| abstract | Talking about the specific position of the migrant writer, Salman Rushdie
claims that “if literature is in part the business of finding new angles at which
to enter reality, then once again our distance, our long geographical perspective,
may provide us with such angles” (Rushdie 1991, 15). According to Rosemary
Marangoly George’s (1996) definition, migrant literature is indeed the contemporary
literary writing in which the politics of location and/or dislocation
is central to the narrative. More particularly, in line with postmodern transnational
thinking, migrant literature has a specific way of thematizing and deconstructing
the traditional meaning of the private and the public, the near
and the far, the past and the future. Contemporary migrant literature, therefore,
is best read as a sub-genre within postmodern writing and postmodern
times in which the theme of dislocation and homelessness is prevalent in a variety of forms.
In order to map out these themes of location and dislocation,
however, post-colonial criticism has tended to limit its focus only to
the metaphor of the journey and the diaspora. Yet within the diaspora, new
connections are made between places, so that the relationship between center
and periphery as it exists, for instance, between the colonial power and
the former colonies, is changed. In my essay, I illustrate the fruitfulness of
thinking about the effects of the diaspora by focusing on the concepts at the
other extreme. This broader approach centralizes the poetics of place,
metaphorically summarized as the poetics of home. |
