Abstract: Randa Jarrar’s coming-of-age novel, A Map of Home (2008) follows its Arab-American protagonist on a tumultuous journey through the “Arab World” and to the United States. The novel is a contemporary Arab immigrant narrative with a complex view of “home” and “identity.” This paper elucidates how the novel defines home in relation to nostalgia, borders, and hybridity. Engaging with Doreen Massey’s (1990) concepts of “globalized space” and “places as processes” – places as spaces which are marked by personal experiences and social relations – this paper considers how Jarrar’s novel takes an “antinostalgic” stance on the Arab “homeland.” “Antinostalgia,” according to Carol Fadda-Conrey, is used to reflect on conditions of war, dispossession, physical abuse, and familial traumas. Applying Massey’s contention that borders are inessential for defining a place, this paper highlights the trope of blended or obscured borders in A Map of Home to emphasize a contemporary take on the transnational makeup of home and identity. Jarrar’s novel champions hybridity as – what I have termed – “circular,” and thus presents a possible solution to various interconnections and disconnections within identity. In my analysis of the novel, I suggest that a place becomes “home” when social relations are formed and personal experiences materialize. Home, in the end, can be everywhere and nowhere all at once.
Bio: Shurouq Ibrahim is a Ph.D student and University Fellow at the Department of Comparative Studies at the Ohio State University. She completed her Master of Arts in 21st Century Literature from the University of Lincoln, UK. Her thesis examined the ties between individual, vicarious, and cultural trauma in contemporary world literature (fiction). Her current research lies at the intersection of trauma studies, the postcolonial Gothic, myth, and contemporary Arab women writing.
Abstract: Migration affects the construction of Chineseness and challenges the concept of purity and also coerces the creation of an identity and sense of self which balances and mitigates the seemingly conflicting Chinese and European identities. According to Looklai, the “entry of Asian labour into the Caribbean plantation system was all in an effort to supply the growing demands and accommodate the changing “conditions surrounding the regional sugar industry in the nineteenth century” (Looklai 3). Jan Lowe Shinebourne stands as a phenomenal force in the examination and traversing of literary discourses on the Caribbean Chinese experience. Shinebourne’s The Last Ship, however, centres around Clarice Chung and other Chinese people who would have arrived on the last ship to British Guiana in 1879 which correlates with the third and final attempt to revive the Chinese experiment. The novel traverses the struggles with Chineseness and cultural acceptance for three generations.
Gene Luen Yang’s graphic novel, American Born Chinese, on the other hand, explores the migratory experience of the Chinese in the United States of America. Jin Wang is a Chinese American who was born in America and is one of the few Asian-American students at Mayflower Elementary School. The novel follows his progression to high school and his experiences of prejudice and self-contempt. Additionally, his identity crisis and constant struggle with his Chineseness is central to the plot. Furthermore, a frame narrative structure is evident in the novel since the tales of the Monkey King, Sun Wukong, overlap, intertwine and converge with Jin Wang’s quest for acceptance and individuality.
In this proposed research paper, the concept of pure Chineseness, the importance of traditions and personal, reconstructed histories will be explored in Shineboure’s prose fiction work, The Last Ship and Yang’s graphic novel, American Born Chinese.
Bio: Scott Ting-A-Kee holds a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and a Postgraduate Diploma in Education specializing in Secondary English from the University of Guyana. He is currently reading for a Postgraduate Diploma in Teaching and Learning with Emerging Technologies at the University of the West Indies. Ting-A-Kee is a Literature teacher, an assistant examiner of CAPE Literatures in English, a subject panel member of the CXC Literatures in English syllabus committee, and an author. His debut novella, Red Hibiscus was published in 2018 and his poetry has been published in The Guyana Annual, In Search of Mami Wata: Narratives and Images of African Water Spirits and the Caribbean Quarterly. Ting-A-Kee was also a writer-in-residence at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine in 2020. His research interests include the Chinese-Caribbean experience, Caribbean literature, postcolonial literature, medical humanities, and literary and cultural disability studies.
Abstract: In a dialectical world, faced with increasing polarized identities and the emergence of a global, or even ‘glocal’ landscape, South Asia, or the ‘global south’, becomes an interesting springboard for literature to experiment and contest these literal and metaphorical borders. These tools of nationalistic hegemony dissemination and create binaries of the ‘Other’ vis-a-vis ethnic, communal and even linguistic lines. I argue that Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island (2019) symbolizes these transnational movements in search of a ‘homeland’ and acts as a counter hegemonic narrative to ‘Imagined Communities.’ Through a critique of western ideological state apparatuses which seek to keep borders and migration closed, the text uses medieval and colonial myths to shed light on plural identities and cross border travel. Two young men residing close to the Indian-Bangladesh border make a journey to Westward, following ancient routes of trade, dispeeling newer national identities to fit into the world order, which grants them a space as ‘refugees’. A close study of the novel helps interrogate questions of transgressing borders and fixed identities, as well as the failure of nationalities being fixed binaries through internal and external conflict. This paper highlights the similarity of two spaces, Venice and the Sundarbans, read as comparative frameworks, where dislocation or rather relocation of a Bengali community happen. Ghosh’s use of literary cartography examines issues of displacement, dislocation and identity in a globalised world.
Bio: Pooja Yadav is a graduate student at the Department of Psychology at the University of Delhi. She completed her B.A (Hons) in Psychology from Lady Shri Ram College for Women, University of Delhi. Her research interests are in the field of Clinical Psychology and Cross- Cultural Psychology. She has a keen interest in the interdisciplinary nature of literature, gender and psychology. She grew up in Turkmenistan, England, Nepal, Australia and Bangladesh before relocating to India for university.