Companion Texts and Spaces of Encounter: Reading Experiences in Shazia Majid, Ivo de Figueiredo and Yohan Shanmugaratnam’s Life Writing

Abstract

ABSTRACT Analyzing reading experiences represented in transnational literature clarifies how the author’s story connects to a larger world literature. Building on the feminist and postcolonial work of Sarah Ahmed, and Elleke Boehmer, Rita Felski's study of the uses of literature, I investigate the signification of the representations of reading experiences in three contemporary Norwegian works. These center thematically on gendered and racialized identity processes, as well as politics and history, in the aftermaths of colonialism and migration: Shazia Majid, Ut av skyggene. Den lange veien mot likestilling for innvandrerkvinnene [Out of the shadows. The long road to equality for immigrant women]; Ivo de Figueiredo’s A Stranger At My Table [En fremmed ved mitt bord. En familiehistorie] and Yohan Shanmugaratnam’s work Vi puster fortsatt [We are still breathing]. My analysis of the reading experiences and the intersectional aspects in these works, explores how their stories refer to and enter into various networks of book communities: Feminist, imperialist, antiracist, Norwegian, English, American, Asian, African, 19th-century, colonial, black, white and more. The authors use their family history to tell a larger transnational story, leading to further explorations of how gender, ethnicity, nationality, class and religion form identities in transnational Norway.