Unhomely Home, Unhomely Women
The Precariousness of Being, Belonging, and Becoming in the Sri Lankan Diasporic Fiction of Nayomi Munaweera
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11678230 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Payel Chattopadhyay Mukherjee (Department of Social Sciences and Humanities, IIIT Delhi, Delhi, India) |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 42 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 285-300 |
| Publication date | 2020-10-09 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | South Asian Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0275-9527 • E-ISSN: 2573-9476 |
| Publisher | Taylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/02759527.2020.1827928 |
| OpenAlex | W3092359728 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 19 |
This paper recognizes an existential anxiety and an estranging sense of unbecoming that postcolonial homes incur, being enunciated as “differential sites of social formation” for the disruptive discourse of global precariousness. Reading Nayomi Munaweera’s fiction, I examine how home has emerged as a conspicuous motif in which identities intersect with a quest to unlearn the political geographies of belonging in South Asian Literature. In Island of A Thousand Mirrors (2012 Munaweera, Nayomi. 2012. Island of a Thousand Mirrors. New York: St. Martin’s Press. doi:10.1086/ahr/73.4.1266.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]), home emerges a space in which exile and belonging overlap for individuals who negotiate their distorted histories and realities amidst a civil war in Sri Lanka. In the other novel, What Lies Between Us (2016 Felicelli, Anita. 2016. “What Lies Between Us,’ Nayomi Munaweera” SF Gate, February 19. https://www.sfgate.com/books/article/What-Lies-Between-Us-Nayomi-Munaweera-6843030.php [Google Scholar]), there is both resistance and virulent anger against the irreconcilable extremities of belonging concurrently to two homes/nations. Home emerges as an unhomely space, situated within the dilemma of becoming and unbecoming. Despite the idealized longing involved, conjuring the “archeologies of desire” accentuates an inescapable failure of reconciliation between an imagined belonging and the shifting paradigms of unsettled identities. Within these irate resistances of unbecoming selves in the literary space of South Asia, home is a precarious locus of discontent which reveals a systemic psychological lacuna in the critical sensibilities of postcolonial belonging
China · Diaspora · Dilemma · Existentialism · Hybridity · Media studies · Negotiation · Political science · Politics · Resistance (ecology · Social science · Sociology · Anthropology · Gender Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Socioeconomic Development in Asia · South Asian Cinema and Culture
The politics of home
Domicide
Real and Imagined Women
The Scandal of the State
Feminists Theorize the Political
Choosing Precarity
The Deep Stirring of the Unhomely
The symbolic survival of the “living dead”
The global subject of precarity
On Urban Alienations and Anomie
The World and the Home
Necropolitics
The postcolonial city and its subjects
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 2 |
| Citation span | 2025 - 2026 (2) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |