Kinship in the Age of Mobility and Technology: Migrant Family Mobilities in the Contemporary Global Novel (Palgrave Studies in Mediating Kinship, Representation, and Difference) 3030698882, 9783030698881

Citation preview

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN MEDIATING KINSHIP, REPRESENTATION, AND DIFFERENCE

Kinship in the Age of Mobility and Technology Migrant Family Mobilities in the Contemporary Global Novel Lamia Tayeb

Palgrave Studies in Mediating Kinship, Representation, and Difference

Series Editors May Friedman, School of Social Work, Ryerson University, Toronto, ON, Canada Silvia Schultermandl, Department of American Studies, University of Graz, Graz, Austria

This book series brings together analyses of familial and kin relationships with emerging and new technologies which allow for the creation, maintenance and expansion of family. We use the term “family” as a working truth with a wide range of meanings in an attempt to address the feelings of family belonging across all aspects of social location: ability, age, race, ethnicity, nationality, sexuality, gender identity, body size, social class and beyond. This book series aims to explore phenomena located at the intersection of technologies including those which allow for family creation, migration, communication, reunion and the family as a site of difference. The individual volumes in this series will offer insightful analyses of the representations of these phenomena in media, social media, literature, popular culture and corporeal settings.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15789

Lamia Tayeb

Kinship in the Age of Mobility and Technology Migrant Family Mobilities in the Contemporary Global Novel

Lamia Tayeb Higher Institute of Human Sciences of Tunis University of Tunis El Manar Tunis, Tunisia

Palgrave Studies in Mediating Kinship, Representation, and Difference ISBN 978-3-030-69888-1 ISBN 978-3-030-69889-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69889-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Ekely, Getty Images. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Badis and Driss

Acknowledgements

My initial idea behind this project has been to take a postcolonial and global migration perspective on the questions of kinship and the family, and to combine the fields of literature and anthropology. Taking an ethnographic unit of research, the transnational family, has been a great challenge for me given my academic training in literature and criticism, and the entire project would not have been completed without the valuable guidance and unflinching support of Dr. May Friedman, Ryerson University, and Dr. Silvia Schultermandl, University of Gratz, the editors of the book series, “Palgrave Studies in Mediating Kinship, Representation and Difference”. In email exchanges, May and Silvia have always been available to offer illuminating feedback and guiding commentary on my project. The shape this book has finally taken is certainly the product of their close monitoring. I am also indebted to other people whose help and cooperation made the completion of this book possible. I thank my colleagues in the English Department at the Higher Institute of Human Sciences of Tunis, in particular Dr. Faiza Draoui, Head of the English Department, for approving the sabbatical leave during which the major part of this project has been carried out. I thank Dr. Nadia Marzouki, Dr. Asma Hichri, Dr. Amel Ben Ahmed, Dr. Samira Mechri, Dr. Rim Triki, Dr. Abid Abidi and Dr. Aida Ben Ahmed for offering precious help. Since this book builds on research work carried out over the last eight years, I thank the people who have given me the opportunity to take literature courses and interact with

vii

viii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

students on varied issues. I thank Prof. Nejet Mchala, Head of Master in Transcultural Studies at the Institut Supérieur des Langues de Tunis, for inviting me to take part in teaching and supervision. I am also grateful to Dr. Salwa Karoui Ounelli, Head of the Agrégation program in English at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Tunis, for giving me the opportunity to teach Anglophone literature courses in which I carried out research on a number of issues directly relevant to this book. I also thank all my students in the Master program in Intercultural Studies since its implementation in 2011 for their stimulating engagement with learning and research in the fields of global literature, migration studies and globalisation, direct contexts in which I place the transnational family in this book. I am finally indebted to my husband, Ahmed Naoual, who supported me since the beginning of this project, read parts of my book and offered feedback on the overall direction of my work.

Contents

1

2

3

4

Material and Representational Mobilities: Disciplinary Convergences and Epistemological Encounters 1.1 Multidisciplinary Dialogues 1.2 Literature and Globalisation/Planetarity References Kinship, Migrant Mobilities and Global Technologies 2.1 Blood Relations in the Age of Biotechnology 2.2 Territory in the Age of Mobility 2.3 Community in the Information Age: From Societies to Mobilities References

1 4 19 26 33 34 38 46 56

Postcolonial Migrant Mobilities: Hanif Kureishi’s and Zadie Smith’s Transcultural Families 3.1 From Nuclear Families to Urban Practices of the Family: Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia 3.2 The Century of Immigration and Biotechnology: Zadie Smith’s Millenial Families References

77 93

Cultural and Emotional Mobilities: Monica Ali’s and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Transnational Wives and Families

97

61

64

ix

x

CONTENTS

4.1

Migration and the Im/Mobility of a Bengali Wife and Mother in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane 4.2 “Motherhood in a Foreign Land”: The Indian–American Family and Diaspora in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake References 5

6

Planetary Mobilities: Khaled Hosseini’s and Nadia Hashimi’s Forced Mobilities and Geographies of Trauma 5.1 “Peering” into the Gates of “My Father’s House”: Home, Kinship and Memory in Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner 5.2 Released into the “World”: “Biogenetic”/Human Kinship and Abandonment in Khaled Hosseini’s And the Mountains Echoed 5.3 In Search of a Mother/Land: Afghanistan’s “Lost” Children in Nadia Hashimi’s When the Moon Is Low References Conclusion: Towards a Planetary Field of Relation and Cohabitation References

Index

102

119 137

143

145

159 175 187 191 199 201

CHAPTER 1

Material and Representational Mobilities: Disciplinary Convergences and Epistemological Encounters

Transnational mobility which gained momentum towards the end of the twentieth century and seems to have escalated in the last two decades has radically changed societies and nations and is transforming the “world” at the macroeconomic, macropolitical and sociocultural levels. At smaller, more personal and private scales, it has radically reshaped the family and the set of intimate ties, power dynamics, and economic, social and cultural relations mediating it. Today’s families are variably affected by global cultural flow enabled by the new transportation and information technologies, global labour migration set apace by the demands of global capitalist economy, and the involuntary mobilities engendered by local political turbulences and wars. Whether sedentary, migrant or nomadic, the family is today losing its settled character: either crossed by different forms of global flow, or compelled to manage its internal and external relations over extensive geographical and social fields. In short, the family is everywhere a transnational cluster of relations inseparable of technology and its disruptive, enabling or mediating roles. In my study of migrant family mobilities and their literary representations, I approach the family as a transnational, translocal, multiply situated and always becoming cluster of individuals and relations. Combining insights from the recent turn to process and change in kinship anthropology, the recent transnational turn in migration studies, and the New Mobilities © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Tayeb, Kinship in the Age of Mobility and Technology, Palgrave Studies in Mediating Kinship, Representation, and Difference, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69889-8_1

1

2

L. TAYEB

Paradigm in sociology, I work towards building a processual, performative and ethico-political understanding of transnational families and deterritorialised family relations. Historically, migration is situated in the age of mobility and technology, which is part of an attempt to go beyond the postcolonial view of the world as a neatly divided and hierarchised system easily distributed along the economist core-periphery model, or its late twentieth-century culturalist counterpart setting a global and cosmopolitan west against a local rest. The study of globalisation, or world “compression” (Robertson, 1990, p. 25) during the last decade of the twentieth century, moved from early economist accounts of the “world system” to cultural accounts linking global interdependence to the weakening of nations and regarding cultural flow outside the local sphere of national society as a defining feature of the emergent notion of the global, human society (see Arnason, 1990; Appadurai, 1996; Friedman, 1990; Robertson, 1990; Smith, 1990; Wallerstein, 1990, 1997). Both late postcolonial theory and theories of globalisation and transnationalism are important frames of my study of migrant family mobilities. Yet, given the fast-changing nature of our times, I propose to bring the New Mobilities Paradigm—with its expanded interest in embodied, emotional and micro, everyday mobilities, its perceptive awareness of the dialectic of mobility and immobility, and its annexing of technology—into the analysis of today’s mobile, transnational families (Sheller & Urry, 2006; Hannam et al., 2006). In other words, I seek to expand the theorising of mobility, fluidity and cultural change in both late postcolonial studies and globalisation studies by incorporating conceptual innovations in some recent social and anthropological research, particularly Janet Carten’s concept of relatedness, the concept of transmigration in the transnational approach to im/migration and the new theorizing of mobility in Sheller and Urry’s New Mobilities Paradigm (Carsten, 2000, 2004; Glick Schiller et al., 1992; Levitt & Glick Schiller, 2004; Sheller & Urry, 2006). Defining the present era as the age of mobility and technology should not be understood as a seamless view of humanity or a total dispensing with power inequalities in today’s world. On the contrary, present-day global mobilities and technologies are inseparable from colonial and postcolonial histories with their multiplex relations of power and complex processes of cultural (inter)change. Their study is also imperatively tied into an understanding of western modernity and its rise out of synergies of empire, capital and technology. The following study takes into account

1

MATERIAL AND REPRESENTATIONAL MOBILITIES …

3

the history of western modernity and the colonial and postcolonial mobilities it set about. It tracks down personal and familial mobility histories entangled with the history of twentieth-century world connectivity which culminated in what has come to be called the global age. I focus on three types of migrant family mobilities represented in a selection of contemporary global novels: postcolonial post-war migration, the current globalisation of labour and the recent spread of refugeeism and forced mobilities. Post-war reconstruction in Western Europe led to the flow of mainly unskilled labour to metropolitan centres and gave rise to such phenomena as racial and cultural hybridity, and multicultural individuals, families, and nations; This early pattern has, in the last few decades, given way to the globalisation of labour, the creation of a global job market to satisfy global capital’s constant demand for experts and labour hands. This is inseparable from the spread of the new information and communication technologies enabling virtual access to the “world” and career opportunities therein, and the ever-increasing availability of affordable transport for individuals and families willing to embark on transnational life plans. Today’s labour migration is one of the multiple forms which global mobility can take and is giving rise to such phenomena as immigrant diasporas, transnational or translocal connectivity, short-term and multidirectional mobility, as well as return migrations. Finally, geopolitical conflicts and national or regional political turbulences are a major motor of the global phenomenon of forced migration and refugees. War or economic insecurity in one national location or world region may push individuals and families to leave their homelands and seek refuge in other countries, notably the western world or Europe as an imagined haven of peace and (economic) security. The three types of migrant mobilities outlined above will be used as frames of reference in the study of literary representations of the transnational family in a selection of global novels from the late twentieth century to the early twenty-first century, namely Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000), Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003), Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake (2003), Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner (2003) and And the Mountains Echoed (2013) and Nadia Hashmi’s When the Moon Is Low (2015). Despite the fact that the novels’ representational mobilities do not fall neatly into either one category or another, taking into account the twentieth century changing trends and patterns of mobility enables the larger and macro view of migrant mobilities to come into stronger light. Indeed, the novels can be

4

L. TAYEB

seen as family sagas or personal histories projecting collective worlds and questions. They represent the multiple mobilities of migrant and ethnic minority families in Britain and the United States as well as Afghan families displaced and dispersed by political upheavals. My choice of the texts is determined by the family and migrant mobility focus, in addition to the authors’ attention to the global socio-economic, political and technological forces shaping the transnational lives of individuals and families in a world that can no longer be subsumed within the sphere of the national. Individuals may appear to be deeply entrenched in a particular location and to have an intense national consciousness and sense of identity, yet they have transnational connections (in the form of a vague kinship to a distant homeland or strong bonds to family relatives left back home). Their transnational networks of relation force onto them consciousness of the global historical forces which impact them in the present, and awareness of the world as a new planetary space within which they are now both closely and distantly connected. In the rest of this introductory chapter, I aim to clarify the two major cross-disciplinary dialogues on which this study is based: first, I introduce the interlinking of three distinct fields of anthropological and sociological enquiry, the New Kinship Studies, transnational migration studies and the New Mobilities Paradigm with their diverse dealings with technology as the primary actor in social change; second, I argue for the combination of material and representational mobilities and the use of narratives and literary accounts as bases of ethnographic and sociological research. Finally, I briefly introduce the emerging notions of global literature and planetary art and criticism.

