Displacement and the Somatics of Postcolonial Culture

2020, Bağlama, S . (2020). A Postcolonial Approach to Contemporary Refugee Literature: Benjamin Zephaniah’s Refugee Boy . TRT Akademi , 6 (10) , 630-643 . Retrieved from https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/pub/trta/issue/56639/725034

Refugee Boy (2001) by Benjamin Zephaniah literalises the refugee experience in contemporary society, reveals the psychology of loss, unbelonging and displacement and helps universalise the traumatic realities of the refugee phenomenon upon innocent people in a 'remote' part of the world through its 14-year-old Eritrean-Ethiopian protagonist. In the novel, in order to be accepted and included into the mainstream 'white' society, the protagonist has a tendency to reshape and reconstitute his identity and personality in relation to what is presented as the proper and the superior. Such a sort of properness and superiority is discursively formed within the framework of the operation of the orientalist mentality and creates an ideal refugee identity, which resembles the case of the colonial subject in contemporary postcolonial fiction. In this context, this article, suggesting that the protagonist of the novel might be considered as a colonial subject, will investigate whether postcolonial theory might critically contribute to the analysis of contemporary refugee literature. This article will also attempt to theorise the process of postcolonial interpellation and explore the relevance of this conceptualisation in terms of articulating the refugee experience through a close reading of the novel.

2019

With the ever-increasing outbreak of intrastate and interstate wars since the mid-20 th century, Africa has experienced mass displacement of people which has subsequently resulted in an increase of displaced communities in the world. From these displaced communities, African refugees constitute a significant share of the total displaced people in the globe, which count to 68.5 million people. The present study explored representation of traumas of displacement in Marie Therese Toyi’s Weep Not, Refugee. The study deployed Ruth Caruth’s tenets of trauma studies in literature. The findings of the study affirm the authors use Weep Not Refugee to explore the significant contribution of displacement to delineate and circumscribe Burundian refugees with traumatised and reduced identities in areas of displacement. In most cases, the journey of leaving home and later their lives in refuge of Burundians are explicated to be surrounded by tragic experience and reduced identities that ascribe t...

Asian American Literature in Transition, 1965–1996, 2021

Journal of Analytical Psychology, 2020

This paper investigates the relations between displacement, home, trauma and the self in the experience of refugees, which has become an issue of unexpected and far‐reaching proportions in recent times. It questions to what extent and under what conditions displacement in the world may be traumatic and how trauma may be considered the effect of an inner displacement. Refugees’ lives are marked by forced migration that is related to a certain suffering due to the changes in their family, relational, social and cultural lives. The paper explores the extent to which these changes can represent a break so significant as to be traumatic. It outlines the way in which traumatic experiences can produce an inner displacement and reorganization of one’s mental life that leads to a focus on traumatic complexes. Under the most severe traumatic conditions, this can be understood as a displacement of the central axis of Self, in which the ego complex yields its position to other complexes, with a...

Caribbean Studies, 2013

leonora simonovis Studies since it complicates the connections between immigrant populations and their homelands, contextualizes Martí and his writing in the light of recent cultural theory and revisits the works of important writers and critics (DuBois, Whitman, Anzaldúa), offering an acute perspective of immigration that links the past and present of immigrant subjects in the Americas.

Dissertation, 2018

Wanderers in the spaces of their memories and the streets of their would-be homes, generations of suffering immigrants are traced back to the past, propelled by the crescendo of melancholic stillness that moves displaced bodies through states of in betweenness that both dispels and teeters on the far side of either assimilation or exclusion. Many transnational narratives situate the immigrant at a crossroads in terms of a loss of the ‘original’ culture in exchange for the new ‘American’ culture, where national diversities are confined to a singular framework and rhetoric of displacement, overruled by the myth of successful assimilation, whereby the hardships of adjusting to foreign spaces are ‘normalized’ and reduced to a series of trials. This portrayal, in turn, does not leave any room for the rhetoric of pain, or what I label as the ‘migrant’s mourning’, where the immigrant’s suffering is suppressed and eclipsed by a collective history of racial abjection. Insights into the psyche of the immigrant serve to map the hedge between the past and the present and absolute versus relative spaces. Applying psychoanalytical and postcolonial frameworks to literary analysis, this dissertation explores some of the prominent transnational narratives to establish that the melancholic dynamics of space, memory, and language can subvert misrepresentations and grant the immigrant mobility within the confines of homogenized spaces. It seeks to explore the ways in which the transnational American narrative employs melancholic tenor as aesthetics to empower displaced figures. Situating its protagonists at the locus of nations, these narratives underscore melancholia, mourning, and memory as tools and protocols of agency that challenge the myth of assimilation and re-think the rhetoric of displacement.

Humanities (Special Issue: Decolonizing Trauma Studies: Trauma and Postcolonialism), 2015

This article starts by engaging in a dialogue with the most relevant postcolonial emendations to trauma theory, addressed to both its aporetic and its therapeutic trends, and it goes on to reflect on the state of the decolonizing trauma theory project, critically examining the motivations behind it as well as some of the problems it still encounters, like the risk of objectification and revictimization of postcolonial peoples, the blurring of their trauma particularities, and the appropriation of their experience. Then, it proposes an alternative understanding of postcolonial trauma theory as a contact zone where trauma criticism and the postcolony are interrelated and mutually transformed, and where unequal power relations are also attended to. Acknowledging the postcolony as a site of theory production rather than the object of external definition, it proceeds to analyze Edwidge Danticat’s short story cycle Claire of the Sea Light: its strategic representation of grief—which she achieves through the short story cycle structure and overall in-betweenness and ambivalence in symbols and characterization—puts Haitians on the critical map of trauma, fighting invisibility and oblivion, but it simultaneously resists an appropriation of Haitian experience by rejecting any monolithic view on Haiti and refusing to fit into a predetermined template.

British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 2023

Recherche littéraire, 2019

Jay Rajiva’s recent book Postcolonial Parabola: Literature, Tactility, and the Ethics of Representing Trauma (2017) is an ample, philosophy-laced, and at the same time original analysis of postcolonial trauma literature, based on the juxtaposition of two distinct postcolonial histories: Indian Partition and South African apartheid. Rajiva aligns his approach to trauma narratives with Stef Craps’s critique of Western trauma theory and ethical argument that colonial traumata should be acknowledged on their own terms, in the spirit of a genuine cross-cultural engagement, as opposed to a universalizing Eurocentric point of view.

Vidyabharati International Interdisciplinary Research Journal, 2021

Postcolonial theory emerged as a field of inquiry to analyse the inequalities between East and West brought about by colonialism. Currently postcolonial theory can prove to be a powerful tool for retrospection of political, economic and cultural relations of the word. This retrospection is imperative since the relations between these two parts of the world are still characterised by inequalities which have been exacerbated by globalisation. Globalisation has been problematised by postcolonial scholars like Sanskara Krishna and Robert Young as it has intensified certain issues which can be situated within the postcolonial framework. These include new forms of colonialism and essentialising discourses reinforcing the east/west divide. These are also the major contributors of refugee crisis for being highly prevalent in the postcolonial states. Apart from this, there are intricate connections between these issues which are important to understand Refugee Crisis particularly in Syria. The aim of this paper is to analyse Atia Awabi's "A Land of Permanent Goodbyes," from postcolonial perspective. It is a refugee novel and highlights the impact of war, migration, and displacement on people. By exploring these postcolonial issues in the novel, the relevance of postcolonial theory to study refugee novels can also be realised.