Imaginary Homelands Research Articles

Reframing nationalism and national identity in Anek

ABSTRACT Foregrounding Anubhav Sinha's Hindi mainstream film Anek (released on 27 May 2022), I will draw upon the discourses of nationalism and nation to examine the issues of separatist insurgency, violence, and militarization in the Northeast from the affective and performative lens in order to unsettle the reified categories of identity politics. As ‘nation-building' has important implications for nationalism and the nation-state, an attempt is made to map out the contours of the historical legacy of state formation in the Northeast India, which is characterized by ‘ethnic polities’ of Northeast groups with a connection to a real or imagined homeland, and the recurrent politics of subnationalism. Delineating the current scholarship on the relationship between hot and banal nationalism, an endeavour is made to offer new ways to understand insurgency and counter insurgency in the Northeast. Lastly, the paper explores how sports serve as a galvanizing force for mobilizing national identity and unity.

Salman Rushdie and Diasporic Literature: Exploring Multicultural Identity Crisis in the Context of 'Imaginary Homelands'

Salman Rushdie and Diasporic Literature: Exploring Multicultural Identity Crisis in the Context of 'Imaginary Homelands'

Tracing Exilience Through Literature and Translation: A Portuguese Gargantua in Paris (1848)

Abstract The present article explores the way translated literature informs on (i) how exile shapes the cities’ landscapes (both the starting city and the arrival), as well as (ii) the emotional hardship of the exilic condition, which entails a feeling of estrangement and the longing for imaginary homelands. To attain this twofold aim, it focuses on the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Portuguese migrant movements to Paris. It searches, on the one hand, to retrace exilience in descriptions of Lisbon and Paris in biographical accounts of Portuguese exiles. On the other hand, it analyses an 1848 rewriting of Rabelais’ Gargantua in Portuguese. It is contented that Gargantua Portuguez [Portuguese Gargantua] bears testimony of the presence of anonymous Portuguese-language exiles in mid-nineteenth-century Paris, while creating a “safe house” for them, by seeking historical justice which would, in turn, assist in coping with the exilic condition.

Notes on Transcultural Fandom, Imaginary Homelands, and Sartorial Fan Practices

Notes on Transcultural Fandom, Imaginary Homelands, and Sartorial Fan Practices

Mapping the Cultural Landscape of the Homeland: A Semiotic Analysis of Agha Shahid Ali’s Poetry Collection

The widely renowned and exhaustively researched Kashmiri-American diasporic poet, Agha Shahid Ali, has received acclaim for his portrayal of themes such as loss, longing for the homeland, nostalgia, hyphenated identity, hybridity, and dislocation, among others. However, within the purview of new historicism, this paper intends to examine the interplay of literature, culture, and history. Using Clifford Geertz's framework of "thick description," the paper analyzes Agha's poetry as a cultural artifact with ethnographic value. Through a semiotic analysis of select poems based on Bakhtin's notion of chronotopes, the paper aims to unravel themes of fragmented identity, cultural memorialization, and the preservation of imaginary homelands. The paper also attempts to explore that Agha Shahid Ali, actively engaged with the socio-political turmoil in his homeland. He sought to reconcile the tensions between different traditions and religious communities, envisioning a personal utopia rooted in his privileged position. His poetry reflects his historical context, facilitating a symbolic exchange between the fragments of Kashmiri culture. Through intertextual references, religious symbols, and social emblems, Ali constructs a significant and experimental narrative about Kashmir.

Understanding Diaspora: Home and Overlapping Hyphenation in The Shadow Lines

The idea of an imaginary homeland and the adopted country is at the heart of diasporic discourse. There is a continuous struggle on the part of the diasporas about the donor culture and the recipient culture which creates an ambivalence, separation anxiety over dislocation, as well as, an existential crisis. The apparent solution to this problem seems to lie either in shading off one’s individuality as an ex-colonized and eventually becoming westernized or retaining the “desh” in him/her while appropriating the diasporic state. However, the more they try to assimilate or acculturate themselves, the more they feel alienated from the recipient culture. Thus, they posit a “Trishanku” position and because of their peculiar positionality, they try to transcend time and space with the wings of memory to experience the lost past which they call ‘home’. This paper takes Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines into consideration and explores how different characters in this novel harbor different notions of home and how they come to terms with their hyphenated position in a transcultural space. This will be achieved through the trajectories of two of its main characters: Tha’mma and Ila. For them, the diaspora home becomes a problematic site, and there is a silent clash in their ideologies. This paper shows that it is more so because the sense of self/existence is shaped by the social relations determined by the collective history, class, race, gender and, most importantly, by culture. Thereby, the characters’ concept of a home remains a prolonged paradox. Spectrum, Volume 17, June 2022: 66-74

Lost in Transition- Quest for Identity Through Diaspora

The conceptualization of migration in literature which more often than not precipitates tragedy and in turn the dilemma in identity is associated with the literary concept of diaspora. Popularly categorized with the longing for homeland and its poetics, there is a rhetorical attempt to fathom the void caused due to displacement. The dichotomy of two identities, created due to tension between the former self-clinging to roots of origin and the latter trying to configure oneself within the framework of a new identity, contributes to the amalgamation of distinguishable individualities. Primarily, Diaspora literature is characterized by a sense of alienation and loss that envelopes the narrative and it is conditioned by the after-effects of expatriation migration. Generally, it revolves around themes of displacement, attempts to trace back existential roots, nostalgia, and the inescapable association of the dire quest for identity that diaspora and migration literature bring on to. It deals with the equivocacy of plurality and hybridization in the domain of constantly changing identities and transnationalism in the process of migration. The paper attempts to examine the various forms of literature and the way they concretize diaspora, as a result: evoking literary stimuli of longing for homeland due to displacement. It aims to encompass the realms of cultural, economic, social, religious, and political consciousness that change an individual's displacement from one dominion to another. The narrative is shaped into reality with devices of metaphors and zeugma to explain exaggerated realities. This paper specifically closely reads texts of various literary genres like Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, a graphic novel, Salman Rushdie's essay Imaginary Homelands Rohinton Mistry's short story Swimming Lessons and Jhumpa Lahiri's novel, Namesake.

Концепт (не)возвращения в поэзии Г. Иванова и Г. Адамовича (к 100-летию эмиграции)

The article deals with the reconstruction of the concept of (non)return in the lyrical poetry of G. Adamovich and G. Ivanov. The concept is considered in two ways: as an image in the space of culture and as a methodological formula for the analysis of images of the artistic consciousness. The main lexical means of representing the concept are cognate verb forms, the most frequent of which is the verb “return”. It is assumed that the core of the concept of (non)return is the topological scheme of movement, including the subject of movement, the route, the environment, the means of movement, and the assessment of the result of movement. It is shown how the basic scheme varies in the texts of the two poets. The adaptations of the basic scheme of movement differ in the conceptualization of the method and environment of movement in the texts of G. Adamovich, in manifold figurative interpretation of the starting and ending points of the path in the poetry of G. Ivanov. In the poetry of G. Ivanov, the valency of the locative with the verb to return is filled with three lexemes: to Russia, to St. Petersburg, home. The images of Russia and the home are internally antinomic. Russia unites three mental spaces of the artistic world: Russia-empire, Soviet Russia and an imaginary homeland. Figurative representations of home range from ideas of an abandoned homeland to the last refuge in eternity. For the St. Petersburg poets G. Ivanov and G. Adamovich, the idea of returning to Russia was invariably associated with the image of St. Petersburg, causing the appearance of elements of the St. Petersburg text. The space of return is the space of their shared memory. The antinomic nature of the concept is confirmed both by its lexical representations and by the ambivalence of the assessment of the idea itself and of the possibility of returning home.

