BETWEEN THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA: AMBIVALENCE OF THE THIRD SPACE IN HANIF KUREISHI’S THE BLACK ALBUM AND LEILA ABOULELA’S BIRD SUMMONS

Urucu B.

ARCENG INTERNATIONAL SOCIAL SCIENCES CONGRESS, Ankara, Türkiye, 3 - 04 Şubat 2024, ss.137-1377, (Özet Bildiri)

  • Yayın Türü: Bildiri / Özet Bildiri
  • Basıldığı Şehir: Ankara
  • Basıldığı Ülke: Türkiye
  • Sayfa Sayıları: ss.137-1377
  • İstanbul Üniversitesi-Cerrahpaşa Adresli: Evet

Özet

Abstract

The interactions and entanglements with Eastern immigrants have contributed to a hybrid British identity. British people of Eastern heritage have emerged as a distinctive community with their cultural practices while also identifying as British. This in-betweenness creates an ever-becoming, incessantly incomplete, and all-fragmented liminal space in the search for an identity. Based on these premises, this study aims to read Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album and Leila Aboulela’s Bird Summons with Homi Bhabha’s Third Space theory, attempting to align the profound coexistence of lacunas and diversities depicted in the lives of shunned individuals. Kureishi, a British playwright and novelist of Pakistani descent, and Egypt-born Aboulela’s novels in this study converge in a plethora of ways, featuring an unending odyssey of impossibly sanguine mobility from the periphery to the center. Throughout this study, the third space corresponds to imaginary liminality resided by Eastern individuals living in British milieus. Since identity is produced through constant interaction with society, the second space does not allow the enunciation of the first place to function properly, entailing the presence of a third space, a newly constructed, ever-changing, never self-sufficient, imaginary space for subaltern cultures. What it means to be human in the third space connotes pejorative undertones. It could be denigrating and hard to accommodate. The study concludes that both novels illustrate individuals who oscillate between recurring patterns of faith-disbelief, hope-despair, rejection-acceptance, and submission-resistance. These shared traits offer a compelling foundation for delineating the distinctive third-space conditions in each narrative.