1.1

Multidisciplinary Dialogues

As mentioned earlier, this book is based on two major disciplinary convergences between, on the one hand, kinship anthropological studies, the sociology and ethnography of family migration, and mobilities research, and, on the other, material mobilities and their literary representations; these will, in turn, spell some fruitful epistemological encounters informed by the emerging posthuman discourse. Cutting with the rational disembodied and autonomous subject of humanism and the bios-centred subject of anthropocentrism, critical posthumanism, as Rosi Braidotti defines it, is a “nomadic”, “supra-disciplinary” approach born of the recent “convergence” of posthuman and post-anthropocentric enquiry

1

MATERIAL AND REPRESENTATIONAL MOBILITIES …

5

within the technology-driven system of “advanced”, “cognitive capitalism”; it is also conceptually invigorated by a vital, neomaterialist, zoecentred “epistemology of becoming” (Braidotti, 2018, pp. 1–2, 10–13, 17). Throughout this book, I base my study of material and representational mobilities on the nomadic and hybrid cross-disciplinarity regarded by Braidotti as the hallmark of the critical posthumanities; at the same time, I base my understanding of personal and family mobilities on a posthuman, processual and performative conception of the subject, reckoning with the embodied, non-discursive and intuitive realm of affect and the range of man–machine and man–animal relations making up the human. In other words, I approach my real and fictional travellers as transversal, performative subjects whose nomadic becoming in the world is not entirely coded by discourse but is largely determined by man– machine assemblages and zoe, the vital force of life associated with the body and its responses and linking the human to its cross-species others (Braidotti, p. 18). 1.1.1

Kinship Studies, Migration Studies, the New Mobilities Paradigm

My literary-ethnographic unit of study can variably be designated as the (ethnic) minority, immigrant, diasporic, transcultural or transnational family. I choose the alternative denomination, migrant family mobilities, to signal my intention, on the one hand, to read migration from a broader mobilities perspective, thereby freeing it from the dualism of home and host country and opening it onto a potentially planetary field of relation, and on the other, explore the transformative impact of migration on its presumed antithesis, kinship and the family. The endpoint is to study the paradoxical ties between spaces/places and the set of mobile and becoming relations that continue to emplace individuals within families and larger communities; none of these relations is separable from the global technologies of our contemporary world. Social and anthropological enquiry has recently integrated technology into its study of social phenomena and processes since today’s processes of kinship interrelating are unthinkable without the old and new technologies of a post-industrial world. In what follows, I relate the disciplinary convergence on which the present study is based to three focal areas of global technological innovation: biotechnologies, transportation technologies and old and new information and communication technologies. I simultaneously introduce

6

L. TAYEB

the rapprochement between kinship and migration in the context of major conceptual and methodological shifts at the turn of the century before explaining what is meant by a bringing of mobilities research into their study. During the last decade of the twentieth century, kinship anthropology witnessed the destabilising of one of its basic assumptions, the grounding of “biogenetic” kinship in an unquestionable natural stratum. A major shift has then taken place as a result of internal disciplinary developments in the wake of David Schneider’s questioning of the notion of “blood”, and external developments related to the emergence of new reproductive technologies in the field of genetics and biotechnology, notably their unprecedented capacity to interfere with the sphere of nature. In After Kinship, Janet Carsten defines this shift in terms of a blurring of the anthropological distinction between nature and culture, a questioning of the assumed biological basis of “social” kinship (2004, p. 6). This idea is at the centre of David Schneider’s A Critique of the Study of Kinship (1984), a seminal text which has questioned the foundational concepts of kinship theory, namely genealogy, filiation and the family: far from being based on universal human biology, these concepts are “cultural” and, therefore, specific to the west and relative. Schneider’s critique instigated a total rethinking of kinship studies away from “relationship terminologies” and formal rules of descent, alliance and residence (Carsten, 2000, p. 2). Kinship’s further entanglement with technology came to tarnish the purity and sanctity of a natural stratum in which cultural phenomena find their secure foundation. Previously, kinship was only thinly related to the scientific field of biology since it was established as the cultural study of the given facts of nature, namely the creation of symbolic blood ties and social organisations on the basis of natural procreation. Late twentieth-century developments in biotechnology, such as the rise of molecular biology, genetic engineering and reproductive (bio)technologies, came to muddle kinship’s natural basis: reproduction is now understood in terms of transferred or medically transferrable “substance”, while kinship is moved from the private and secret sphere of naturally given procreation to the public and extra visual sphere of medically assisted procreation technologies. The establishment of legalised procedures as sperm or egg donation, gestational surrogacy and paternity tests came to confuse biogenetic and social kinships. Further, a technoscientific capacity to transform nature by acting on its genetic base came to tamper with the natural integrity of organisms and species and create

1

MATERIAL AND REPRESENTATIONAL MOBILITIES …

7

a disturbing parallel between cultural homogenisation in the global age and the much-dreaded reduction of natural diversity in the biotech age (Franklin, 2000; Rifkin, 1998; Strathern, 1992). Alongside this shift, kinship anthropology witnessed the disintegration of its classical object of study, namely non-western traditional or tribal societies. New trends developed in response to two major problems: a conceptual problem with the subject matter of anthropology, culture (given the complexity of culture and cultural interaction in our contemporary global world), and a methodological problem related to the dissolution of small-scale societies and the consequent emergence of two unmanageable fields of ethnographic research, the ‘urban centre’ and the multisites of transnational ethnography. In response to such challenges, anthropological enquiry gradually shifted away from static structures to the processes of global cultural flow and the cultural complexity of groups. By the same token, kinship studies moved away from “explanations of social stability” (Carsten, 2000, p. 2) towards addressing social transformations pertaining to the modernity paradigm (Collard, 2000, p. 636). For instance, sociocultural and technological transformations affecting the traditional nuclear family in the west shifted interest towards reconstituted families, adoptive kinship and other forms of family relatedness in which ties are “achieved” rather than “ascribed” (Carsten, 2007b, p. 404). In short, a combination of external social transformations in both western and traditional societies and internal methodological and epistemological transformations (Collard, p. 636) contributed to the shift towards a “processual approach to kinship focusing on the practices and understandings by which relationships are constructed in everyday social life rather than on abstract or idealized rules” (Gillespie, 2000, p. 1). From the 1990s onward, the new kinship studies may be seen to go in two opposite directions: in the “micro perspective”, the once excluded small processes of kinship and family (everyday, intimate experiences, the affective dynamics of relationships, memories of the past and general temporal dynamics) come to the fore. Both experiences over time and affective relationships in/to space are foregrounded and “the close-up, experiential dimension” is privileged (Carsten, 2004, p. 9). In addition to and rather complementing the “micro perspective”, the “macro perspective” involves a broadening of the scope of analysis to allow the large processes of society, culture, political and economic affairs to come into view (Lamphere, 2001, p. 38). The knowledge that the anthropologist

8

L. TAYEB

seeks to construct is no longer knowledge of social structures or selfcontained, detemporised communities, but of “connections … between small everyday inscriptions of kinship and the self and the larger tales of polities and nations” (Carsten, 2007a, p. 84). For Louise Lamphere, the “transformed subject” of kinship in the twenty-first century will continue to combine the micro and macro perspectives (p. 38), and this inevitably leads to greater disciplinary and methodological flexibility. In sum, kinship studies at the turn of the century adapted to two “losses”, loss of the discreteness of the realms of nature and culture, and loss of an assumed integrity of place, culture and community. Similarly, the late twentieth-century transnational turn in migration studies put into question the methodological nationalism on which social and anthropological research is based, in particular the tendency to assume the co-extensiveness of societies and nations. The transnational optic in migration studies shifted the subject matter of migration studies away from assimilation towards simultaneous connection to, and situatedness in more than one national location. It is concerned with a new unit of analysis, “transmigrants”, alternatively conceptualised as individuals who “develop and maintain multiple relations – familial, economic, social, organizational, religious, and political that span borders” (Glick Schiller et al., 1992, p. 1). It foregrounds a new space of interconnection and bonding beyond home and host nations, the transnational social field, and a new temporality of migrant social life, the simultaneity of ties and connections (Glick Schiller et al., 1992, Levitt & Glick Schiller, 2004; Vertovec, 2001). As such, it posits transnationality as a complex, multiple and fluid social identity. Since transmigrants maintain active social relations in their homelands and simultaneously establish social networks of connection in the host country, they develop a “transnational profile” that is to be distinguished from the diasporic profile and identity; their transnational identity rests on their capacity “to not only master both languages (host and origin) but also come into contact and have the social skills to establish connections with people and communities from both the host and origin country” (Bradatan et al., 2010, p. 174). Such simultaneous cross-border connections are of course unworkable without the recent developments in transport and communications technologies, namely the democratisation, routinisation and greater frequency of transnational travel. Late twentieth-century developments in air flight, marine navigation and high-speed train technologies engendered what Paul Virilio named a “dromological revolution”, in which time vanquishes

