Abstract
Using cultural and literary theory and contemporary metropolitan post-Second World War postcolonial fictions, the concept of displacement is revisited here allowing for an affirmation of the specificity and beginnings of displaced writers’ identities and for a reassertion of the significance of their starting points meanwhile resisting, precluding, and falling into the dangers of cultural and mental ghettoization and defensive and/or vulgar nationalism. Burdened with colonial history and being “out of place,” writings by displaced writers with their hyphenated identities have altered the literature of England in its language and cultural identity. This has promoted the rediscovery, as in the Freudian psychoanalytic context, of materials that have been repressed or “pushed aside” in cultural translation, but which surely continue to cause trouble and restlessness in the perpetual journey of displacement.
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Notes
- 1.
The difference between origins and beginnings is that with the former the starting point is a romanticized, fixed point, whereas with the latter it is “the first step in the intentional production of meaning” and could be rerouted elsewhere (see Said’s Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Columbia University Press: 1975)).
- 2.
english is used here with a small letter to accentuate the English language’s reappropriation by postcolonial writers. It is also to highlight the fact that there has been a move from what was known previously as English literature to literatures written in English.
- 3.
See Khalidi, R. Palestinian Identity: the Construction of Modern National Consciousness, 1997.
- 4.
From Mahmoud Darwish’s The Earth Is Closing on Us. See Victims of the Map: 2005.
- 5.
I am German by nationality, Jordanian by birth, Palestinian by descent, and spent my twenties in England. I am a third-generation Palestinian exile to a first-generation Palestinian refugee/Laje’ father (born in Palestine in 1938, a few years before and left subsequent to The Nakba, The Catastrophe of 1948) and a second-generation Palestinian displaced/Nazeh mother (born in Palestine in 1964, right before, and left subsequent to the Naksah, The Six Days War of 1967).
- 6.
See Philips, M. and Trevor, W., The Windrush Generation: the irresistible rise of multi-racial Britain, 1998.
- 7.
“Masala Fish” is the title promoted and demonstrated in Chapter 4 to cover the second generation of displaced writers mentioned below. Masala (Oriental, colorful, hot) and fish (Occidental, cold, white) are combined or “infused” to offer a syncretic reflection of the displaced’s hyphenated identities. Food is particularly used here as a metaphor for displacement and migration, for food is a signifier for the liminality of boundaries: food passes across any boundary: it is adaptive, integral, and frontierless.
- 8.
See George, R. The Politics of Home (1996).
- 9.
See Bhabha’s The Location of Culture (2005: 13).
- 10.
Bhangra is a Punjabi, South Asian genre of music, a genre that has become internationalized. From a folk music of rural India, and with an increasing Asian population in England, it turned into a fusion of the old and new, of Punjabi and Pop music.
- 11.
Psychoanalytically, the concept of displacement starts out in the twentieth century as a Freudian concept (Verschiebung). See Freud’s The Origins and Development of Psychoanalysis (Montana: Kessinger Publishing, LLC: 2010, p. 29).
- 12.
See Buchanan (2008: 28–34).
- 13.
That is, when it is cast more broadly outside the Oedipal framework that is a rigidly imposed hierarchy, restricted, closed, and familial.
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© 2016 Akram Al Deek
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Deek, A.A. (2016). Placing Displacement: An Introduction. In: Writing Displacement. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59248-4_1
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