Revisiting the concept of displacement: representations of home and identity in contemporary metropolitan post-colonial E(e)nglish fiction (1956 -1990)

• Main Author: Dik, Akram A.
• Published: University of Sunderland 2014
• Subjects: 823.91
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.616977

This study uses cultural and literary theory and contemporary metropolitan post Second World War postcolonial fictions to revisit the concept of displacement allowing for an affirmation of the specificity and beginnings of displaced writers' identities and a reassertion of the significance of their starting points meanwhile resisting, precluding, falling into the dangers of cultural and mental ghettoisation and defensive and/or vulgar nationalism. Burdened with colonial history and being 'out of place', writings by displaced writers with their hyphenated identities have altered the literature of England both in its language and its cultural identity. This has promoted the rediscovery, as in the Freudian psychoanalytic context, of materials that have been repressed or 'pushed aside' in cultural translation, but which continue to cause trouble and restlessness in the perpetual journey of displacement. Displacement also troubles the ideas of citizenship and national belonging and offers to the noncitizen the freedom to be 'out of place' which opens doors for cultural translation and filtration. Displacement falls therefore somewhere between nationalism (Oedipal, rigid, imposed, created, closed) and nomadology (anti-Oedipal, open, flexible, creative, free) allowing critical and aesthetic distance, and balancing the central authority between past and present, tradition and modernity, by translating (between) them. Revisiting displacement produces therefore an oscillation between the two at will. It thus celebrates multiplicity and hybridity/syncreticism without falling into the anti-memory and history-free, spatially-attenuated, free-floating, aloof and ontologically rootless concept of nomadism, or the nomadic rhizome. In revisiting the concept of displacement, this thesis is skeptical of nomadology's total and complete transcendence of national and Oedipalised territorial frameworks.