1

MATERIAL AND REPRESENTATIONAL MOBILITIES …

9

space by negating it and “defeat[s] … the world as a field, as distance, as matter”. Late twentieth-century high-speed travel has the capacity to free individuals and geographically separated family members of the constraints of distance; it also contracts the world and engenders an “extreme reduction of contact time, a fearsome friction of places and elements” that eventually homogenises the world by dissolving not only “what separated, but also distinguished” (Virilio, 2006, pp. 150, 152, 157). Yet what Virilio regarded as “fearsome” because it is destructive of distances and differences is essential to the maintenance of the ties and connections which have come to make up a large part of (transnational) social life in today’s world. Further, Virilio’s dissolved distance is a fundamental feature of the virtual mobilities of our digital age. With the transformation of mid-twentieth-century mass media technologies into the now integrated information and communication technologies (ICTs), the global flow of ideas, images and information has become the hallmark of our twenty-first-century times. In addition to material mobilities, the mobility of images and imaginings plays a fundamental role in shaping today’s transnational identities and modes of being. For Appadurai, the concomitance of two phenomena, electronic media and mass migration, led to worldwide deterritorialisation of social and cultural identities (Appadurai, 1996, p. 3). At the level of individuals and families, information and communication technologies played an important role in counteracting the effects of physical displacement and mobility and reinforcing transnational ties and connections: digital technologies and the worldwide web engender an emerging twenty-first-century sense of virtual “co-presence” which either supersedes or makes up for the lack of physical co-presence (see, Baldassar et al., 2016; Licoppe, 2004; Madianou & Miller, 2012a, 2012b). Transnationalism’s emphasis on cross-border flows, networks and connections is certainly perceptive in its understanding of the nature of today’s migrant mobilities. Highlighting the disjunction between a dynamic and fluid social life and the bounded geography of the nation, it dispelled the sociological illusion of the spatial and cultural boundedness of society. Yet recent refinements in the literature of transnationalism have attempted to overcome its restricted understanding of cross-border connections and its perception of the world as divided into nation-states (Greiner & Sakdapolrak, 2013, p. 374). The goal is to expand the concept by taking into account different kinds of flow both within the nation and beyond its scale. Transnationalism must put aside “abstract” flows and

10

L. TAYEB

“a-spatial” subjectivities; it must reorient itself towards empirical engagement with the emplaced subjectivities of migrants and the role played by places and mobilities in constituting selfhood now conceived as a relational and “hybrid achievement” (Mavrommatis, 2015, p. 97; Greiner & Sakdapolrak, 2013, p. 374; Conradson & McKay, 2007, p. 167). A major refinement of the transnational paradigm is the concept of translocality which grapples with the dialectic of places, motions and actors (both human and non-human) beyond the national society logic. Expanding on transnationalism, translocality dismantles the foundational opposition in social thought between fixity and flow or sedentarism and mobility. A certain level of fixity and situatedness in the times and spaces of movement is possible while a measure of mobility (virtual, imaginary, material) is an aspect of the most sedentary existence. As such, places are both relational and dynamic: they are produced and transformed by the varied im/mobilities which cross and constitute them at any particular time. Transnational identities are also spatialised in the sense that social research is now focused on the way mobile individuals situate themselves in the concrete locations of their transnational fields, the way, in other words, they get emplaced in the various (trans-)localities they cross or territorialise on (Conradson & McKay, p. 168; Mavrommatis, p. 97). Translocalism’s concern with the geographical specificity of places— now freed of their restrictive national frames and approached at their micro, local levels—is part of an attempt to grapple with the complexity of transnational social fields: the “multilayered” and “multisited” arenas in which migrants weave webs of interconnection at the homeland, host society and global levels (King & Christou, 2011, pp. 455–456; Levitt & Jaworsky, 2007, p. 131). In terms of approach and methodological implications, the translocality framework orients research in migration towards two major directions: first, it brings within the ambit of analysis the (trans)migrants’ micro geographies of emplacements as well as the immaterial range of affective experiences, symbols and imaginaries making up the field. It sheds light on the material geographies of migration and the migrants’ networks of connection, which are in turn inseparable of the affective states and cultural imaginaries through which individual actors handle mobility and interrelation (Conradson & McKay, 2007, p. 169; see also King & Christou, pp. 455–456; Kobayashi et al., 2011; Skrbiš, 2008). Second, awareness of the complexity of transnational social fields raises the methodological problem of articulating the link between the local processes of emplacement and interconnection and the larger

1

MATERIAL AND REPRESENTATIONAL MOBILITIES …

11

dynamics of trade and power. Aware of the limitations of the multisited approach in transnational studies, Levitt and Jaworsky point in the direction of “a thick and empirically rich mapping of how global, macro-level processes interact with local lived experiences” (p. 143). As we shall see, the concern with bridging a persistent gap between micro perspectives and macro analyses is a methodological riddle in varied social science research fields adapting to the “global” and “mobile” turns. I have already placed Carsten’s processual approach to kinship in the context of a disciplinary shift towards investigating the links between the domestic spaces and personal histories of kinship and large-scale social, economic and political processes. The mobilities approach I introduce below faces a similar methodological challenge, “the systematic unbundling and formalisation of research protocols, methods and analyses that can integrate macro and micro components, rather than allowing these to continue developing separately” (D’Andrea et al., 2011, pp. 155–156). In the next section, I argue that literary texts, with their unique capacity to make the historical, social and political purview come through the personal and subjective account, may yield such integrated understanding. Bearing in mind the convergence between the conceptual and methodological shifts of kinship studies and transnational migration studies, I argue next that both disciplines may benefit from incorporating insights from the New Mobilities Paradigm which came to expand the question of mobility already established in varied disciplines along the humanities and social sciences spectrum. Notwithstanding the “interdisciplinary origins” of the concept of mobility (Aguiar et al., 2019, p. 6), I refer mainly to Sheller and Urry’s new mobilities paradigm and its three axes of innovation: first, the paradigm challenges the construction of mobility in a range of social science disciplines as deviation from a normalised sedentarism by which places, cultures and human beings are regarded as fundamentally stable, fixed and rooted. It approaches mobility as an intrinsic aspect of places and social phenomena and replaces the view of places as stable and bounded “geographical containers for social processes” with their conception as dynamic nodes within “networks of connections” (Sheller & Urry, 2006, p. 209). Second, Sheller and Urry explicitly distance themselves from the nomadic thought on which previous theories of global modernity are based and reject what they perceive as their “‘grand narrative’ of mobility, fluidity and liquidity” with its “totalising or reductive description of the contemporary world” (p. 210). Part of their new paradigm is awareness of the interdependence of travel and dwelling or mobility

12

L. TAYEB

and immobility since mobility cannot be separated from the fixed structures and actors enabling it. Going beyond the restrictive concern with romanticised cosmopolitan mobility, the new paradigm grapples with the power structures and material systems enabling or obstructing mobility: it highlights “the significance of complex interlocking mobility and mooring systems in the world today” and “the astounding fragility of complex mobility systems” endangered as they are by global risks (terrorists, viruses, toxic materials… on the move) and ensuing “urban disasters” (Hannam et al., pp. 5–6, 7). Finally, the new paradigm is multi-scalar in its approach to mobile phenomena: it is concerned with both human and non-human mobility and expands the concern with deterritorialisation and macro mobilities in globalisation studies and transnationalism by opening social research onto the field of the embodied experiences and affective states of everyday, micro mobilities and the rich layers of meaning enfolded in them (Sheller & Urry, pp. 212–214; see also Elliott & Urry, 2010). How can a mobilities approach reconfigure and inform the study of kinship and the family in the context of transnational migration? Indeed, the mobilities turn is now conceptually moving into and transforming various disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. For instance, the thematic of home and belonging in transnational migration studies is being rethought from a mobilities perspective so that belonging is no longer understood as a bonding of self and place but as “mobile” performance and practice bringing places and mobile and relational selves to bear on each other (Fallov et al., 2013, pp. 468–469). Noel Salazar equally proposes an interbreeding of cultural anthropology and mobilities: since mobility is “culturally embedded”, “moulded by cultural knowledge and practices” and since it necessarily entails the mobility of culture, anthropological enquiry must grapple with “the complex dynamics between culture and human mobility” (Salazar, 2010, pp. 55, 64). In the same vein, Clare Holdsworth undertakes a reading of the family from a mobilities perspective. Using a “family practices” approach, she conceptually reconciles mobility and the family by simultaneously freeing the family of “either structure or locality” and delinking mobility of “a pre-occupation with the doings of mobile subjects to consider the relationality of mobility” (Holdsworth, 2013, pp. 12, 33). In line with those multidisciplinary refinements, I read migration as a mobile practice thereby expanding its meaning beyond the dualism of home and host society and the one-directional logic of the migratory

1

MATERIAL AND REPRESENTATIONAL MOBILITIES …

13

journey. Using the transnational family as unit of analysis, I also combine the micro with the macro perspective, or the private and quotidian level and the level of collective histories and trans/national geographies. The narrative texts in which I explore contemporary migrant mobilities link the small processes of family life to the grand schemes of societies and nations, relate family histories of mobility to the collective mobilities of which they are part, and posit familial blood ties alongside other forms of relatedness. Through them, we get a view of the way technologydriven dynamics of change in conjunction with ideological, sociopolitical, economic, cultural and religious forces impact kinship ties and practices in our contemporary era. 1.1.2

Between the Literary and the Ethnographic

A central disciplinary convergence on which I base this book is the use of literary texts as bases of anthropological and sociological enquiry in the framework of a rapprochement between the humanities and social sciences (Aguiar et al., 2019, Merriman & Pearce, 2017). Exploring a number of imaginative literary accounts, I aim to construct ethnographic knowledge of the effects of varied migrant mobilities on familial and kinship relations throughout the latter part of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first century. One implication is that the disciplinary boundaries between social “facts” and literary “fictions”, “objective” analysis of real social worlds, and critical reading of imaginative and subjective accounts of the real, get deceptively blurred: literary texts may in the process get mistakenly read as a mirror of the “real” while the “real” may lose its empirical foothold in the material world. However, a new belief in the value of imaginative literature to sociological research in general and mobilities research in particular is beginning to take hold (Crawshaw & Fowler, 2008, p. 458; Lagji, 2019; Murray & Upstone, 2014). In what follows, I probe the valuable insights and findings that might accrue from a combination of ethnographic enquiry with the critical study of fictional accounts of families and kinship relations. Putting narrative fictions to the service of anthropological research, I also approach them as reliable accounts of human experience departing from the idea that literature is not to be excluded from the realm of science. I take the following questions as useful starting points: can sociology/anthropology glean knowledge of social processes through literary accounts or are

