Date of Award

2018

Document Type

M.A. Essay

First Advisor

Ayo Coly, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and African and African American Studies

Second Advisor

Veronika Fuechtner, Associate Professor of German Studies and Adjunct Associate Professor of Psychiatry

Abstract

In this study I argue that existing theoretical frameworks and approaches evade, efface, ignore and obscure the role of “home” and “roots” for diasporic identities. I contend that while the models of identity draw attention to “hybridity,” the material ontology of the migrant body cannot be reduced to a mere psychological phenomenon of “hybridity.” My critique of the effacement of “home” in the contemporary post-colonial and migration studies problematizes Homi Bhabha and Stuart Hall by disputing the celebratory metaphorization of migrant subjects as fluid, uprooted, and deterritorialized. By revisiting certain terminologies, including “hybridity,” “liminality,” “in-betweenness,” “Third Space” from Bhabha’s The Location of Culture; “becoming,” and “imaginary” rediscovery from Hall’s essay on Cultural Identity and Diaspora, my reading of Elefanten im Garten by Meral Kureyshi and Au Pays by Tahar Ben Jelloun centers on language and body to argue that “home” and “roots” are by no means obsolete for migrant subjects. In both novels, the body of the migrant subject is staged as a site of negotiation between incorporation and disintegration; digesting and expunging; immersion and collapse. Therefore, I argue that ignoring “home” not only discounts the psychic rupture of languages, memories and the embodied, but also evades the questions of materiality, that is the physical essence.

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