Metaphor and Diaspora in Contemporary Writing
Edited by Jonathan P.A. Sell
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan Limited, 2012
'A lively, varied and contentious contribution to the field' - James Procter, Reader in Modern English and Postcolonial Literature, University of Newcastle, UK
Choose ten major contemporary diasporic writers, ask ten leading authorities to write about their use of metaphor, and this is the result: a timely reassertion of metaphor's unrivalled capacity to encompass sameness and difference and create understanding and empathy across boundaries of nationality, race and ethnicity. Essays on Nadeem Aslam, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Mohsin Hamid, Hanif Kureishi, Andrea Levy, V. S. Naipaul, Caryl Phillips, Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith and Chris Stewart not only open up their private thought-worlds but also uncover structural metaphors of diasporic experience and show how metaphor, far from being a merely literary figure, may be used (and
abused) for political purposes, for defining and preserving a sense of identity, and for surviving in an often hostile world. In the process, the diasporic subject itself emerges as metaphorical by nature, constantly seeking its own meaning as it shuttles back and forth in its imagination between recollected homeland and adopted home.
CONTENTS:
Introduction: Metaphor and Diaspora
Tropes of Diasporic Life in the Work of Nadeem Aslam
Becoming Foreign: Tropes of Migrant Identity in Three Novels by Abdulrazak Gurnah
'My split self and my split world': Troping Identity in Mohsin Hamid's Fiction
'Beige outlaws': Hanif Kureishi, Miscegenation and Diasporic Experience
Metaphors of Belonging in Andrea Levy's Small Island
Ancestry, Uncertainty and Dislocation in V. S. Naipaul's Half a Life
Jewish/Postcolonial Diasporas in the Work of Caryl Phillips
Metaphors of the Secular in the Fiction of Salman Rushdie
White Teeth's Embodied Metaphors: the Moribund and the Living
Orpheus in the Alpujarras: Metaphors of Arrival in Chris Stewart's Driving Over Lemons
References
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January 2012 Hardback £50.00 978-0-230-31422-1
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