Rushdie’nin Seküler Milliyetçiliği ve Üstkurmacanın Sınırları

This paper first analyzes the use of metafiction in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight's Children; and explains how this narrative technique is connected to the novel’s identity politics. Even though several Rushdie critics have justifiably praised Rushdie’s work for its inclusive identity politics based on hybridity, this paper discusses the limits of Rushdie's metafiction in Midnight's Children, and argues that Rushdie's secularist nationalism in Jose Casanova's sense defines the limits of his metafiction, which is clearly exclusive of characters with religious orientation. Methodologically, the paper first discusses Rushdie's distinctive way of using metafiction in order to explicate how Midnight's Children is based on the concept of hybridity. The following part connects Rushdie's novel to his theory: through an analysis of his Imaginary Homelands and a 2011 interview, I trace the novel's secularist nationalism as shown in Rushdie's theory. The conclusion provides a comparative analysis of Rushdie’s work regarding metafiction, secularism, nationalism, identity and belonging.

“Tuti is Losing its Uniqueness”: Genealogy Documentation of the Maḥas of Tuti Island and the (De)Construction of Belonging

ABSTRACT Tuti Island is a river island located at the junction of the Blue and the White Nile in Greater Khartoum, the capital region of the Sudan. Through the process of documenting their genealogies, some of inhabitants of Tuti Island have constructed a historical narrative about the origins and early settlement of the island and of the Maḥas extended families who live there. For many of the Maḥas of Tuti, documenting their genealogies is a way of overcoming their fear about the island losing its uniqueness, because of urban master plans through which the island is envisioned as a waterfront development. By attaching their families’ histories to the island, they hope to assert their sense of belonging. Moreover, some of the island’s genealogists have traced their genealogical lines as far back as the time before their ancestors migrated from northern Sudan and ended up on Tuti island. The social alienation Maḥas Tuti are experiencing plays a vital role in driving people to attach their genealogies and family histories to Qāmī, the “original” land of the Maḥas of Tuti island and construct an imagined homeland.

Virtual Returns: Colonial postcards online and digital \u2018nostalg\xe9rie\u2019 among the former European settlers of Algeria

This article analyses how certain former European settlers of Algeria (pieds-noirs) have created a digital space of remembrance online using scans of colonial-era postcards. Tracing the role of colonial-era postcards in pied-noir memory narratives, from the phototexts of the 1980s to websites from the mid-2000s onwards, I suggest these digital sites of memory attempt to maintain a connection to an imagined Algerian homeland during the so-called ‘memory wars’. By collecting, scanning, and reproducing postcards and photographs of colonial landscapes, pieds-noirs websites aim to reconstruct a lost topography of houses, shops, streets, and towns that have been renamed and rebuilt since independence. These ‘virtual returns’ to Algerian urban topographies rely predominantly on affective responses to ‘nostalgérie’ or nostalgia for Algeria. However, in relying on colonial-era postcards they ultimately recreate the ‘visual economy’ (Welch and McGonagle) of French Algeria in the early 20th century. I argue that, despite the radical ‘connectivity’ presented by the internet, these websites remain primarily focused on creating a homogenous collective memory for an imagined audience of pieds-noirs online. Nonetheless, I conclude by suggesting that this online model of colonial nostalgia has permeated, in limited but influential ways, how other groups interpret visual ‘nostalgérie’.

The Hegemony of the Past in Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine (1989)

xperiencing alienation and displacement exiled writers have a specific relationship to the past. “Haunted by a sense of loss, some urge to reclaim to look back” (Rushdie 10), these exiled souls who lead a liminal existence between a lost past and a foreign present cannot but inscribe the past in their fictions. Indeed for them, the inscription of the past is a prerequisite for the restoration of their damaged selves and histories. Perceiving things from their shaky “fractured perceptions” (12), while overwhelmed by nostalgia and homesickness, these “wounded creatures” (Rushdie 12) end up creating idealized versions of homes and pasts or ie: “imaginary homelands” (10) and glorified pasts. Rushdie’s theory can be applicable to many exiled writers but certainly not to Baharati Mukherjee. Mukherjee is one of the most prominent Indian American writers who is known by her controversial hypothesis of ‘past erosion’. Rejecting hyphenization and heralding assimilation Mukherjee declares herself “an American citizen without hyphens” (33). Such audacious pronouncement that has distinguished her from her peers and incurred her some hostile reactions as well. Nevertheless, Mukherjee’s fiction betrays her strong attachment to her past. Hence, this paper seeks to demonstrate that Mukherjee’s most praised assimilation novel Jasmine (1989) that tells the story of Punjabi Joyti’s ‘American dream’ coming true is one of the most past troubled narratives. It proceeds with dwelling on Mukherjee’s theory of “past erosion” then moves to scrutinize the omnipresence of the past in the novel focusing on the protagonist’s struggle with past memories.