14

L. TAYEB

narrative fictions mere “‘proxies’ for sociological descriptions” and ethnographic fieldwork? (Carlin, 2010, p. 221). What are the limits of the rationalist, objectivist view of social science as well as the subjectivist view of literature? Indeed, the scientific status of anthropological enquiry has been thrown into doubt with the spread in the 1970s and 1980s of poststructuralist theories stressing the role of discourse in structuring and conditioning human knowledge. Since anthropological accounts are always textual descriptions of human cultures, and cultures are complex systems of meaning unfolding in the social action of individual actors, then anthropological enquiry involves both interpretation (Geertz, 1973, p. 14) and representation, discourse or writing (Clifford, 1986, p. 2). Clifford Geertz bases his interpretive anthropological approach on what he calls “the semiotic concept of culture”, which suggests an abandonment of the objectifying view in favour of culture as “webs of significance [man] himself has spun” (p. 5). From this perspective, the anthropologist does not engage in simple description of symbol systems, but formulates “second and third-order … interpretations” of native cultures (p. 15). What goes into such second-order formulations (simplification, imagination, mis/interpretation) radically changes the scientific status of anthropology from “an experimental science in search of law … [to] an interpretive one in search of meaning” (p. 5). For Geertz, then, acknowledging the complexity of cultural symbol systems and the “guessing” work that is involved in their interpretation, does not deny ethnography’s value; such value no longer depends on the measure of truthfulness or facticity of an ethnographer’s account, but “on the degree to which he is able to clarify what goes on in [faraway] places, to reduce the puzzlement” (pp. 16, 20). What we have here is a modified view of anthropology that refutes the authority of anthropological writings by boldly pronouncing that “they are fictions”, which does not mean, however, “that they are false, unfactual” (Geertz, p. 15). Blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction, without simple exchange of received meanings (seeing facts as fictions, i.e. unreal, imagined, counterfeit and “elevating” fictions to the status of facts, i.e. denying that they are always already constructions) is thus the first step towards a fruitful alliance between the literary and the ethnographic. In his introduction to Writing Culture, James Clifford proposes to push centre stage what has been overlooked in anthropological work, namely writing and text-making. Like Geertz’s interpretive anthropology,

1

MATERIAL AND REPRESENTATIONAL MOBILITIES …

15

the emphasis on writing leads Clifford to question the scientific status of anthropology, though he does not do so by dismissing ethnographic accounts as false, but by assuming “that science is in, not above, historical and linguistic processes … that academic and literary genres interpenetrate and that the writing of cultural descriptions is properly experimental and ethical” (p. 2). What Clifford seeks to drive home is that cultural accounts are inevitably “constructed” and that “ethnographic truths are thus inherently partial – committed and incomplete” (pp. 2, 7). To cut with the visual paradigm of culture as object of sight and analysis as well as the hegemonic idea of the ethnographic gaze, Clifford further proposes “to think of a cultural poetics that is an interplay of voices, of positioned utterances” (p. 12). He rethinks ethnography through the “discursive paradigm” as well as the dialogic view positioning the ethnographer as a participant in cultural dialogues, and culture as “contested, temporal, emergent” (pp. 12, 19). Though he rejects Geertz’s semiotic view of culture for its capacity to unify cultures, Clifford agrees with him on anthropology’s kinship to literature. In contrast to Geertz’s culture semiotics and Clifford’s cultural poetics, Lila Abu-Lughold dismisses cultural accounts as inevitably hegemonic and radically opens ethnography onto literature by opting for storytelling as a mode of representation (1993, p. 6). Indeed, she is not only aware of the potentially hegemonic and therefore deforming power of writing; she also contends that the culture concept in anthropology is too generalising and reductive, rejects what she perceives as ethnographic description “traffick[ing] in generalisations”, and proposes to write “against culture” (pp. 5–6). By generalisation, Abu-Lughold means the ethnographer’s dangerous tendency towards “producing homogeneity, coherence and timelessness” (p. 7). Being inevitably enmeshed with power and leading to the “creation of ‘cultures’”, rather than their objective description, ethnographic generalisations can only be avoided by “compos[ing] an ethnography of narratives and conversations” (pp. 5, 6–7). Abu-Lughold thus moves in the direction of a radical methodological shift in anthropology; her new narrative method breaks with the false objectivism of scientific discourse and opts for the poetics of storytelling, dialogue and polyphony. If ethnography is leaning in form and method towards the literary, can it equally do so in subject matter? Can fictional accounts of social worlds and relationships be useful to the ethnographic “interpretation” and “writing” of cultures? Indeed, what is implied in these questions is

16

L. TAYEB

the given association of literature with imagination, affect and subjectivity, and its dismissal (from the opposite sphere of science) as fictive and unascertainable knowledge of the human. Since the early modern period, literature has been carefully delimited and excluded from the sphere of scientific enquiry and enclosed in the esoteric world of art creation. For James Clifford, tempering the scientific objectivism of ethnography with the poetics of culture and rhetoric of writing must be combined with a “post-literary” view liberating literature from “received definitions” and breaking with any “literary practice marked off in an aesthetic, creative, or humanizing domain” (1986, pp. 5, 6). In line with this view, Michel de Certeau questions the treatment of science and fiction as mutually exclusive fields of knowledge. He denounces both the presumed univocity of science and metaphoricity of fiction, which lead to the association of the one with the real, unequivocal and true meaning, and the other with “insecure” and “elusive” knowledge (1986, p. 203). Michel de Certeau argues for the “interplay” of both and defends fiction on the grounds that, unlike science, it has foregone the “ambition to speak the ‘real’”, since it is “a discourse that informs the real without pretending either to represent it or to credit itself with the capacity for such a representation” (pp. 202, 203). Indeed, de Certeau psychoanalytically configures fiction as the “repressed” that has been carefully delimited but returns to haunt science, and considers that ceding back to fiction its “legitimacy”—acknowledging that it is “hardly a stranger to the ‘real’”—is bound up with “first ‘recogniz[ing] the repressed, which takes the form of ‘literature’ within the discourse that is legitimated as scientific” (p. 219). Since fiction’s separation from science is reductive and misconceived, since science is simply that which has refused to “resign itself to the loss of both totality and reality” (de Certeau, 1986, p. 214), and since acknowledging such loss also amounts to conceding fiction’s possible kinship to the real, we may, in sum, argue for liberation of science and fiction from the constraints of their obversity. A good example of this orientation in sociological research is Avery Gordon’s book, Ghostly Matters (2008): in line with De Certeau’s characterising of fiction as the repressed of science, Gordon introduces haunting, or the ghostly matter, as a shorthand appellation for that which is intangible, “elusive” and therefore excluded, or (to quote de Certeau again) “exorcised” from the sphere of sociological enquiry (Gordon, 2008, p. 26; de Certeau, p. 202). Gordon starts from the unclear boundaries between fact and fiction in sociology, points to sociology’s attempt to delimit its sphere of enquiry away from, and

1

MATERIAL AND REPRESENTATIONAL MOBILITIES …

17

against the fictive, and overhauls the discipline by recognising the value of the fictive in constituting sociological knowledge. The “fictive” or “ghostly matter” is not just literature but the “ensemble of cultural imaginings, affective experiences, animated objects, marginal voices, narrative densities, and eccentric traces of power’s presence”. This is the realm of invisible and marginal phenomena traditionally “minimized” in sociological enquiry, yet able to give a deeper understanding of social life and experience if sociology were ready to acknowledge that such phenomena can be seen as factual and that “facts are always in imminent danger of being contaminated … by fictions” (Gordon, pp. 25, 26). The ghostly matter, brought by Gordon to the centre of sociological attention, does more than blur the boundaries between imaginative literature and reality; it calls our attention to a realm of human experience that is generally privileged by literary artists, namely the intimate world of personal feelings and the elusive world of memories and hauntings. In this respect, both literature’s introspective journeys and its evocation of external social worlds are valuable resources for ethnographic and sociological enquiry. As Robert Young argues with particular reference to postcolonial writing, the “combination of the subjective with the objective, the ability to articulate the ways in which larger historical events are felt on the pulses of the people who undergo them” may be seen as a distinctive feature of literature as well as its contribution to the sociological or anthropological account (2012, p. 218). In the migration context, memories and emotions and the way they translate into stories are valuable resources in the study of transnational family life (Chamberlain & Leydesdorff, 2004). The global novels I study in the third, fourth and fifth chapters of this book convey memories of the past and affective relations to place which greatly impact the experiences of individuals and their negotiations of kinship relations to place, family and community in a transnational context. They give eloquent expression to the dense layers of feeling and the complex interplay between the past and the present through their “attention to the singular, the particular, the one case”; projecting the collective through the personal and private, they give insightful accounts of society through the medium of fiction (Merolla, 2002, p. 106). Cast in the personal history form, they stand as valuable testimonies or “witness” to societies (Carlin, 2010, p. 221). One further disjunction between literature and ethnography is temporal: social sciences’ concern with the present is generally at odds with imaginative literature’s historical vision, i.e. its need to understand

18

L. TAYEB

the dynamics of the past and the present through memory and the personal history form (Merriman & Pearce, 2017, p. 503; Aguiar et al., 2019, p. 10). Indeed, sociology’s concern with the subject’s immediate environment has been informed by the emerging posthuman Actor Network and Assemblage theories which empty the subject of his/her social and cultural dimensions. Yet such conceptual frame is being reinfused by “human” social, cultural, and emotional content through a renewed emphasis on the “temporal dimensions of ‘being’” and the life course approach to personal and family mobilities (Pearce, 2019, p. 31). This pushes to the centre of sociological and anthropological enquiry fictional accounts of the real—with their capacity to interweave, personal and collective histories, memories of the past, emotional states and cultural imaginaries with a subject’s network of relations and spaces of mobility in the present. The recent rapprochement between the humanities and the social sciences in the context of the mobilities turn and the shift towards a “nomadic critical posthumanities” (Braidotti, 2018) goes further than praising literature’s sociological value. In the context of migration and mobility, literature is a particularly valuable source of data: “embedded in and reflective of cultural imaginaries, [it] ought to be included more regularly in studies of migration and movement”, especially when studying the effect of the imaginings of migration on the experience and landscapes of mobility (Lagji, 2019, p. 6). Crawshaw and Fowler endorse a creative fiction-based mobilities research methodology that “seeks to unpick the relationship between creative written representations of mobility and social reality”. Such process is based on the identification of the “tropes” by which well-situated authors “‘distil’ a collective experience”; literature’s unique value lies in “the process of distillation which offers insights that cannot be accessed by any other means and opens the way to new understandings” (Crawshaw & Fowler, 2008, p. 458). Moreover, when representing mobile subjects and experiences, literature has a capacity to kin-aesthetically capture “the sensation of movement”, i.e. its embodied experience, cultural meanings and affects. Reflecting on a range of innovative “mobile methods” in the emerging mobilities research, Peter Merriman and Lynne Pearce highlight their new arts-based concern with “the aesthetics of movement” or “movement enacted, felt, perceived, expressed, metered, choreographed, appreciated and desired”. From this perspective, the value of “textual representations of movement” for the sociological study of mobility lies in their capacity “to refract kinaesthetic

1

MATERIAL AND REPRESENTATIONAL MOBILITIES …

19

sensibilities and moments” (Merriman & Pearce, 2017, pp. 498, 502). It is worth mentioning that the recent engagement with literature in much mobilities research is based on a non-representational and processual view of the “real” and a willingness to abandon “the ‘old-fashioned’ realism that clings to the way we think about the world and how we ‘know’ it”. Based on Henry Lefebvre’s view that our (spatial, urban, mobile) experiences are the result of performative reworking of the levels of materiality and representation, there is now a tendency to “regard the textual realm as intrinsic to our lived experience rather than merely a representation of it” (Merriman & Pearce, p. 503; see also Aguiar et al., pp. 7–8; Lefebvre, 1991).

