Violence, Identities and Bare Life in Rawi Hage’s Cockroach

• Main Authors: Hsiao-Chiao Chien, 簡小喬
• Other Authors: TEE Kim Tong
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2013
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/09572384366080981541

碩士 === 國立中山大學 === 外國語文學系研究所 === 101 === As a Lebanese Canadian writer, Rawi Hage weaves his experience of Lebanese civil war and life in Canada into the story of Cockroach where the allegorical world of the underground is occupied with the diaspora who lead a life struggling with experience, memory, illusion and fantasy of displacement and survival in the metropolis Montreal. By implicating a non-identity human life as the cockroach, Hage envisions the coming of a secular human life. The problematic social reality and human existence as the cockroach are at the heart of these people’s daily life. This thesis is to explore violence and identity conflict in Montreal, the Western multicultural society, so as to mark human subjects, particularly the Middle Eastern diaspora, as bare life in modernity. Issues concerning cultures, societies and politics in Canada and Middle East will be discussed as well as the metropolitan individuals’ survival. I borrow Slavoj Žižek’s notion of violence to scrutinize the relationship between desire and the social reality, where life is constrained by the O/other and means violence itself. I attempt to discuss the diaspora’s self and cultural identities with reference to Canadian ethnicity and multiculturalism, which is the play of positioning and representation proposed by Stuart Hall. With my employment of Benjamin’s society in modernity and Giorgio Agamben’s bare life, I recognize that bourgeois individuals identified with the sensuous life possess the same biological essence as working-class diaspora minorities. By examining marginalized Middle Eastern ethnical groups’ social, political and cultural dilemmas related to metropolitan life, this thesis questions Western cultural ground on which human life is separated into form and content. Human subjects in modernity are at the intersection of the man and the animal in the late 20th century.