Domus, Dream, Domicide: Home as Limit Point in the Pyrocene Lessons from the ‘Black Summer’ Australian Bushfires
Year: 2022
Type: article
Abstract: This article explores the way in which bushfires challenge our theoretical frameworks for comprehending both ‘home’ and ‘home destruction’. Disaster scholarship has long argued that the very idea of ‘natural disaster’ remains inadequate as a term of description for the entanglements of the human and natural – acutely so for the entanglements that are at the heart of a changing climate and its consequences. The article proposes a new conception of ‘home’ as an intimately affective space where there is more at-stake than human-centeredness; rather, it is suggested here that ‘home’ is better reconceptualised as a site of multispecies connection that reframes the conventional understanding of the individual free-standing dwelling as a place where Australian modernity triumphs over the natural environment. The destruction wrought by catastrophic bushfires in turn also needs to be reconceptualised beyond a narrow focus on human-centred loss of life and property. When homes are destroyed the ecological entanglements that comprise the lived experience of the human home are also painfully severed.
Source: Australian Feminist Studies
Authors: Scott Webster, Fiona Allon
Institution: The University of Sydney
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4320724004