Online Lecture: Back home: Narratives of migration, nostalgia and cultural translation.

‘Back home: Narratives of migration, nostalgia and cultural translation in Anglophone Arab women’s literature’ - Dr Akkad Alhussein (UCL). Tuesday 27 June 2023, 1-2pm (GMT)

In migration contexts, nostalgia can be a melancholic longing for a bygone past and a lost home but also a constructive attempt to counter the rupture of migration and build a new home in the here and now. In a post-colonial literary framework, migrants’ daily negotiations of home and difference are shaped by inequalities in the distribution of power, calling for narratives that contest discourses of cultural hegemony.

The talk will explore the role of nostalgic representations of home and identity in fictional narratives of migration and displacement written by contemporary Arab women writers writing in English. I view these narratives and negotiations as fraught instances of cultural translation that emerge from writing in the language of the “other” as well as migrants’ engagement in the cross-cultural and cross-temporal production of meaning through narratives of longing and belonging that connect past and present in a hybrid space defined by minority. I base my discussion on a concept of nostalgia that recognizes both its disabling and enabling dimensions.

Hence, the talk aims at teasing out some of the entanglements of Anglophone Arab women writers’ depictions of nostalgic narratives in fictive representations of the Arab migration experience as cultural encounter. The questions that I ask are: What are the overarching tropes and (counter)narratives that underly these configurations of home and dislocation? What framing strategies are involved and with what consequences for the construction of otherness?