1.2

Literature and Globalisation/Planetarity

In this book, I use the terms “global literature” and the “global novel” to take into account changes in both “English” and Anglophone postcolonial literatures, and highlight a recent development in art and culture, the globalisation of literature. The already international field of postcolonial literature has undergone radical transformation and taken new orientations at the turn of the century, namely movement beyond oppositional paradigms and resistance politics, and a new concern with diaspora, borders and transnational identities. Indeed, postcolonial writers at the end of the twentieth century are no longer easily classifiable in specific national or regional literatures, partly because they, or their books, are subject to transnational mobility, and partly because their subject matter can no longer be limited to a national context and location: “the globalization of publishing … generates immigrating books as well as immigrating writers”, which tends to render national and literary labels vexingly inaccurate (Walkowitz, 2006, p. 533). It is certainly true that postcolonialism is by definition a transnational field “challeng[ing] the primacy of discrete national literatures” and “providing a framework for studying literature and culture in a transnational context” (Jay, 2010, pp. 1–2). Yet the field has undergone transformation as it started to put on board the geopolitical shifts of a post-1989 world. In particular, developments in the culture industry and book production and circulation, the spread of English as a global language, and the increasing mobility of writers, have enlarged the field of postcolonial literatures geographically, linguistically and thematically, and blurred previous demarcations

20

L. TAYEB

between British and American literatures on the one hand, and Anglophone world literatures, on the other. Implied in this is the idea that late twentieth-century transnational processes have not only affected the field of Anglophone postcolonial literature; they have equally transformed British and American literatures and the very national paradigm in literary studies. In response to such transformations, some literary scholars have tried to come to terms with the disorienting multicultural and global contexts of contemporary British literature—a certain notion of contemporaneity as synonymous with multiplicity and world openness—while retaining the traditional national paradigm in literary studies (Bentley, 2005, 2008; English, 2006; Head, 2002). Other writers and critics have tried to come to grips with the “world”, “global” or “planetary” stage that befits the study of art and culture in our contemporary era. Since the notion of books as collective properties of nations, originating in specific (national) places, is now over (Walkowitz, 2009, pp. 573–574), and since writers today, regardless of their national origins or affiliations, seem to have developed what Moraru calls a “planetary imaginary” (2015b, p. 27), the literary texts we read at the turn of century are written in the world and for the world. In that sense, they not only defy categorisation, but call upon critics to start “reading beyond the nation” (Walkowitz, 2006, p. 535). In the case of the international field of postcolonial literature, obsolescence of “older Eurocentric models of ‘comparative’ analysis” (Jay, 2010, p. 2) and inadequacy of old national and regional divisions have led to opening postcolonial literature onto late twentieth century world literature and its fusion and diffusion within it. Indeed, the transnationalism and “globalectics” of postcolonial literature coincided with a “spectacular comeback” of world literature at the turn of the century (Hart, 2017; Helgesson, 2014, pp. 484–485). A late twentieth-century metamorphosing, self-questioning weltliteratur emerged and got increasingly inclusive of postcolonial works; to ward off the accusation of Eurocentric models of writing and reading, it no longer defined itself on the basis of universality and aesthetic value, but in terms of circulation and translation “into a broader world beyond [a work’s] linguistic and cultural point of origin” (Damrosch, 2003, p. 6). Two major theoretical-methodological approaches emerged as responses to the growing postcolonial disjunction between literature and nationalism on the one hand, and the conceptual

1

MATERIAL AND REPRESENTATIONAL MOBILITIES …

21

return of weltliteratur on the other: the transnational, global paradigm and the planetary paradigm. A new wave of writings in the humanities talk about a “transnational turn” (Jay, 2010) or a globalising of literary studies (Gunn, 2001), seen as the outcome of declining nations and nation-states (Miyoshi, 2001, p. 287); it refers to a divorcing of literature from national themes and an unmooring of character and action from national settings. Giles Gunn notes the recent interest in the “internationalization of literary and cultural studies” and the attendant change of language testified by “the new governance of such terms as hybridity, diaspora, transculturation, subaltern, hegemony, deterritorialisation, rhizome, mestizo, Eurocentrism and othering ” (p. 18). Paul Jay proposes that critics and academics in the field altogether abandon the national approach to literature and “emphasiz[e] literature’s relation to the historical processes of globalization” (2001, p. 33). Focusing on the field of postcolonial studies itself, Masao Miyoshi notes in the shift from Said to Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall and Arjun Appadurai “the replacement of political economy by culture as a central paradigm”. A concomitant predominance of theory in academic environments has further interlinked postcolonial identities to other marginal or oppressed social identities such as gender, ethnic or subcultural identities (Miyoshi, pp. 287, 288). The recent transformation of literary studies may on the whole be understood in terms of a double and simultaneous shift towards “interdisciplinarity” and “difference” (Gunn, p. 16; Jay, 2010, p. 16). These and other radical changes in late twentieth-century literary studies have led various scholars to abandon the national paradigm in literature for a new “transnational” or “global” paradigm placed in the context of global media and the global dissemination of culture. More recently, Peter Boxall has argued that twenty-first-century literary works combine their representation of local forms of life with a new “global perspective” as “a response to a new kind of being in the world in the third millennium” (Boxall, 2013, p. 8). In short, what has previously been approached as a situated and discrete literary studies is in danger of fragmentation and incoherence as a result of internal movement towards interdisciplinarity and difference in the humanities and external forces of globalisation. Other articles and books such as Masao Miyoshi’s “Turn to the Planet” (2001), Christian Moraru’s Reading for the Planet (2015b), and Elias and Moraru’s, The Planetary Turn (2015a), deliberately reject the global paradigm and devise a new conceptual framework around the notion of

22

L. TAYEB

the planet. Growing dissatisfaction with the hegemonic aspect of global processes has led some scholars to rethink the integrated system of the world and counter the globalist perspective by a “planetary” perspective geared to relationality and protective of the ecological and cultural diversity of the planet (Elias & Moraru, 2015, p. xxiii). For planetarists, globalisation and planetarisation project different viewpoints on the increasing interconnection and interdependence of the world at the end of the twentieth century, or as Moraru puts it, “competing constructions of the worlding world” (2015b, p. 11). Moraru proposes to map the world “qua planet” (2015b, p. 6) as an alternative to the modality of the globe and posits that “they diverge in their different management of relationality” (2015b, p. 11). While global relationality is predominantly “financial-technocratic”, the planet combines “biophysical” and “cultural” spheres, and both inter-human and human/non-human interaction (Elias & Moraru, pp. xvi, xxiii). As a foil to the cold abstractness of the globe, the planet is thus projected as an unbounded field of interrelating, an emotionally charged space nurturing a new sense of “togetherness”, and a new locus of belonging either replacing or supplementing national homelands; it also implies an ethics: ethics of relatedness or ethical “withworld”, and ethics of “care” or “humanity”, the “imperative of attending to the particular and the local” (Moraru, 2015b, pp. 14–15; Elias & Moraru, 2015, p. xxiv; Edson, 2015, p. 108). Thus conceived, the planet may be seen as the new postnational and post-postcolonial context of artistic creation, “the emerging single ‘unit’ of cultural discourse and analysis, of world-writing and worldreading” (Moraru, 2015b, p. 8). It is the alternative “cosmology” that postcolonial thinkers in search of a new mode of knowledge “outside western categories of thought” must embrace (Krishnaswamy & Hawley, 2008, p. 106). Based on the modality of the planet, writers and critics have recently sought to devise appropriate techniques of representation and adequate critical methods for the study of arts, literature and culture in the twenty-first-century. Christian Moraru has proposed a geomethodology, a reading “with the planet” construed as reading against homogenisation and interlinking of the part to the whole, or the micro to the macro picture (2015a, p. 213). Raoul Eshelman has devised a new “episteme”, performatism, and a new theory, performatist planetarity, as a philosophical and epistemological attempt to move beyond postmodernism and towards “anthropological affirmation”: performatism no longer conceives the human as a belated effect of discourse, but as

1

MATERIAL AND REPRESENTATIONAL MOBILITIES …

23

“a unified, bio-social construct (it is neither entirely natural, nor is it entirely an effect of discourse)”. Further, human interaction is settled by the processes of imitation and intuition, which operate in a realm prior to or beyond discourse to enable the “mimetic transfer of value between humans” (Eshelman, 2015, pp. 90, 92). Artistically speaking, performatist narratives deploy mimetic/intuitive interaction and ironytranscending “narrative resolutions”, in order to achieve “an affirmatively conceived global relationality among humans” (Eshelman, p. 94). From such perspective, planetarity may be used as a useful approach to the novels’ “ethics of humanity” (Young, p. 18). The literary texts I study in chapters three, four and five depict a contemporary globalising world and the string of transnational flows and processes operating in it as the material context in which the new technology-driven dynamics of kinship work to embed individuals within their “biogenetic” families and the “fictive” families of nation, ethnic group and religious or cultural community. Because it is geared to power, control and homogenisation, such globalising world is the space of internecine relation. An alternatively conceived planetary world enables a reading of migrant family mobilities outside the loci of “biogenetic” family and national culture/community. In other words, the novels are a rich artistic space to explore the interplay of global politics and planetary poetics and ethics, or the geopolitics of migration and “the geothematics of planetariness” (Elias & Moraru, 2015, p. xi). In the next chapter, I bring into stronger focus the three major strands of the study, kinship, migrant mobilities and global technologies. Presenting material processes and transformations in our contemporary world, I mean the chapter to conceptually and theoretically set the ground for my engagement with representational mobilities in the subsequent three chapters. I introduce the role played by the three broad fields of technological development introduced earlier—biotechnology transportation technology, and information and communication technologies—on the traditional components of human connectedness, namely blood or genealogy, territory or the notion of rootedness and “community” or collective cultural identity. I outline broad developments in the three fields of technology along with critical posthuman, sociological and ethnological study of their impacts on individuals, families and groups in our globalising world. Chapters 3, 4 and 5 deal with specific texts and specific networks of relation interweaving individuals within families and families within communities in highly complex and contingent ways. With respect to

