Becoming Home: Diaspora and the Anglophone Transnational

“Becoming Home: Diaspora and the Anglophone Transnational” is a collection of essays exploring national identity, migration, exile, colonialism, postcolonialism, slavery, race, and gender in the literature of the Anglophone world. The volume focuses on the dispersion or scattering of people in exile, and how those with an existing homeland and those displaced, without a politically recognized sovereign state, negotiate displacement and the experience of living at home-abroad. This group includes expatriate minority communities existing uneasily and nostalgically on the margins of their host country.

The diaspora becomes an important cultural phenomenon in the formation of national identities and opposing attempts to transcend the idea of nationhood itself on its way to developing new forms of transnationalism. Chapters on the literature or national allegories of the diaspora and the transnational explore the diverse and geographically expansive ways in which Anglophone literature by colonized subjects and emigrants negotiates diasporic spaces to create imagined communities or a sense of home. Themes explored within these pages include restlessness, tensions, trauma, ambiguities, assimilation, estrangement, myth, nostalgia, sentimentality, homesickness, national schizophrenia, divided loyalties, intellectual capital, and geographical interstices. Special attention is paid to the complex ways identity is negotiated by immigrants to Anglophone countries writing in English about their home-abroad experience. The lived experiences of emigrants of the diaspora create a literature rife with tensions concerning identity, language, and belongingness in the struggle for home. Focusing on writers in particular geopolitical spaces, the essays in the collection offer an active conversation with leading theorizers of the diaspora and the transnational, including Edward Said, Bill Ashcroft, William Safran, Gabriel Sheffer, Stuart Hall, Homi Bhabha, Frantz Fanon, and Benedict Anderson.

This volume cuts across the broad geopolitical space of the Anglophone world of literature and cultural studies and will appeal to professors, scholars, graduate, and undergraduate students in English, comparative literature, history, ethnic and race studies, diaspora studies, migration, and transnational studies. The volume will also be an indispensable aid to public policy experts.

Acknowledgments

Preface
Elaine Savory
The New School

Introduction
Jude V. Nixon
Salem State University
Mariaconcetta Costantini
G. d’ Annunzio University, Italy

Chapter 1
Trauma and Chronotopic Displacement in Ty Pak’s Guilt Payment
Teodora Domotor
Karoli Gaspar University, Budapest, Hungary

Chapter 2
The House and the Home: Gender in Diaspora in Monica Ali's Brick Lane and Nadeem Aslam's Maps for Lost Lovers
Natacha Lasorak
École Normale Supérieure, Lyon, France

Chapter 3
Representations of the African Diaspora in Ben Okri’s Fiction
Mariaconcetta Costantini
G. d’ Annunzio University, Italy

Chapter 4
Spaces of Masculine Intimacies in Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners
Fadila Habchi
Yale University

Chapter 5
“The Germans Live in Germany; the Romans Live in Rome; the Turkeys Live in Turkey, but the English Live at Home”: Periodicals’ Role in Exporting the British Home Ideal
Megan Burke Witzleben
Hilbert College

Chapter 6
Home Cooking: Diaspora and Transnational Anglophone Caribbean Cookbooks
Keja Valens
Salem State University

Chapter 7
Unhomely Poetics: Derek Walcott’s The Prodigal and Virgil’s Aeneid
Hannah Karmin
Cornell University

Chapter 8
“[E]ither I’m nobody, or I’m a nation”: Home, History, and the Diasporic Transnational in Derek Walcott’s Omeros
Jude V. Nixon
Salem State University

Afterword
Karen Minott
Independent scholar

Contributors

Index

Jude V. Nixon is Professor of English at Salem State University, habilitated professor in the Polish Academy. His areas of teaching and research are Victorian literature and culture, and Caribbean literature. He has published extensively on the Victorians, especially on Gerard Manley Hopkins, John Henry Newman, Thomas Carlyle, and Charles Dickens, appearing in journals such as “Victorian Poetry,” “Victorian Studies,” the “Carlyle Studies Annual”, the “Dickens Studies Annual,” “Times Literary Supplement,” the “Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, Texas Study in Literature and Language, Modern Philology,” and “The Hopkins Quarterly.” Author/Editor of four books on Hopkins and Victorian science, culture, and religion, Professor Nixon is editor of the “Sermons and Spiritual Writings” (Oxford 2018). Professor Nixon servers on several editorial boards, among them “Victorian Poetry,” “The Hopkins Quarterly,” the “Dickens Studies Annual,” “MIND” (Poland), “Merope” (Italy), and “AngloSophia - Studies in English Literature and Culture” (Italy).

Mariaconcetta Costantini is Professor of English Literature at G. d’Annunzio University of Chieti-Pescara, Italy, and, from 2021, Visiting Professor at Bishop Grosseteste University, Lincoln, UK. Her areas of research and teaching are Victorian literature and culture, and postcolonial literature. She has published six monographs, articles, and book chapters. Her publications also include essays on contemporary fiction and Anglophone writers, with particular attention to African authors (Ben Okri, Chinua Achebe, Dennis Brutus). She has explored different aspects of Okri’s oeuvre, given papers on him, and published articles, book chapters, and a monograph (“Behind the Mask. A Study of Ben Okri’s Fiction,” 2002). Professor Costantini serves on several editorial boards both in Italy and abroad, among them “Gothic Studies,” “The Hopkins Quarterly,” “Crime Fiction Studies,” “Italian Americana.” She is co-editor of the book series “AngloSophia. Studies in English Literature and Culture” and the online peer-reviewed journal “Victorian Popular Fictions.”

ambiguities, anglophone, assimilation, colonialism, diaspora, estrangement, exile, gender, geopolitics, home, home abroad, identity, imagined communities, imperialism, migration, myth, nostalgia, postcolonialism, race, slavery, spaces, transnationalism, trauma, unhomeliness