The Deep Stirring of the Unhomely

African Diaspora on Biyi Bandele's The Street

Bibliographic Data

ID9250329
AuthorsChukwuma Okoye (0000-0003-2969-7393, corresponding author)
Year2008
Volume39
Issue2
Pages79-92
Publication date2008-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueResearch in African Literatures (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0034-5210 • E-ISSN: 1527-2044
PublisherIndiana University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.2979/ral.2008.39.2.79
OpenAlexW1985182515
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited13

Informed by the pervasive dispersal of peoples, capital, commodities and ideas across the globe the concepts of home and diaspora have produced some of the liveliest debates in recent times. Previously conceived in essentialist terms as considerably stable models, these concepts have today become intensely contested. This paper examines the manner in which Biyi Bandele engages with these contested notions in The Street . It examines the dialectics of home in diaspora and observes that “unhomeliness,” the postcolonial condition of displacement, invasion, and estrangement of “home,” typifies the experience of displaced subjects as they engage with the project of identification against the drifting (dis)locations of home in two spaces: the natal homeland and the host nation. The street functions not only as the site where subject positions are perennially formed and performed, negotiated and (re)constituted, but also as a metaphor for the dynamic and medial nature of diasporic identity

Aesthetics · Art · Dialectic · Diaspora · Epistemology · Essentialism · Ethnology · Globe · Homeland · Identity (music) · Metaphor · Mobilities · Political science · Sociology · Subject (documents) · Anthropology · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity · Gender Studies · Law · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Psychology

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