24

L. TAYEB

the three types of migrant mobilities and the three fields of technological change introduced earlier, I focus in Chapter 3 on postcolonial migrant mobilities in Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000). The novels portray embattled transcultural families and first and second-generation immigrants in London from the 1970s to the end of the twentieth century: they refer to the mid-twentieth-century technologies of mass communication and the biotechnological developments of the latter half of the twentieth century leading to the controversial genetic engineering research and innovation. Hanif Kureishi is preoccupied with the 1970s cultural industry, leading to the spread of a postmodern culture of disposable art, depthless image, simulation and multiple identities. Zadie Smith fictionally probes the continuities and transformations in race and racism in the context of late twentieth-century multiculturalist politics and biotechnological developments. In addition to Kureishi’s depiction of urban practices of the family that ultimately reconcile mobility and connectedness, I study the authors’ shared focus on the individual’s coming of age journey into understanding the transnational histories and genealogies of his/her families and the necessary navigating of past and present global interconnections for a stable sense of one’s social selfhood in the future. In Chapter 4, Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2004) and Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake (2003) at first travel from a relatively stable (family) life in the homeland to a totally new and psychologically straining life in diaspora, and later move back and forth between the two locations so as to project a transnational view of the immigrant’s social field and cultural imaginary. Situating transnational families within liminal, embattled diasporas, the two authors bring into focus the South Asian minority in Britain and the United States, represent arranged marriage and the everyday life of displaced (house)wives, and centralise gender and intergenerational relations. I approach the novels’ mobilities as cultural and emotional in order to shed light on the intangible realm of embodied experiences and complex emotions involved in the migration process. Ali’s Brick Lane represents the first generation’s culture conflicts and the “creative culture-building” processes and orientations in the context of late twentieth-century global economic and geopolitical change (Foner, 1997, p. 961); it traces Nazneen’s journey towards domestic empowerment and liberation from the patriarchal domination of the Bangladeshi ethnic minority of Brick Lane and the white racist culture of metropolitan

1

MATERIAL AND REPRESENTATIONAL MOBILITIES …

25

London. Lahiri’s The Namesake portrays the second-generation immigrant’s personal journey back and forth between a private and “secret” domestic culture and a public mainstream American culture, and foregrounds generational issues and the complex psychosocial dynamics of relatedness of the children of immigrants. The transnational social field of the characters along with travelling cultural images and commodities appear to have a great impact on individual, family-inflected identity. Chapter 5 is focused on the Afghan-American writers, Khaled Hosseini and Nadia Hashimi, and their representations of the forced migrations of Afghan people at the end of the twentieth century. Hosseini’s The Kite Runner (2003) and And the Mountains Echoed (2013) and Nadia Hashimi’s When the Moon Is Low (2015) are concerned with the way geopolitical forces and international conflicts disrupt the lives of individuals safely or otherwise precariously ensconced in families and communities. Traumatic memories of the past are significantly grounded in kinship and family relations while the intimate sphere of kinship is linked to the big processes of history and the macro spheres of nation and world. Khaled Hosseini interweaves personal and national traumas and creates an intricate analogy between the wounded self, somehow bereaved of safe family bonds and places of childhood, and the wounded nation invaded by strangers, wrecked by a merciless war and dispersing its children to scarred diasporas of loss. Nadia Hashimi’s When the Moon Is Low foregrounds a major figure in migration and mobility studies, the refugee and asylum seeker; it represents the personal tribulations of one Afghan family crossing the Afghan-Iranian border and having to trek across a merciless underground European world of illegal routes and vagrant refugees before reaching England, its final destination. The personal quest for lost kin and the safety of political asylum in England is significantly linked to the projected family reunion at the end of the narrative. Nearing and going beyond the beginning of the twenty-first century, the novels represent the information age especially the electronically networked and connected world, and the emergence, as a result of global information technologies, of a new sense of planetary human community. Overall, the novels enable an extensive and in-depth view of kinship practices of individuals and families in dynamic spaces of movement and interrelation that rise above the transnational to encompass the planetary. Chapter 6 brings, by way of conclusion, the notion of planetarity and the planetary ethics of cohabitation into stronger focus, and

26

L. TAYEB

takes it beyond its vague utopian dimension into a concrete realm of sociopolitical praxis.

References Abu-Lughold, L. (1993). Writing women’s worlds: Bedouin stories. University of California Press. Aguiar, M., Mathieson, C., & Pearce, L. (Eds.), (2019). Mobilities, literature, culture. Palgrave Macmillan. Ali, M. (2003). Brick Lane. Black Swan. Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalization. University of Minnesota Press. Arnason, J. P. (1990). Nationalism, globalization and modernity. In M. Featherstone (Ed.), Global culture: Nationalism, globalization and modernity (pp. 207–236). Sage. Baldassar, L., Nedelcu, M., Merla, L., & Wilding, R. (2016). ICT-based copresence in transnational families and communities: Challenging the premise of face-to-face proximity in sustaining relationships. Global Networks, 16(2), 133–144. https://doi.org/10.1111/glob.12108. Bentley, N. (2005). British fiction of the 1990s. Routledge. Bentley, N. (2008). Contemporary British fiction. Edinburgh University Press. Boxall, P. (2013). Twenty-first-century fiction: A critical introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bradatan, C., Popan, A., & Melton, R. (2010). Transnationality as a fluid social identity. Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture, 16(2), 169–178. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504631003688856. Braidotti, R. (2018). A theoretical framework for the critical posthumanities. Theory, Culture and Society, 1–31. https://doi.org/10.1117/026327641877 1486. Carlin, A. P. (2010). The Corpus status of literature in teaching sociology: Novels as ‘sociological reconstruction’. The American Sociologist, 41(3), 211–231. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40983450. Accessed 18 Nov 2018. Carsten J. (2000). Introduction: Cultures of relatedness. In J. Carsten (Ed.), Cultures of relatedness: New approaches to the study of kinship (pp. 1–36). Cambridge University Press. Carsten, J. (2004). After kinship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carsten J. (2007a). Connections and disconnections of memory and kinship in narratives of adoption reunions in Scotland. In J. Carsten (Ed.), Ghosts of memory: Essays on remembrance and relatedness (pp. 83–103). Blackwell Publishers.

1

MATERIAL AND REPRESENTATIONAL MOBILITIES …

27

Carsten J. (2007b). Constitutive knowledge: Tracing trajectories of information in new contexts of relatedness. Anthropological Quarterly, 80(2), 403–426. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30053060. Accessed 18 Nov 2018. Chamberlain, M., & Leydesdorff, S. (2004). Transnational families: Memories and narratives. Global Networks, 4(3), 227–241. https://doi.org/10.1111/j. 1471-0374.2004.00090.x. Collard, C. (2000). Kinship Studies au tournant du siècle [Kinship studies at the turn of the century]. L’Homme: Revue Française d’Anthropologie, 154–155, 653–658. https://doi.org/10.4000/lhomme.53. Clifford, J. (1986). Introduction: Partial truths. In J. Clifford & G. E. Marcus (Eds.), Writing culture: The poetics and politics of ethnography (pp. 1–26). University of California Press. Conradson, D., & McKay, D. (2007). Translocal subjectivities: Mobility, connection, emotion. Mobilities, 2(2), 167–174. https://doi.org/10.1080/174501 007013811524. Crawshaw, R., & Fowler, C. (2008). Articulation, imagined space and virtual mobility in literary narratives of migration. Mobilities, 3(3), 455–469. https:// doi.org/10.1080/17450100802376795. Damrosch, D. (2003). Introduction: Goethe coins a phrase. In D. Damrosch, What is world literature? (pp. 1–36). Princeton University Press. D’Andrea, A., Ciolfi, L., & Gray, B. (2011). Methodological challenges and innovations in mobilities research. Mobilities, 6(2), 149–160. https://doi. org/10.1080/17450101.2011.552769. de Certeau, Michel. (1986). Heterologies: Discourse on the other (trans. B. Massumi). University of Minnesota Press. Edson, L. (2015). Planetarity, performativity, relationality: Claire Denis’s Chocolat and cinematic ethics. In A. J. Elias & C. Moraru (Eds.), The planetary turn: Relationality and geoaesthetics in the twenty-first century (pp. 107–124). Northwestern University Press. Elias, A. J., & Moraru, C. (2015). Introduction: The planetary condition. In A. J. Elias & C. Moraru (Eds.), The planetary turn: Relationality and geoaesthetics in the twenty-first century (pp. xi–xxxvii). Northwestern University Press. Elliott, A., & Urry, J. (2010). Mobile lives. Routledge. English, J. F. (2006). Introduction: British fiction in a global frame. In J. F. English (Ed.), A concise companion to contemporary British fiction (pp. 1–15). Blackwell Publishers. Eshelman, R. (2015). Archetypologies of the human: Planetary performatism, cinematic relationality and Iñárritu’s Babel. In A. J. Elias & C. Moraru (Eds.), The planetary turn: Relationality and geoaesthetics in the twenty-first century (pp. 89–105). Northwestern University Press.

