship to widespread and diverse forms of mobility. Migration, exile, transnationalism, tourism, and relocation create a mobile space for home not only as a site of origin, but as a destination and transit zone. Rosi Braidotti’s multiple figurations of mobility, both physical and metaphorical, are particularly useful in an analysis of DeSalvo’s autobiographical texts. This essay concentrates on two of her memoires: "Crazy in the Kitchen" (2004) and "On Moving" (2009). In these works DeSalvo interrogates the layers of meaning of home as well as the interaction between home and geographic and intellectual mobility. In "Crazy in the Kitchen", a work that highlights the interconnectedness between food-writing and life-writing in Italian American culture, the narrator’s search for self relies on the constant reinvention of geographical space, of domestic space, and of textual space. "On Moving" explores the condition of relocation or change of dwellings. Taking as a point of departure her own anxiety about changing homes, DeSalvo resorts to an examination of the relationship between mobility and home through the experiences of other writers and thinkers.