Farzaneh Doosti; Amir Ali Nojoumian
Volume 15, Issue 21 , October 2019, , Pages 127-152
Abstract
This paper examines Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire (2017) as a faithful transposition of Sophocles’s Antigone into a contemporary novel that addresses the diasporic subject’s encounter with sovereign politics of life and death in the post-9/11 backlash against Muslims. A survey of the notion of the ...
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This paper examines Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire (2017) as a faithful transposition of Sophocles’s Antigone into a contemporary novel that addresses the diasporic subject’s encounter with sovereign politics of life and death in the post-9/11 backlash against Muslims. A survey of the notion of the embodied subject as set in the complex network of power relations and biopolitics in the diaspora space where new forms of bio- and necro- power (as expounded by Postcolonial thinker Achille Mbembe) are at work towards enforcing subjugation of diasporic bodies forcefully synthesises with the question of belonging, the right to soil, and post-mortem identity in Shamsie’s Home Fire. For Aneeka Pasha and other British diasporics, burial of British citizens by birth in the British soil is a natural and legal right, whereas to the representatives of the Islamophobic State, the diasporic subject’s rights to soil is as evanescent as their liminal identities. Just like Polyneices in Antigone, the dead body of Parvaiz – a remorseful ISIS member seeking a way back home to rest in peace – functions beyond the biological borders of his body and proves to challenge the body politic of the state and question their necropolitical decisions.
Roya Elahi; Amirali Nojoumian
Volume 14, Issue 19 , October 2018, , Pages 33-55
Abstract
The Uncanny whose presence at least refers back to Freud's 1919 essay of the same title has been reconsidered by critics in recent century. The uncanny is no more attributed merely to the realm of aesthetic or psychology as Freud attempted to explain. It is rather an interdisciplinary issue to discuss ...
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The Uncanny whose presence at least refers back to Freud's 1919 essay of the same title has been reconsidered by critics in recent century. The uncanny is no more attributed merely to the realm of aesthetic or psychology as Freud attempted to explain. It is rather an interdisciplinary issue to discuss our modern anxieties such as migration, gender, history, etc. Margaret Atwood (1939- ) is a contemporary Canadian writer who has reconsidered history. What makes her different from other writers is the way she rereads history. This article is an attempt to study The Handmaid's Tale, her 1985 novel through the uncanny. In her novel, history is a narrative whose uncanny reading foregrounds the unrepresentable realities in relation to subject formation. Through the uncanny, history which has been taken for granted as a familiar, clear and unchangeable "fact" becomes a strange, ambiguous and alternate "sign". The theories of Sigmund Freud and Jean-François Lyotard are mainly consulted to delineate the uncanny and history and their tendency to foreground the unrepresentabilities of subject formation. In Atwood's novel, Language and memory function as two significant uncanny issues whose indecisive and abeyant nature shun any historical "fact" to actualize as a familiar, clear and unchangeable given. This in turn, keeps the reader incessantly in the state of indecision and ultimately renders the process of subject formation as unrepresentable.
Bahareh Bahmanpour; Amir Ali Nojumian
Volume 14, Issue 19 , October 2018, , Pages 77-97
Abstract
The present article is based on the hypothesis that immigration, in all shapes or forms (either as a forced exile or a voluntary displacement), is an unsettling and traumatic experience which leads to the formation of traumatized subjectivities. This trauma (also referred to as "diasporic trauma" or ...
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The present article is based on the hypothesis that immigration, in all shapes or forms (either as a forced exile or a voluntary displacement), is an unsettling and traumatic experience which leads to the formation of traumatized subjectivities. This trauma (also referred to as "diasporic trauma" or "trauma of displacement") is, like many other types of trauma, transgenerational: that is, it affects not only the lives of the first-generation diasporic subjects but also the diasporic experience of their descendants by problematizing any illusory sense of a coherently hybrid self. Since from the view of many trauma theorists, literature (from autobiography and testimony to fiction and poetry) highlights the problematics of the representation and the narrativization of trauma; the present article, then, aims to explore the possibility and the means of the literary representation of trauma of displacement in diasporic literature. Employing the Post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory of trauma within a diasporic context, it thus opens up new avenues to offer a psychoanalytic study of the diasporic trauma in Lahiri's trilogy of "Hema and Kaushik" (including, "Once in a Lifetime," "Year's End," and "Going Ashore") from her Unaccustomed Earth (2008) through the lens of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok's theory of hauntology—particularly their notion of the phantom, the two processes of introjection and incorporation, and the crypt. Drawing on the dead-mother metaphor around which the whole trilogy revolves as well as underlining the notion of afterwardsness which is circuitously performed within the unconscious structure of the whole text, it thus argues that trauma of displacement whose psychoanalytic pain amounts to that of being ripped off the mother's womb and a life-long exposure to the phantom of an absent/present mother is so disconcerting and deep that it takes it about a generation (if not more) to be resolved and to be possibly put to rest. This possibility, of course, can be only opened up if the diasporic subject has, often transgenerationally, acknowledged, claimed, and confronted the phantom of the loss of the motherland and has even begun a belated mourning process for it. This process, however, as Lahiri's texts suggest, does not often run smoothly since the diasporic subject constantly, though unconsciously, incorporates (rather than introjecting) that constitutive element of loss at the core of his/her subjectivity by activating a series of defense mechanisms, erecting dysfunctional crypts, and getting stuck in a vicious circle of acting-out (rather than working through).
Ahmad Reza Samadi; Amir Ali Nojoumian
Volume 12, Issue 16 , April 2016, , Pages 131-151
Abstract
This article attempts to analyze the concept of identity in some of Donald Barthelme’s short stories. In order to get to this objective, Louis Althusser’s views of ISAs (Ideological State Apparatuses), interpellation and ideology have been utilized in displaying their impact on shaping one’s identity. ...
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This article attempts to analyze the concept of identity in some of Donald Barthelme’s short stories. In order to get to this objective, Louis Althusser’s views of ISAs (Ideological State Apparatuses), interpellation and ideology have been utilized in displaying their impact on shaping one’s identity. Identity works as ideology does and through the ISAs like family, religion, politics, educational systems and media, it is formed and constructed. The impact of media, education and army that form the system of values and ideas, are depicted in Barthelme’s short stories. The present study, first introduces Donald Barthelme, then various views on identity are discussed. Later, Althusser’s views on the concept of ideology are introduced and lastly, the analysis of Barthelme’s short stories provides the influence of ideology in the formation of one’s identity as a subject. This study concentrates on various forms of authority that prevail the society through the dominant ideology and then the construction of identity under these conditions is discussed.
Volume 11, Issue 15 , October 2015, , Pages 248-273