28

L. TAYEB

Fallov, M. A., Jørgensen, A., & Knudsen, L. B. (2013). Mobile forms of belonging. Mobilities, 8(4), 467–486. https://doi.org/10.1080/17450101. 2013.769722. Foner, N. (1997). The immigrant family: Cultural legacies and cultural changes. The International Migration Review, 31(4), 961–974. http://www.jstor.org/ stable/2547420. Accessed 11 Dec 2018. Franklin, S. (2000). Life itself: Global nature and the genetic imaginary. In S. Franklin, C. Lury, & J. Stacey (Eds.), Global nature, global culture (pp. 188– 227). Sage. Friedman, J. (1990). Being in the world: Globalization and localization. In M. Featherstone (Ed.), Global culture: Nationalism, globalization and modernity (pp. 311–327). Sage. Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures. Basic Books. Gillespie, S. D. (2000). Beyond kinship: An introduction. In R. Joyce & S. D. Gillespie (Eds.), Beyond kinship: Social and material reproduction in house societies (pp. 1–21). University of Pennsylvania Press. Glick Schiller, N., Basch, L., & Blanc-Szanton, C. (1992). Transnationalism: A new analytic framework for understanding migration. Annals of the New York Academy of Science, 645(1), 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-6632. 1992.tb33484.x. Gordon, A. F. (2008). Ghostly matters: Haunting and the sociological imagination. University of Minnesota Press. Greiner, C., & Sakdapolrak, P. (2013). Translocality: Concepts, applications, and emerging research perspectives. Geography Compass, 7 (5), 373–384. https:// doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12048. Gunn, G. (2001). Introduction: Globalizing literary studies. PMLA, 116(1), 16– 31. http://www.jstor.org/stable/463638. Accessed 18 Nov 2018. Hannam, K., Sheller, M., & Urry, J. (2006). Editorial: Mobilities, immobilities, and moorings. Mobilities, 1(1), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/174501005 00489198. Hart, D. W. (2017). The globalectics of nationalism in C. L. R. James’s and Michelle Cliff’s writing. Postcolonial Text, (12)2, 1–18. Hashimi, N. (2015). When the Moon Is Low. William Morrow. Head, D. (2002). The Cambridge introduction to modern British fiction: 1950– 2000. Cambridge University Press. Helgesson, S. (2014). Postcolonialism and world literature. Interventions, 16(4), 483–500. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2013.851825. Holdsworth, C. (2013). Family and intimate mobilities. Palgrave Macmillan. Hosseini, K. (2003). The Kite Runner. Bloomsbury. Hosseini, K. (2013). And the Mountains Echoed. Bloomsbury.

1

MATERIAL AND REPRESENTATIONAL MOBILITIES …

29

Jay, P. (2001). Beyond discipline: Globalization and the future of english. PMLA, 116(1), 32–47. http://www.jstor.org/stable/463639. Accessed 28 Nov 2018. Jay, P. (2010). Global matters: The transnational turn in literary studies. Cornell University Press. King, R., & Christou, A. (2011). Of counter-diaspora and reverse transnationalism: Return mobilities to and from the ancestral homeland. Mobilities, 6(4), 451–466. https://doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2011.603941. Kobayashi, A., Preston, V., & Murnaghan, A. (2011). Place, affect, and transnationalism through the voices of Hong King immigrants to Canada. Social and Cultural Geography, 12(8), 871–888. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365. 2011.624191. Krishnaswamy, R., & Hawley, J. C. (2008). Planetarity and the postcolonial. In R. Krishnaswamy & J. C. Hawley (Eds.), The postcolonial and the global (pp. 105–108). University of Minnesota Press. Kureishi, H. (1990). The Buddha of Suburbia. Faber & Faber. Lagji, A. (2019). Waiting in motion: mapping postcolonial fiction, postcolonial mobilities, and migration through Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West. Mobilities, 14(2), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2018.1533684. Lahiri, J. (2003). The Namesake. Fourth Estate. Lamphere, L. (2001). Whatever happened to kinship studies? Reflections of a feminist anthropologist. In L. Stone (Ed.), New directions in anthropological kinship (pp. 21–47). Rowman Littlefield Publishers. Lefebvre, H. (1991). The production of space (trans. D. Nicholson-Smith). Blackwell Publishing. Original Edition: Lefebvre, H. (1974, 1984). Production de l’espace. Editions Anthropos. Levitt, P., & Glick Schiller, N. (2004). Conceptualizing simultaneity: A transnational social field perspective on society. International Migration Review, 38(3), 1002–1039. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27645424. Accessed 14 June 2014. Levitt, P., & Jaworsky, B. N. (2007). Transnational migration studies: Past developments and future trends. Annual Review of Sociology, 33, 129–156. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.soc.33.040406.131816. Licoppe, C. (2004). ‘Connected’ presence: The emergence of a new repertoire for managing social relationships in a changing communication technoscape. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 22, 135–156. https://doi. org/10.1068/d323t. Madianou, M., & Miller, D. (2012a). Migration and new media: Transnational families and polymedia. Routledge. Madianou, M., & Miller, D. (2012b). Polymedia: Towards a new theory of digital media in interpersonal communication. International Journal of

30

L. TAYEB

Cultural Studies, 16(2), 169–187. https://doi.org/10.1177/136787791245 2486. Mavrommatis, G. (2015). South Asian tales: Ethnic entrepreneurs and narratives of spatialized transnational identities emerging in an East London (UK) inner-city area. Diaspora Studies, 8(2), 89–103. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 09739572.2015.1029710. Merolla, D. (2002). Deceitful origins and tenacious roots: Moroccan immigration and new trends in Dutch literature. In D. Bryceson & U. Vuorela (Eds.), The transnational family: New European frontiers and global networks (pp. 103–123). Berg. Merriman, P., & Pearce, L. (2017). Mobility and the humanities. Mobilities, 12(4), 493–508. https://doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2017.1330853. Miyoshi, M. (2001). Turn to the planet: Literature, diversity, and totality. Comparative Literature, 53(4), 283–297. http://www.jstor.org/stable/359 3520. Accessed 18 Nov 2018. Moraru, C. (2015a). Decompressing culture: Three steps toward a geomethodology. In A. J. Elias & C. Moraru (Eds.), The planetary turn: Relationality and geoaesthetics in the twenty-first century (pp. 211–244). Northwestern University Press. Moraru, C. (2015b). Reading for the planet: Towards a geomethodology. University of Michigan Press. Murray, L., & Upstone, S. (Eds.), (2014). Mobilising representations: Dialogues, embodiment and power. In L. Murray & S. Upstone, (Eds.), Researching and representing mobilities: Transdisciplinary encounters (pp. 1–20). Palgrave Macmillan. Pearce, L. (2019). Mobility, memory and the lifecourse in twentieth-century literature and culture. Palgrave Macmillan. Rifkin, J. (1998). The Biotech century: Harnessing the gene and re-making the world. Penguin Putnam. Robertson, R. (1990). Mapping the global condition: Globalization as the central concept. In M. Featherstone (Ed.), Global culture: Nationalism, globalization and modernity (pp. 15–30). Sage. Salazar, N. B. (2010). Towards an anthropology of cultural mobilities. Crossings: Journal of migration and culture, (1), 53–68. https://doi.org/10.1386/ cjmc.1.53_1. Schneider, D. (1984). A critique of the study of kinship. The University of Michigan Press. Sheller, M., & Urry, J. (2006). The new mobilities paradigm. Environment and Planning A, 38, 207–226. https://doi.org/10.1068/a37268. Skrbiš, Z. (2008). Transnational families: Theorising migration, emotions and belonging. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 29(3), 231–246. https://doi. org/10.1080/07256860802169188.

1

MATERIAL AND REPRESENTATIONAL MOBILITIES …

31

Smith, A. D. (1990). Towards a global culture? In M. Featherstone (Ed.), Global culture: Nationalism, globalization and modernity (pp. 171–192). Sage. Smith, Z. (2000). White Teeth. Penguin Books. Strathern, M. (1992). After nature: English kinship in the late twentieth century. Cambridge University Press. Vertovec, S. (2001). Transnationalism and identity. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 27 (4), 573–582. https://doi.org/10.1080/136918301 20090386. Virilio, Paul. (2006). Speed and politics (trans. M. Polizzotti). MIT Press. Original Edition: Virilio, P. (1977). Vitesse et Politique. Édition Galilée. Walkowitz, R. L. (2006). The location of literature: The transnational book and the migrant writer. Contemporary Literature, 47 (4), 527–545. http://www. jstor.org/stable/4489178. Accessed 18 Nov 2018. Walkowitz, R. L. (2009). Comparison literature. New Literary History, 40(3), 567–582. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27760276. Accessed 31 Jan 2019. Wallerstein, I. (1990). Culture as the ideological battleground of the modern world-system. In M. Featherstone (Ed.), Global culture: Nationalism, globalization and modernity (pp. 31–55). Sage. Wallerstein, I. (1997). The national and the universal: Can there be such a thing as world culture. In A. D. King (Ed.), Culture, globalization and the world system: Contemporary conditions for the representation of identity (pp. 91–105). University of Minnesota Press. Young, R. J. C. (2012). World literature and postcolonialism. In T. D’haen, D. Damrosch, & D. Kadir (Eds.), The Routledge companion to world literature (pp. 213–222). Routledge.

CHAPTER 2

Kinship, Migrant Mobilities and Global Technologies

This chapter explores the impact of migrant mobilities and global technologies on kinship and the family and introduces the major conceptual changes and paradigmatic shifts arising in the context of a “mobile turn” in the humanities and social sciences. Departing from the idea that mobility unsettles the three naturalised and sedentarised fields of interrelating in which the family is traditionally embedded—“blood” or “biogenetic” kinship, territory or place and community—I probe the way social and anthropological research has responded to the growing disjunction between place and social experience and breakdown of a naturalised fit between peoples, places and cultures, as a result of global technological and societal change (Gupta & Ferguson, 1992, pp. 6–7). By “blood”, I mean the microcosmic, “real”, “biogenetic” family and the genealogical structure in which it is subsumed: “blood” relations and naturally given families are being put under strain by new developments in biotechnology and the growing miscegenation attendant upon transnational mobility; new family formations have appeared in which the blood tie loses its natural and taken for granted aspects. “Ancestral” ties to place or territory are also challenged by today’s routine transnational flow of people, ideas, objects and cultural symbols. Seeped into modern nationalist ideologies and the late modern imperialist struggle over land appropriation and liberation, they take the form of legal rights © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Tayeb, Kinship in the Age of Mobility and Technology, Palgrave Studies in Mediating Kinship, Representation, and Difference, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69889-8_2

33

34

L. TAYEB

to the nation’s soil or emotional ties to the homeland. Transnational mobility, in the form of emigration or immigration—the “invasion” of one’s homeland by strangers—breaches this fundamental tie to place and unsettles the territorial and sedentarist paradigm of individual and collective identity. Finally, insofar as it connotes a desirable and emotionalised sense belonging, a sense of completeness or unity and a certain cultural particularity or distinctiveness, community, the third field of human interrelating, is also lost in the age of transnational mobility and global mass communication. Anthropological apocalyptic images of the collapse of “community” and loss of “society” and “culture” abound at the turn of the century: from the dissolution of the “pluralist vision of a world full of distinctive, total societies . . . into a post-plural one” (Strathern, 1992b, p. 77) to emerging images of an unbounded “global ecumene” (Hannerz, 1992), “traveling cultures” (Clifford, 1992), “ethnoscapes” of global modernity (Appadurai, 1996, p. 48), and “melting” solids of “liquid modernity” (Bauman, 2000, pp. 2–3). In what follows, I engage with a set of empirical, conceptual and methodological questions: how can anthropologists study culture outside the territorial sphere of bounded community, and read, in a world of “fragmenting parts and vanishing wholes” (Strathern, 1992b, p. 77), culture’s forms and symbols and its flow through the actions of multiplesituated individuals; how are kinship relations being transformed in a globalising world where traditional concepts of family, territory, cultural community and society are being swept aside? What is happening to a traditional family notion, connoting at once a “natural” interrelatedness and a naturalised relatedness to place and community? What new forms and dynamics have relationships taken in the age of biotechnology, velocity and communication? And can an alternatively conceived planetary “world” serve as the new sphere (beyond the kinship-based community or the territorial national society) in which individuals and families can weave sustaining webs of relation?

