This article is an attempt at an interplay between Édouard Glissant’s archipelagic thinking, Marion Shoard’s edgeland and an imagined geography and history of a particular location and the people who have lived there. The town of Paldiski – the Baltic Port – bordering the Gulf of Finland, may be a remarkable Glissantian vantage point, and simultaneously an edgeland from which to draw attention to the creationand persistence of the ‘imaginaire’ that Glissant argued binds people as much as economic transactions. The port is both closed (as a military base or due to customs regulations) and open as a harbour. Thus, it frames all kinds of flows of peoples, materials and policies, yet it is on the edge literally and figuratively. In Paldiski, the imaginary seems independent of the physical environment, the past and future, and the people highlighted by the lifepaths of two historic figures.

The multiple, varied, and often conflicting geographies of home are approached as relationally, spatially, and temporarily constituted and examined in many disciplines adopting a multitude of approaches. In cultural and social geography, the physical materiality of home and its imaginative geographies are seen as closely intertwined, in which the home is interpreted as a process of creating and understanding the forms of being at various scales and its representations in literature, art, film, and the virtual world. Feminist, postcolonial, and hybrid geographical approaches have highlighted the contested and negative domestic aspects, although historically the home is defined by feelings of security, familiarity, and nurture. The home is now established as a problematic and ambiguous concept across the social sciences. Likewise in geography the home is defined as a result of distinctive emotional, sensory, and bodily experiences and memories rather than seen as fixed and static physicality in time or space, although the latter approach is again gaining ground due to global migration trends.

This article focuses on the multiple entanglements between a house, lives lived within it, and social and political contexts within which both are situated and adapted. Rather than seeing a house as a background for where things happened to people, the house (home) biography approach interprets space as an active participant in society and sociality. By zooming in on 13 F.R. Kreutzwaldi Street, Tallinn, this article demonstrates how societal ideals have materialized in a house and in every-day practice in nearly a hundred years from 1924 when the house was built up to the present day. The focus is on the turbulent periods in Estonian history – the 1930s and 1940s, as well as the 1990s with the in-between stabilisation of the soviet lifestyle of the 1970s. The latter had a material expression in extensive re-construction of the house, with which traces current inhabitants like society in whole are still trying to tackle.

This special issue of Karib includes authors with different disciplinary backgrounds in conversation with the Martinican philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant (1928–2011) and with each other. Glissant has inspired and challenged us to use his essays and imaginary as a vantage point, a base from which to view the world and create the schema of belonging and relational rootedness. The focus is on how Glissant’s work continues to be interpreted in new ways in disciplines other than philosophy or literary studies and on exploring fundamental questions about physical spaces and their ‘imaginaries’ around the world. Glissant used diverse examples and terms, each drawing meaning from the others. The authors of this issue set out to do exactly that as they wander around the globe, drawing specific attention to certain points or to the process itself. The insularity of an island (literally and metaphorically) in Glissant’s writing is also a paradoxical globality: the wandering (errance) does not have a start or a finish. In this case, it seemed symbolically appropriate to set out from the Caribbean and return to it in the final paper of the collection.