Shifting Identity/ies in the Literature of Arab Immigration and Exile: Hanan Al-Shaykh’s Hikayat Zahra (The Story of Zahra) as a Case Study

Abstract

In this age of mass migration, refugee crises, and global mobility, it could be argued that the experience of displacement, relocation, migration, and diaspora is no longer the exception but the rule. The tension between the centre and the periphery, the ‘homeland’ and the ‘host land’ raises, time and again, familiar issues of belonging, allegiance, affinity, estrangement and alienation. It is on this perspective- following various paths among which the postcolonial theory- that the aim of this paper is to try to shed light, and more precisely on the notion of “shifting identity/ies”/concepts of identity and difference based on Hanan Al-Shaykh’s  Hikayat Zahra/The Story of Zahra .This paper hopes to answer the following question raised in the novel “Does the émigré become abnormal once he has departed his own land?”

Keywords : migration-global- diaspora-postcolonial theory-identity-shifting-alienation

DOI: 10.7176/JLLL/92-02

Publication date:October 31^st 2022