Open AccessForever Displaced?: Identity, Migration, and the Concept of Home in the Works of Manzu Islam, Neamat Imam, and Tahmima Anam
Author(s) -
Tahmina Mariyam
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
anglica
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.101
H-Index - 1
ISSN - 0860-5734
DOI - 10.7311/0860-5734.28.1.06
Subject(s) - diaspora , identity (music) , islam , dislocation , sociology , space (punctuation) , gender studies , meaning (existential) , aesthetics , history , art , epistemology , philosophy , archaeology , linguistics , materials science , composite material
This paper explores the meaning of identity and nation, home and belonging, through the study of internal and international migration in three novels. In doing so it encoun- ters the construction of collective identity in Manzu Islam’s Song of our Swampland, the dystopian dislocation in Neamat Imam’s The Black Coat and the concept of meta-home in Tahmima Anam’s The Bones of Grace. The complex, unstable space of diaspora seems ever evolving and forever shifting. Here ‘home’ becomes what Homi K. Bhabha has ex- pounded as “a mythic place of desire.” In this fluid construction of diasporic existence the paper examines the concepts of “de-territorialization,” “unhoming,” “dislocation,” “iden- tity,” and “belonging.”