Blurred Identities: Investigating Language and Memory as Locations of Identity and Culture in Amara Lakhous' Scontro di civiltà per un ascensore a Piazza Vittorio and Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez
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2013
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Bi-College (Haverford and Bryn Mawr Colleges). Comparative Literature Program
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eng
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Bi-College users only
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Abstract
While varied forms of migration have always existed, the last few decades have witnessed vast displacements and resettlements of many populations. World and ethnic wars, the dissolution of nations, environmental fluctuations, and the increasing wealth disparities between nations have all contributed to the growing number of exilic populations. In addition, the world has also contracted in its perceived expanse as a consequence of improved technologies, which have provided a facility of communication and mobility across borders. Thus exile, a term that has often been perceived as a unifying condition suffered by populations of ‘immigrants,’ ‘emigrants,’ ‘emigres,’and ‘refugees,’ has become an increasingly universal experience. Amara Lakhous and Richard Rodriguez, two authors who have encountered the liberties and constraints pertaining to the modern exile, have demonstrated their precarious condition of “in-betweenness” in their respective works. As modern exilic authors, they are concerned with the preservation of identity and cultural history in the face of a destination country that does not resemble their own and misunderstands the ‘other’. As they attempt to balance two opposing cultures, language and memory become crucial modes for both accessing the past and assimilating within the host culture. Lakhous and Rodriguez demonstrate that the exilic author is a classification under construction, which complicates the limited boundaries of nation and national literature, and the experience of migration.