Date

2021-10-05

Author

soleymanzadeh, laya

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This thesis analyzes Abdulrazak Gurnah’s three novels, By the Sea, The Last Gift, and Gravel Heart with respect to hospitality and multiculturalism which permeate negotiations of identity and narrative agency through asymmetric power relations of multicultural home/hostlands settings. It shows how the novels explore negotiations of identity, narrative agency, and hospitality in physical and relational (human relationships) spaces in their multicultural settings of home- and hostland. In Gurnah’s fictional world, the representations of these settings and of characters at the intersections of class, race, gender and sexuality, and nationality, illustrate (in)hospitality to processes of identity negotiation, and the texts show this (in)hospitality through their use of political and social references and literary intertextualities, familial and societal relationships, and the inclusion/exclusion of certain narratives (female narrative agency in particular). The first analytic perspective of this thesis addresses how the novels present hospitality in multicultural home/hostland settings through sociopolitical allusions and references and literary intertextualities, to probe into their impact on negotiations of identity and agency. Secondly, with a focus on positionality with regard to the formation of identity and agency, the thesis highlights the significance of hospitality for story sharing within familial and societal relationships in (in)hospitable multicultural spaces and settings and its contribution to the power/knowledge system in resistance to dominant discourses of knowledge in the novels. Based on these interrelated perspectives, the thesis argues that the novels present inhospitality and inhospitable spaces and relationships as hindering characters’ negotiations of identity and narrative agency, and thence as blocking their resistance to dominant and powerful discourses that define them through stereotypical perceptions and representations, undermining any multiculturalism practiced in home- and hostland settings. It is suggested that, although partially empowered through their stories narrated in hospitable relationships and spaces, inhospitality is shown, ultimately, to disallow the subversion of subalternity and negotiation of power.

Subject Keywords

Postcolonial and Migration Literatures: Abdulrazak Gurnah, hospitality, identity, multiculturalism, narrative agency

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/93111

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis