House or house ?
While such approaches have been necessary for problematizing hegemonic mobilizations of “house”, there is additionally a hazard in reading movement as constitutive of the (publish)fashionable world. In particular, such frameworks usually overlook the experiences of those who are forcibly displaced. Critical investment in tropes of migrancy may unwittingly recycle imperialist assumptions by producing imagined spaces of alterity that serve to liberate the centred, “at home” topic on the expense of historicized experiences of homelessness. Abdulrazak Gurnahs 2001 novel By the Sea represents one such historicized experience, that of its protagonist, asylum seeker Saleh Omar. This article argues that, by way of its narrative investment in homes and family objects and within the importance of narrative for creating a way of residence for its migrant protagonist, Gurnahs novel poses a challenge to an aesthetic valorization of displacement.
is a key site for negotiating twentieth-century anxieties about individual and nationwide identification. s … Read More