| Title | A Poetics of Home. On narrative voice and the deconstruction of home in migrant literature |
|---|---|
| Published in | Migrant Cartographies. New Cultural and Literary Spaces in Post-Colonial Europe, p.177-189. |
| Author | Buikema, R.L. |
| Date | 2005 |
| Language | Dutch |
| Type | book part |
| Publisher | Lexington Books |
| Abstract | Talking about the specific position of the migrant writer, Salman Rushdie claims that “if literature is in part the business of finding new angles at which to enter reality, then once again our distance, our long geographical perspective, may provide us with such angles” (Rushdie 1991, 15). According to Rosemary Marangoly George’s (1996) definition, migrant literature is indeed the contemporary literary writing in which the politics of location and/or dislocation is central to the narrative. More particularly, in line with postmodern transnational thinking, migrant literature has a specific way of thematizing and deconstructing the traditional meaning of the private and the public, the near and the far, the past and the future. Contemporary migrant literature, therefore, is best read as a sub-genre within postmodern writing and postmodern times in which the theme of dislocation and homelessness is prevalent in a variety of forms. In order to map out these themes of location and dislocation, however, post-colonial criticism has tended to limit its focus only to the metaphor of the journey and the diaspora. Yet within the diaspora, new connections are made between places, so that the relationship between center and periphery as it exists, for instance, between the colonial power and the former colonies, is changed. In my essay, I illustrate the fruitfulness of thinking about the effects of the diaspora by focusing on the concepts at the other extreme. This broader approach centralizes the poetics of place, metaphorically summarized as the poetics of home. |
| Publication | http://igitur-archive.library.uu.nl/let/2006-0825-201308/UUi... |
| Persistent Identifier | URN:NBN:NL:UI:10-1874-12281 |
| Metadata | XML |
| Repository | Utrecht University |
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