In the Ethics of Strangers: Saul Bellow Drawing Boundaries of No ‘M’an’s Land

This paper seeks to demonstrate how space in Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein (2000) and Humboldt’s Gift (1975) is acquainted with the metaphors memory, spiritual journeys and philosophical meditations. Space, in the Bellovian sense, is not local nor is it historical (real); rather, it is fictional, utopian and philosophical. By the “the Boundaries of no ‘M’an’s Land,” the researcher underpins the sublime ideals of Bellow’s mental space. By the term “strangers,” the researcher refers to Bellow’s intellectual heroes who are identified with the metaphors of space. In this concern, two fundamental questions are investigated: a) how should one argue for the idea that metaphors of space are related to memory, spiritual journeys and philosophical meditations? b) what sense can be given to the relationship between the metaphors of space and the ethics of strangers? To unmask these blind spots, the aspects of metaphors are firstly investigated. Second, the relationship between these metaphors and the ethics of strangers are examined. In the light of these primary findings, the conclusion which can be drawn is that the metaphors of space do not only epitomize the quality of American, cultural, aesthetic and philosophical discourse, but also draw imaginary homelands of “strange” intellectuals. Special focus will be given to Ravelstein and Humboldt’s Gift. Bellow’s other novels and short stories are deployed to support the thesis. The Kantian notions of human welfare and moral worth and the Hegelian assumptions of the phenomenology of spirit are key concepts to illustrate the analysis.

Utopias of Self in Imaginary Homelands

Moving between different homelands involves constructing utopias of place and self. Such mythical past, present and future selves are intertwined with the construction of imaginary homelands in the writings of transnational Canadians, for whom the quintessential questions of the Canadian imagination – Who am I? and Where is here? – continue to be unsolvable dilemmas.

Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland: A study of alienation and identity

Jhumpa Lahiri is one of the leading and successful second generation of Indian writers of English novellists. Lahiri’s The Lowland explores complex nature of human relationship and feelings of loneliness and the question of identity. The novel centres round the theme of political and personal violence, duty and desire, heritage and homeland, secrets and conspiracies and alienation and identity. The Lowland is a comprehensive, enthusiastic story that examines in detail the junction of the political and the personal scenario, enveloping nearly fifty years of Indian and American history through the lives of one family. Jhumpa Lahiri’s themes are far-fetched and widely focused on the issues of acculturation, assimilation, desolation, fragmented identity and individuality of the characters in an alien land. Being a contemporary novelist of immigrant experience, she incandescently substantiated the problems encountered by the second generation in the ‘imaginary homeland’. In this paper, an attempt has been made on the theme of alienation and identity.

CONCEPTUALIZING THE IMAGINARY IN LITERARY DISCOURSE: A DIASPORIC ANALYSIS

The conceptual understanding of the diasporic imaginary is necessary for the construction of homeland through the articulation of creative narratives. The diasporic imaginary is widely narrated in the contemporary literature analysing the issues of displacement, cultural identity, home and nation. The new meaning of home in the post-modernity is analysed in the study for a comprehensive understanding of the diasporic narratives. The hybridity of cultural encounter make the immigrant to rediscover the lost home through fractured memories. The belongings to a space that negotiates with the cultural making of the home and nation should be analysed to critically evaluate the construction of imaginary homelands through the virtual of realities.

