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"Al Deek, Akram"
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Writing Displacement
Uses the Palestinian exilic displacements as a tool and compass to find intersecting points of reference with the Caribbean, Indian, African, Chinese, and Pakistani dispersions
Studies the metamorphosis of the politics of home and identity amongst different migrant nationals from the end of WWII into the new millennium
Celebrates the freedom to be 'out of place' which opens doors for and promotes rediscovery of materials that have been repressed or pushed aside in cultural translation
eBook
Chapter 3 The Windrush Generation: Remapping England and Its Literature
Due to the large and accumulative number of emigrants and the subsequent emergent fiction, where roughly a hundred British novels are released weekly and with more than three quarters of the people living in the world today having had their lives shaped by the experience of colonialism, neither of the following chapters are or can be entirely representative. The chapters are divided, however, according to subject matter across a chronological sequence. The division and structure of generational division should trace therefore different shifts in identity politics and their relational conceptions of home. This discourse of displacement and migration through literary and cultural interlocution should demonstrate how variable and shifting pre-given, pre-assumed, and fixed ideas can be, and how they are altered, or restaged, once taken out of their originary places, out of their Oedipalized territories, that is, once they are displaced. In this context, then, England can be considered a fertile soil and an open site upon which postcolonial black and Asian cultures developed creatively in relation to their colonial history. The empire, Rushdie tells us, writes back to the center. The very historically and colonially scarred relationship between the migrants’ colonial past and the current postcolonial present brings a rather interesting cultural dimension and challenge to the displaced intellectual’s writing. Writing back to the center also connotes not only being part of the center marching from the margins; it is also a turning look forward, a look that is not restricted by a colonial past but a rather optimistic look toward an open future.
Book Chapter
Chapter 1 Writing Displacement
In 1980, Deleuze and Guattari coined important concepts in philosophical studies, namely nomadology, the rhizome, or nomadic rhizome, and deterritorialization. These concepts primarily deal with geographical as well as psychological displacements and are concerned with the nomad’s identity, boundaries, and environment that surround the self, continuity, and points of departure and arrival. Celebrating the removal of power and authority over a territory by its inhabitants, the deployment of these concepts weakens the ties between the displaced and land, between culture and place. These concepts embrace uprootedness and reject points of origin in particular as Oedipalized territorialities. Revisiting displacement does not totally reject Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of a nomadic rhizome; however, it does reject what might be considered its inhuman and unethical character.
Book Chapter
Chapter 4 Masala Fish: Cultural Synthesis and Literary Adventuring
This chapter addresses issues raised by second-generation immigrants (with an emphasis on the prefix “im” to emphasize the place they arrived at, as opposed to the place they emigrated from, and by which their identities were predominantly influenced and shaped). Emphasis on the prefix also foregrounds the formative years spent in England, which facilitated their integration into British culture. This chapter follows on therefore from the preceding chapter that contextualized the work of the emigrant or pioneer generation in terms of the question of displacement. Thus the Windrush Generation paved the way to what is called here the “Masala Fish” Generation of immigrant. Secondgeneration writers were no longer mere products of the vanishing Empire but members of a new multicultural British scene.
Book Chapter
Promoting Cultural Diversity/Multiculturalism Post-9/11: A Conclusion
The Prime Minister of the current British government has expressed resentment toward not only mass migration but, as he categorizes it, “bad immigration”—as opposed to a “good one.” The speech (Cameron: 2011) came in conjunction with the French prime minister’s ban of the burka/niqap amidst political uproar and acceleration in policies aimed at the large Muslim and Arab population in France in particular and Europe in general. A predecessor speech by Germany’s chancellor had already announced: multikulti has failed in Germany (Merkel, October 17, 2010). Reading these speeches, one feels, on the one hand, a sense that West European societies, cultures, and values are being threatened, or to use a less harsher term, challenged by the existing nonnative population as well as the rapid influx of immigrants (especially now North African and Middle Eastern countries) to Europe. On the other, and whether there is a certain policy being set toward immigration or mere intimidation toward the foreign, such political speeches and attitudes toward the formerly colonized have created anger and inflamed extremism and strong opposition of migrant Asian and African communities in Britain, Algerians, Tunisians, and Moroccan in France, and the majority of Turks in Germany.
Book Chapter
Chapter 2 Displacing Cultural Identity
Arriving in the western metropolis fresh from a natal environment, the displaced is initially caught between two political, cultural, linguistic, and perhaps religious systems which close upon themselves contradicting each other and prohibiting negotiation and translation. Two main complications arise then: the first is color consciousness and a sense of inferiority which follow from racial discrimination and exclusion; the second is a very strong longing for a familiar culture, religion, and community based on the past and imaginatively configured in the present. The consequence of this conjunction is often the emergence of what Rushdie calls “ghetto mentality” (Rushdie: 1991: 19), which amounts to a self-imposed, diasporic community sanctioned ghettoizing nationalism, walled-in and unable to negotiate an alternative form of existence. This “ghetto mentality” acts as a resistance to racism not to mention the “consumptive” or “consumer” mentality characteristic of western capitalism and endemic in neocolonialism. These two complications impinge profoundly on the struggle to belong and the reformulation of an identity that is neither racially constructed, nor etiologically or nationalistically “locked-in.” These complications also explain why, answering the question above, all people cannot live peacefully in Babylon, the radiance of difference.
Book Chapter
Placing Displacement: An Introduction
Using cultural and literary theory and contemporary metropolitan post-Second World War postcolonial fictions, the concept of displacement is revisited here allowing for an affirmation of the specificity and beginnings of displaced writers’ identities and for a reassertion of the significance of their starting points meanwhile resisting, precluding, and falling into the dangers of cultural and mental ghettoization 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 in its language and 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 surely continue to cause trouble and restlessness in the perpetual journey of displacement.
Book Chapter