Travel and/as Travail
Diasporic Dislocations in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea and Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9002280 |
|---|---|
| Authors | John Masterson (0000-0003-2869-6612, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2010 |
| Volume | 45 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 409-427 |
| Publication date | 2010-09-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-9894 • E-ISSN: 1741-6442 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/0021989410376223 |
| OpenAlex | W1967715451 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 8 |
This article looks at two novels exploring the pains and gains of the immigrant experience. Both By the Sea and The Inheritance of Loss feature protagonists struggling to build their lives anew in a foreign land. I discuss them in relation to some of the key trends in postcolonial studies, arguing that Gurnah’s and Desai’s texts provide a necessary “re-grounding” to some of the more romanticizing tendencies in writing on diaspora and dislocation. I also consider how they might be seen in relation to ongoing debates about globalization, suggesting both provide timely reminders that celebrations of “fluidity and flow” are often only applicable to a privileged few. By attending to the material realities of bodies, both individual and collective, and to specific geo-political spaces, both Gurnah and Desai shift our readerly focus from the indeterminacies of “globalization” to the actualities of “glocalization”
Aesthetics · Art · Diaspora · Dislocation · Focus (optics · Globalization · Glocalization · Identity (music · Immigration · Inheritance (genetic algorithm · Political science · Politics · Relation (database · Sociology · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity · Gender Studies · History · Law · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Socioeconomic Development in Asia
Contemporary Asian Literatures in English
Coloniality of Vulnerability
Abdulrazak Gurnah’s African Ocean
Of Basement Kitchens and Filthy Lodges
Of cityscapes, affect and migrant subjectivities in Kiran Desai’s Inheritance of Loss
East and Central Africa
Disabled movement beyond metaphor in Michael Ondaatje's The Cat's Table and Abdulrazak Gurnah's By the Sea
(In)visible scripts, hidden costs
| Citations per year | 0.53 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2011 - 2026 (16) |
| Highly cited | No |