Migrancies and Modernities in Jamal Mahjoub’s <i>The Carrier</i>

Postcolonial fictions of dislocation and exile are many, ranging from Sam Selvon and Bessie Head to Salman Rushdie. They map the fates, paths and histories of various migrant groups, often backtracking the routes of slavery and the Middle Passage. By thematizing the representation of history, postcolonial historical novels also pay attention to resistance to European and Western colonization and traditional historical writing. This can be seen in such works as Bharati Mukherjee's The Holder of the World (1993), an AsianAmerican novel focussing on the journeying of a seventeenthcentury American woman to the courts of India, and Caryl Phillips's Crossing the River (1994), a text ranging in time and space from nineteenth-century Liberia to the American West and post-Second World War Yorkshire. In this essay I will present a reading of The Carrier (1998), a migrant novel written by the Sudanese/British novelist Jamal Mahjoub (b. I960). I will argue that migrant and diasporic identities are not restricted to the Black Triangle, but that they are present more generally in the (hi)stories told of European identities. It is my intention in this paper to show how a postcolonial text, by thematizing and racializing movement and migrancy, is able to question the alleged stability of identity and reveals the constructed nature of home peculiar to Euro-American discourses of modernity.