Transnational spaces, transitional places : Muslimness in contemporary literary imaginations

This dissertation focuses on contemporary literature in English produced by writers of Muslim origin. My study analyzes Laila Lalami's The Moor's Account (2014), Leila Abuela's The Kindness of Enemies (2015), Diana Abu-Jaber's Crescent (2003), Elif Shafak's The Saint of Incipient Sanities (2004) and Randa Jarrar's A Map of Home (2007), and Leila Aboulela's Minaret (2005), Shelina Janmohamed's Love in a Headscarf (2009), and Tanwi Nandini Islam's Bright Lines (2015) to explore and illuminate the ways in which Muslim diasporic subjectivity is being reconfigured in contemporary literary imaginations. Guided by developments in Muslim literary studies, postcolonial and diaspora theories, this dissertation examines, from an interdisciplinary perspective, the particular conjunctures of literature, Muslimness, displacement, and belonging within the new analytic framework of Muslim diaspora space. This project seeks to move beyond the set of discourses -- radicalization vs. secularization; Islamism vs. liberalism-- that have defined Muslimness to highlight alternative positionalities in between. My analyses of the chosen texts through the lens of Muslim diaspora space, I argue, shift the focus from the preconceived notions about the authors' positionality as Muslim to the ways in which they create complex characters that represent the variety of Muslim discourses and practices. Rather than focusing on such over-asked questions as "Is the text Islamic or secular?" and "Western or Muslim?," Muslim diaspora space as a mode of analysis highlights how the writers negotiate the concepts of Islamic vs. secular and Muslim vs. citizen by redefining "Muslimness" as well as "western-ness."

ONLINE TRUST IN THE CONTEXT OF GLOBAL MIGRATION: MOBILITY, SOCIALITY, AND THE PRODUCTION OF CHINESE DIASPORIC SUBJECTIVITY IN AUSTRALIA

In light of the conference theme, Trust in the system, this panel brings together three papers that explore the (trans)formation of Chinese diasporic subjectivity through the intellectual lens of online dis/trust. As Gidden (2010) argues, trust is a shared social reality. Such a sense of collectively is being ‘stretched’ across national borders and cultural boundaries. Fewer explore the dis/trust and the associated concepts of authenticity and credibility against a transnational and cross-border environment. By transnationality, we refer to the increased level of mobility of the material goods, financial capitals and social networks of contemporary migrants. In other words, they live a life that is constantly ‘transiting’ between national, social and cultural borders rather than having to choose a static sense of belonging. The three papers are then, organised to explore the transnational characters of Chinese migrants’ lives in Australia, from financial and economic survival to dating and socialisation, and the re-exploration of selfhood and belonging at later life. The three papers draw on different research methods range from ethnographic interviews and participant observation to the online walkthrough method and interface studies, and to the researcher embedded approach, to form critical inquiries about the production of trust in a digital era from the perspective of transnational migrations. In examining the different stages of life and the plurality of Chinese migrants in Australia, this panel has the potential to contribute to the broader conversation in online trusts in a global, polymedia era.

War, Trauma, Displacement, Diaspora

This chapter examines Toni Morrison’s and Caryl Phillips’s portraits of African American troops in World War I, World War II, and Vietnam. These authors’ stories of African American soldiers and veterans bring together two topic areas that may, at first glance, seem to have little to do with each other: war and diaspora. This chapter interrogates the complex relationship between diasporic subjectivity and national citizenship. Utilizing Caruthian trauma theory, it reveals how Morrison, in Sulaand Tar Baby, and Phillips, in Crossing the River, subtly link their narratives of temporary traumatic displacement on foreign battlefields with the historical ur-trauma of diasporic dislocation. In these novels, the wounds that the Middle Passage and slavery inflicted on black diasporic bodies and psyches metaphorically bleed into, and coalesce with, traumas and post-traumatic conditions resulting from black participation in modern warfare—participation that both Morrison and Phillips depict in terms of young black men being sent abroad to fight destructive and traumatizing wars that are not theirs to fight. The literal and metaphorical connections that Morrison and Phillips forge between war and diaspora in various ways call attention to the greed and large-scale violence that have all too often accompanied the Western project of modernity.

An African American Journey to Black Diasporic Consciousness

This chapter demonstrates that Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage participates in the ongoing construction of black diasporic identity or consciousness by offering a philosophically and spiritually informed thematic narrative of the formation of a black diasporic subject. By the novel’s end, the protagonist arrives at an analytically and emotionally processed awareness of his identity position as a member of the African diaspora, recognizes that both rupture and connection characterize his relationship with Africanity, and acknowledges the necessity of an ever-continuing existential journey. This chapter also reveals that transformed/liberated perception and transformed/liberated consciousness are inextricably intertwined in Middle Passage. Owing to this connection, Johnson bolsters his narrative of the formation of diasporic subjectivity (a narrative of the formation of one type of transformed/liberated consciousness) by conversing with the role of perception in Melville’s Benito Cereno, in phenomenology, and in Buddhism. Finally, this chapter emphasizes that Johnson’s phenomenologically and Buddhistically informed emphasis on the malleability of black diasporic identity offers a counterargument to black cultural nationalistic positions, which he sees as propagating fixed, static notions of blackness.