Home is political

Review of the books 'The politics of home: Belonging and nostalgia in Western Europe and the United States' by J. W. Duyvendak, and 'The politics of home: Postcolonial relocations and twentieth-century fiction' by R. M. George.

Abstract

The idea that “the personal is political” is perhaps less controversial than when it was a slogan of the feminist movement in the 1970s. I say “perhaps” as I am only too aware of the suspicion of and resistance to “politics” in psychotherapy — as if the clinic, consulting room and couch can or should be situated outside society or (from the Greek) the polis.