New ways of belonging in diaspora in Laila Lalami’s The Other Americans

Abstract

ABSTRACT In response to Diaspora criticism’s recommendations for listening to underground voices, often eclipsed by the leading diaspora figures, the present paper brings attention to the blossoming literary work of the contemporary Moroccan-American writer Laila Lalami. Her fiction, four full-length novels and short prose so far, is argued to intertwine creatively with the major scholarly turns that have marked diasporic literary criticism since its inception in the early 1990s. It registers certain mobility and shifts of concerns from the tropes of homesickness, through homelessness to the rhetoric of transnationalism to grapple with white hegemonic spatiality and politics. However, the focus here is laid on her latest novel The Other Americans (2019) which features minorities from different ethnic backgrounds, yet converging in the enmeshment of their personal lives with the political forces, which intensifies the unsettled issues of identity in the US. Though no material principles of assimilation are proposed, Lalami’s implied protagonist’s eventual urges for complete integration into mainstream society draw on the power of love and forgetting rather than violence and revenge. In so doing, Lalami’s materialist perspective is believed to debunk the Trumpist right political paranoia with reference to the assimilating capability of immigrants.