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" Disorientation: “Home” in postcolonial literature "
Z. Esra Mirze
S. Burton
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Latin Dissertation
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English
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| Record Number
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53011
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| Doc. No
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TL22965
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| Call number
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3209125
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| Main Entry
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Z. Esra Mirze
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| Title & Author
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Disorientation: “Home” in postcolonial literature\ Z. Esra Mirze
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| College
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University of Nevada, Reno
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| Date
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2005
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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2005
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| Page No
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239
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| Abstract
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In this dissertation, I explore diasporic subjectivity in various postcolonial novels using the figures of the exile, immigrant and hybrid to articulate how the experience of displacement complicates the definitions of "home" in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia, Monica Ali's Brick Lane, and Orhan Pamuk's White Castle and My name is Red . Home---with its sliding reference to architecture, origin, and nation---has traditionally been portrayed as fixed. I claim that home can no longer be discussed without acknowledging the destabilizing effect of its unrootedness. In the postcolonial world, home is a contested space in which conflicting discourses of race, gender, class, and nation meet and merge. As a source of identity, home not only acts as a locus of self-invention, but provides subjects with the discursive tools necessary to instigate a process of negation and negotiation between the self, community, and culture---be it in familial or national contexts. I argue that it is crucial to revise the traditional conceptualization of home as a private sphere; on the contrary, home is where the private coexists with the public. As such the postcolonial home becomes an idea which helps articulate a complex relationship between private and public, between subject and spaces. Ultimately, by recognizing and theorizing numerous significations and workings of home, I investigate the relationship between geographical consciousness and identity politics. To do so, I introduce the term "disorientation" to describe a flexible and well-informed poisitionality. As opposed to the various significations of orientation insinuating constancy (as in to get oriented), forced transformation (as in orientalization), and the ill-advised scholarship of otherness (as in orientalism), I prefer "disorientation" as a term that complicates the discussions of identity by acknowledging its instability. I use "disorientation" both thematically--referring to the condition of self-inflicted homelessness which negates the rootedness of home--and also methodologically, to deconstruct the orientalist binaries produced as byproducts of dogmatic eurocentrizm.
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| Subject
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Language, literature and linguistics; Ali, Monica; Disorientation; Hanif Kureishi; Home; India; Kureishi, Hanif; Monica Ali; Orhan Pamuk; Pamuk, Orhan; Postcolonial; Rushdie, Salman; Salman Rushdie; Turkey; Literature; British and Irish literature; Asian literature; 0593:British and Irish literature; 0305:Asian literature; 0298:Literature
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S. Burton
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University of Nevada, Reno
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