This book historically surveys the contested poetics of space and place associated with the term «homeland» in the Middle East, Balkans, Ireland, South Africa and Germany in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These cases of contested homeland discourses are contrasted with a case of non-contention in Sweden. The contributors do not narrate events preceding the conflicts in these divisive areas of the world, they offer and confront representations of homeland from multiple and, at times, unusual perspectives. Ambiguity and variety are one common denominator of this very uncommon collection. These scholarly representations of homeland are saturated with the contradictions of imagination and culture. They all contain a subtext concerning the role of the nation state and its relationships to multiple understandings of homeland in contemporary global cultures and politics. The different and sometimes incompatible opinions voiced here are bound by a common hope to affect the current discourse on nationalism, community, homeland and exile.

The Editors: Ron Robin is Professor of History the University of Haifa. He is a graduate of the Hebrew University, Jerusalem and University of California, Berkeley. His most recent book is The Making of the Cold War Enemy: Culture and Politics in the Military-Intellectual Complex. Bo Stråth is Professor of Contemporary History at the European University Institute, Florence. He has published widely on issues of modernity and democracy in Europe, in a historical and a comparative perspective.