Re-Imagining Home in Transnational Narratives

This article analyses Firoozeh Dumas’s memoirs, Funny in Farsi and Laughing Without an Accent , to examine how Iranian-American homemaking is constructed as a dynamic, embodied and sensory process in diaspora life writing. Drawing on recent scholarship in diaspora studies, the sociology of home and life writing, the article introduces and develops the concept of ‘multisensory homing’ as an innovative interdisciplinary framework. This approach theorises diasporic belonging as materially constituted through everyday embodied practices—tasting, smelling, laughing—that go beyond symbolic or nostalgic models of home and extend existing spatial and temporal paradigms by centring humour and affective materiality. The discussion situates Dumas’s work in relation to classic and recent diaspora theory as well as Iranian-American humour and life writing, highlighting its distinctive intervention: a sensorially grounded focus on everyday resilience and cultural negotiation as an alternative to trauma-centric or political accounts, offering new insight into the relational practice of homemaking for migrants and minorities across contemporary transnational contexts.