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العنوان
The Monolithic British Empire Deconstructed :
المؤلف
Alsalmani, Aseel Hatif Jassam.
هيئة الاعداد
باحث / أسيل هاتف جسام السلماني
مشرف / ماجدة أحمد نعيم هارون
تاريخ النشر
2024.
عدد الصفحات
142 p. ;
اللغة
الإنجليزية
الدرجة
الدكتوراه
التخصص
الأدب والنظرية الأدبية
تاريخ الإجازة
1/1/2024
مكان الإجازة
جامعة عين شمس - كلية الآداب - اللغة الإنجليزية وآدابها
الفهرس
Only 14 pages are availabe for public view

from 142

from 142

Abstract

The study deconstructs the British Eurocentric assumptions that the British Empire propagates: it is written with the aim of undoing the false conceptions in regard to the mono-cultural notion of the British community. It deconstructs such beliefs in relation to a number of interrelated issues. Hanif Kureishi’s Love in a Blue Time (1997) and Leila Aboulela’s Elsewhere, Home (2018) are chosen to examine how their authors have challenged the British Empire’s claim to superiority. The study draws a comparison between these two authors’ representations of the lifestyles, homes, attitudes, customs, and dreams of their transcultural characters to highlight both writers’ attempt to deconstruct the monolithic perceptions of the British Empire.
The study falls into four chapters and a conclusion.
In chapter one, the theoretical framework is set. It serves as an introduction that shows how Britain’s assumed monolithic structure is disrupted by Kureishi and Aboulela’s attempt to write back to the empire and uncover its fallacies. It casts light on the theories of community and the tools of deconstruction which are introduced by Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall, Edward Said, Mikhail Bakhtin, Jean-Luc Nancy, Avtar Brah, and Zygmunt Bauman.
Chapter two casts light on how the carnival concept plays a role in fashioning and transforming the identities of the transnational immigrant characters of Kureishi and Aboulela. It outlines the socio-political meaning of the grotesque figure and explains its disruptive function through the application of the theories of community and the devices of deconstruction in the analysis of Kureishi and Aboulela’s postcolonial collections of short fiction.
Chapter three touches on the concept of inbetweenness as a state of being and how such a stance can paradoxically be destructive and productive. It underlines the psychological impact of cultural differences on the transnational migrant characters of both Kureishi and Aboulela by examining their attitudes and reactions following their traumatic/ productive post-migratory experience. It aims to analyze the interracial encounters and the onsites where conflicts between/among different ethnicities occur. It shows how these places are ambivalent in their effect on both the colonizer and the colonized.
Chapter four demonstrates the significance of narrative memory and storytelling as strategies of power that both Kureishi and Aboulela have used with the aim of addressing their characters’ attachment and belonging to their past and new (future) topographies in relation to the discursive process of identity formation.
The conclusion sums up the findings of the study. It concludes that both Kureishi and Aboulela have succeeded in writing back to the British Empire by making use of the strategic narrative tools of deconstruction. By means of the redeeming power of narratorial and archeological memory, both Anglophone writers demonstrate how some of their intercultural characters have managed to reconstruct the past while they are in the British diaspora and remap the boundaries after going through the discursive process of self-realization.