The Disillusionment of “Home” in Abla Farhoud’s Au grand soleil cachez vos filles

The Disillusionment of “Home” in Abla Farhoud’s Au grand soleil cachez vos filles Nancy M. Arenberg Born in Lebanon, Abla Farhoud is recognized as a prolific author who, at the young age of five, immigrated to Quebec with her family in the early 1950s. Over the years, she has attracted considerable critical attention as a successful playwright, but is also celebrated for her prose works in which she explores the plight of migrants, often women, who find themselves opposed to traditional cultures and values in Canada.1 Most notably, Farhoud concentrates on a Lebanese woman’s struggle to adapt to life in Montreal in Le Bonheur à la queue glissante (1998), a seminal text that places many of her literary productions within the category of écriture migrante. It is Farhoud’s focus on nomadism, identity, and problematic homecomings that establishes a connection to other migrant writers located in Montreal, such as Dany Laferrière, Régine Robin, Ying Chen, Marie-Célie Agnant, and Émile Ollivier. At a later stage of her career, Farhoud published Toutes celles que j’étais (2015), an autofictional work in which the author’s avatar, Aablè, moves to Montreal with her family as a young girl. But after fourteen years in Quebec, Aablè’s family travels to Lebanon, which sets the stage for the second novel in this projected trilogy. Farhoud’s Au grand soleil cachez vos filles (2017) reprises some key immigrant issues seen in the previous text, mainly the themes of disenfranchisement, nostalgic longing, and exile. In this work, the father of the Abdelnour clan makes the decision to repatriate the family to Lebanon, thus uprooting the children from their comfortable lifestyle in Montreal. As seen in Toutes celles que j’étais, this novel also channels many of Farhoud’s actual experiences, for the narrative is situated in the pre-civil war period of the 1960s. In fact, Farhoud did return to Lebanon at the age of twenty in 1965 but fled to France before the onset of the Six-Day War in 1967. Since the Abdelnour family’s migration emphasizes travelling across significant geographical boundaries, the first part of this article examines the complex representation [End Page 337] of the homeland, a distant mirage on the horizon. At the nexus of the family’s journey is the crisis of radical displacement, as they cross borders to arrive “over there,” but struggle to establish roots to create a sense of “home” in this unfamiliar place. To delve into this intricate notion of returning “home,” Salman Rushdie’s perspective on imaginary homelands is interpolated into the discussion in concert with Edward Said’s notion of imaginative geography. Although the narrative unfolds from the alternating viewpoints of several family members, the main part of this study focuses on the problem of disillusionment, stemming from the difficult experiences of the two older daughters, Ikram and Faïzah. Seen through a feminist lens, the overarching crisis of disillusionment is also manifested on a corporeal level. To clarify, the bodies of the two sisters demonstrate resistance, at times, to cultural traditions and norms in Lebanon. Most importantly, Farhoud concentrates on the two sisters’ struggles to assimilate into the restrictive and foreign customs of Lebanese society, a challenge for independent women accustomed to mobility, freedom, and vast opportunities in Montreal. The concluding part of this article briefly considers Farhoud’s perspective on the plight of immigrants who live in a perpetual state of exile in search of a place to call “home.” According to Sara Ahmed, “home” can be defined as a place with fixed, stable boundaries, signifying the notion of belonging. However, in migrant narratives, this conception is unattainable, as immigrants are perpetually dislocated from a place or a space to call home (see Ahmed, “Home and Away” 339). It is useful to begin this study by looking at the family’s path of migration, a key component of Farhoud’s textual production. At first glance, one of the most striking aspects of the novel is the author’s reversal of the more traditional path, often seen in Québécois migrant narratives, in which immigrants move across borders in search of better lives in the new world...

Мифологизация родины в романе Теодора Каллифатидеса «Прошлое - это не сон»

The purpose of the study is to determine the features characterising homeland mythologization in the autobiographical novel “The Past Is Not a Dream” (Sw. Det gångna är inte en dröm) by the modern Swedish author of the Greek origin Th. Kallifatides. Scientific novelty of the study lies in approaching the modern Swedish literature from the standpoint of the postcolonial concept IMAGINARY HOMELAND. As a result, it is proved that the ancient Greek mythology in the novel chosen for the analysis becomes a foundation and material for creating a modern myth about an individual’s national identity belonging to “great narratives” of the past.

Mapping the imaginary homelands: Hostility, refugeeism and exile in select poems

Mapping the imaginary homelands: Hostility, refugeeism and exile in select poems

‘Imaginary Homelands’ and resistance to Melting Pot in the poetry of Sujata Bhat

‘Imaginary Homelands’ and resistance to Melting Pot in the poetry of Sujata Bhat