Displaced civilizations: Memory, belonging, and cultural survival in migrant narratives from the Middle East and Africa
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.48162/rev.53.023Keywords:
diasporic literature, trauma, identity, postcolonial theory, cultural survivalAbstract
The paper is a critical examination of the literary figuration of displacement as an ontological civilizational disjunction in contemporary African and Middle Eastern diasporic literature. Going beyond prevailing paradigms of hybridity and identity negotiation, the paper contends that exile in these texts is not just spatial or psychological dislocation, but also the collapse of ancestral epistemologies, cosmologies, and long-term cultural continuities. Drawing on an interdisciplinary theoretical framework that brings together postcolonial theory, trauma studies, and discourse on memory, the article suggests the concept of displaced civilizations to explain how migrant texts function as aesthetic archives of endangered cultural worlds. Through close comparative readings of a selection of the novels of Tayeb Salih, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Leila Aboulela, Dinaw Mengestu, Rawi Hage, and Hisham Matar, this study examines the central roles played by memory, language, religion, and storytelling as complex strategies of resistance, self-survival, and cultural reconstruction. Ultimately, it positions literature as a crucial site wherein civilizational memory is not only mourned but actually reimagined and remade in the context of rupture and exile.
Downloads
References
Aboulela, L. (2005). The translator. Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Adichie, C. N. (2013). Americanah. Alfred A. Knopf.
Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The location of culture. Routledge.
Boehmer, E. (2005). Colonial and postcolonial literature: Migrant metaphors. Oxford University Press.
Boym, S. (2001). The future of nostalgia. Basic Books.
Brah, A. (1996). Cartographies of diaspora: Contesting identities. Routledge.
Cohen, R. (2008). Global diasporas: An introduction (2nd ed.). Routledge
Gilroy, P. (1993). The black Atlantic: Modernity and double consciousness. Harvard University Press.
Glissant, É. (1997). Poetics of relation (B. Wing, Trans.). University of Michigan Press. (Original work published 1990)
Hage, R. (2008). Cockroach. House of Anansi Press.
Hall, S. (1990). Cultural identity and diaspora. In J. Rutherford (Ed.), Identity: Community, culture, difference (pp. 222–237). Lawrence & Wishart.
Hirsch, M. (2012). The generation of postmemory: Writing and visual culture after the Holocaust. Columbia University Press.
Huyssen, A. (2003). Present pasts: Urban palimpsests and the politics of memory. Stanford University Press.
Massad, J. A. (2007). Desiring Arabs. University of Chicago Press.
Matar, H. (2006). In the country of men. Viking.
Mbembe, A. (2001). On the postcolony. University of California Press.
Mengestu, D. (2007). The beautiful things that heaven bears. Grove Press.
Naficy, H. (2001). An accented cinema: Exilic and diasporic filmmaking. Princeton University Press.
Quayson, A. (2000). Strategic transformations in Nigerian writing. Cambridge University Press.
Rothberg, M. (2009). Multidirectional memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the age of decolonization. Stanford University Press.
Said, E. W. (2000). Reflections on exile and other essays. Harvard University Press.
Said, E. W. (2000a). Orientalism. Vintage Books. (Original work published 1978)
Salih, T. (2009). Season of migration to the north (D. L. Brehm, Trans.). New York Review Books Classics. (Original work published 1966).
Tölölyan, K. (2007). The contemporary discourse of diaspora studies. In W. P. Kasch & M. I. O. Delaney (Eds.), Diaspora and transnationalism: Concepts, theories and methods (pp. 123–138). Amsterdam University Press.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2025 Hadjer Ben Salem
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