2.1

Blood Relations in the Age of Biotechnology

The blood relationship, which appears to be central to the individual quest for identity and self-understanding, assumes an especially salient and vital aspect in the transnational family, deprived as it is of larger kinship contexts as ethnic community, homeland and nation. Indeed, the emotional value placed on blood relatives and the whole notion of

2

KINSHIP, MIGRANT MOBILITIES AND GLOBAL TECHNOLOGIES

35

genetic and cultural reproduction loses its routine, commonplace aspect to become a matter of life or death for migrants keen on preserving their blood and culture from dissolution. In White Teeth (2000), Zadie Smith comically projects Alsana’s most terrible nightmare as an immigrant’s fear of “dissolution, disappearance”; revolving around her son’s possible miscegenation, Alsana’s nightmarish visions take the form of a relentlessly receding future genetic possibility: . . . visions of Millat (genetically BB; where B stands for Bengali-ness) marrying someone called Sarah (aa where ‘a’ stands for Aryan) resulting in a child called Michael (Ba), who in turn marries somebody called Lucy (aa), leaving Alsana with a legacy of unrecognizable great-grandchildren (Aaaaaaa!), their Bengali-ness thoroughly diluted, genotype hidden by phenotype. (Smith, 2000, p. 327)

Alsana’s latent fears appear to be prodded by new developments in genetics, namely the idea that genes received jointly from the biological father and the biological mother determine inheritance, and that the fear of the migrant parent at the end of the twentieth century has turned into a fear of genotype dilution or dissolution. But Alsana’s fears about the loss of a physical kinship to her children and grandchildren also betray the untold fears of cultural dissolution, the possibility that a social and cultural Bengali-ness is also lost in the process. For transnational individuals and families, blood relations are salient and essential to any social kinship they may advocate; hence, the disjunction between physical kinship and place, conceived as the field of a concomitant social interaction and kinship, defines at a basic level the problematic condition of the transnational family. Yet the notion of blood has not simply been shaken as a result of the growing disjunction between place, ethnie and sociality in the age of migration. Its theoretical interrogation is related to a much more fundamental shift in western thought: movement beyond the received concepts of nature and culture and interrogation of the boundaries separating them. Up to the 1960s, “the facts of kinship were simultaneously facts of nature and facts of culture and society” and biological kinship served as an unquestioned basis of cultural kinship systems (Strathern, 1992a, p. 46). It is precisely against this tradition that David Schneider’s A Critique of the Study of Kinship (1984) was written. Schneider attacked the conventional practice in kinship studies of treating the “biological relationship . . . as the reference point, the

36

L. TAYEB

fixed position, against which all cultural aspects take their meaning”; he traced varied attempt in the anthropological tradition to dissociate the natural and cultural domains, or physical from social kinship and came to the conclusion that kinship had persistently “been defined in terms of the relations that arise out of the processes of human sexual reproduction” because of the western cultural assumption that “Blood is thicker than Water” (Schneider, 1984, pp. 99, 165). In other words, the (anthropologist’s) cultural belief in the primacy and durability of natural blood ties is what explains his/her inability to study kinship independently of biology. Schneider detected the biased treatment of a cultural and social idea (Blood’s thickness) as a natural fact, and the inability to see the blood tie as “icon”, “figure” or “symbol” of “the bonds of solidarity that are caused by or engendered by the actual biological connectedness” (Schneider, 1984, p. 194). His critique confounded the anthropologically marked domains of nature and culture: henceforth, the natural fact is indistinguishable from the cultural view of that fact and is thus in no way “natural”. If Schneider’s critique has overhauled the discipline of kinship by shifting attention away from the static facts of nature to “culture as a symbolic system” (Carsten, 2004, p. 20), Marilyn Strathern studies what she perceives as the loss of nature’s “grounding function” in the late twentieth century as a result of two major developments: global capitalism’s reduction of cultural diversity and the new reproductive technologies’ interference with a natural genetic diversity (1992a, p. 195). Strathern establishes an analogy between natural loss and cultural loss, and uses it to make sense of the current global anxieties about homogenisation and dissolution; more specifically, she contrasts an old invigorating, “natural” or spontaneous diversity of the English and their culture, to the new deadening production of diversity by biotechnology, global media and global capitalism. The result is “too close a parallel between what is taken to affect natural life and what is taken to affect human life”: risky reduction of natural and cultural diversity, or as Strathern puts it, the “denuding of the planet” on the one hand, and the tendency of human societies “to cocacolarise themselves” on the other (Strathern, 1992a, p. 37). The late twentieth-century sense that there is “less nature” is, in part, explained by technology’s interference with nature in the scientific field of microbiology (Strathern, 1992a, pp. 42–43). Not only does the fuzzy genetic notion of information and code replace the hard realities of skin and blood; the new reproductive technologies generate anxieties about

2

KINSHIP, MIGRANT MOBILITIES AND GLOBAL TECHNOLOGIES

37

the loss of a natural genetic diversity based on an understanding of kinship as “a developmental process that guaranteed diversity, the individuality of persons and the generation of future possibilities”. This is due to the fact that certain microbiological procedures (in vitro fertilisation, artificial insemination, cloning…) emblematise the dreadful substituting of “whole persons” by “reproductive cells” in fertilisation and conception, and appear to dangerously interfere with the natural production of diversity and individuality (Strathern, 1992a, pp. 39, 41). In the same vein, Donna Haraway argues that border crossing is the essence of the late twentieth-century techniques of genetic engineering; these not only cross “a culturally salient line between nature and artifice”, but also “greatly increase the density of all kinds of other traffic on the bridge between what counts as nature and culture” (Haraway, 1997, p. 56). More specifically, the creation of transgenic organisms through recombinant DNA techniques is transgressive in a quite novel way since it “pollutes . . . the lineage of nature itself . . . transforming [it] into its binary opposite, culture” (Haraway, 1997, p. 60). To explain the new relationship to nature engendered by genetic engineering, Jeremy Rifkin introduces the metaphors of alchemy and algeny, the pyrotechnical age and the biotechnological revolution of the twentieth century. By fusing and soldering metals, alchemy, the old science of matter, simply aims “to unravel nature’s secrets” and “hurry the physical world along to its own perfected state” (Rifkin, 1998, pp. 33, 34); the algenist by contrast “views the living world as in potential, . . . doesn’t think of an organism as a discrete entity but rather as a temporary set of relationships”, and totally disregards species boundaries while manipulating and recombining their genetic bases. Algeny, in other words, is not content with reaching nature’s perfect state, but aims at creating organisms that are “more ‘efficient’ than those that exist at the state of nature” (Rifkin, 1998, pp. 34–35). Biotechnology not only destroys species diversity; it also strips species down to their genetic information and crosses species boundaries by making combination work at the genetic level, thus “chang[ing] both our concept of nature and our relationship to it” (Rifkin, 1998, p. 14). While nature is now seen in terms of genetic information, man’s acting on it is also geared towards improving its efficiency and productivity, destroying in the process the natural diversity guaranteed by spontaneous reproduction. In sum, Schneider’s critique called into question the entire anthropological tradition which grounded social kinship in biological reproduction

38

L. TAYEB

when he argued that the natural facts of sexual reproduction and blood are rather western cultural ideas that had been misleadingly naturalised. Strathern and Haraway in their turn viewed the late twentieth-century biotechnologies as a dangerous trespass on the purity of type and the natural process of reproduction and diversification leading to the loss of a safeguarded sphere of the natural. For Rifkin, biotechnology’s obsession with improving nature’s efficiency by striking at its genetic root shall lead to the destruction of natural diversity and the loss of nature altogether. We are thus driven to abandon both a naturalised nature and a now blurry distinction between nature and culture. The implications this shift has for the study of kinship and the transnational family in the twenty-first century are, indeed, manifold. As I argue in the next three chapters, the “blood” relationship is at once sanctified and endangered by the varied circumstances of mixture, assimilation, displacement and dispersal. Yet its definitive aspect is also weighed against the times and places going into the making of relationships as well the personal journeys of understanding through which mobile individuals weave webs of feeling around their kin.

2.2

Territory in the Age of Mobility

In this section, the term territory broadly refers to a geographical basis of collective material and symbolic human activity. It is construed as an essential part of what human beings hold themselves to be since it contains the “cultural landscapes” that “reinforce . . . [their] group identity”: raw geography is turned into an embodied natural habitat and acquires “deep meaning” to individuals and groups, while landscape is appropriated, emotionally suffused and incorporated to a sense of identity. Together, they constitute a place as a vital component of personal and collective self-imagining (White, 2000, pp. 4, 27). For A. D. Smith, the fundamental human bond to territory or place is imputed to the large overlap between a group’s identity and the symbolic fabric of its natural habitat. Rootedness in, and possession of an “originary” place is always part of a collective self-imagining based on an ancestral past and tradition (Smith, 1986, p. 183). Throughout the twentieth century, territorial ties have evolved into national ones and territorial consciousness has become an inherent feature of modern national identity (Gellner, 1983, p. 6; Anderson, 1983, p. 15). “Territorialisation” is one of the “key social processes” of modern nation-formation, which denotes at the material

2

KINSHIP, MIGRANT MOBILITIES AND GLOBAL TECHNOLOGIES

39

and cultural levels, “residence in, and the growth of memories and attachments to an historic homeland, and the identification of the members with its landscape” (Smith, 2007, pp. 18, 19). In the latter half of the twentieth century, national territories acquired greater political and cultural salience in the wake of postcolonial nation-making and the establishment of the international community of nations. The illusion of a fixed and strictly divided “world” is, indeed, the corollary of twentieth-century nationalism and its related construct of the national society. It led anthropological and social research towards assuming a natural link between cultural communities and societies and the places of their dwelling/origin. Anthropologists localised social groups and cultures, approached territory as a stable geographical element and privileged social interaction and interrelating in space over relationship to place. Because of their tendency to “[map] cultures onto places”, they treated space as a “neutral grid on which cultural difference, historical memory and societal organization are inscribed” (Gupta & Ferguson, 1992, p. 7). However, the recent proliferation of transnational movements and flows brought about two apparently contradictory trends, the deterritorialisation of community and culture on the one hand, and the refurbishing of (trans)national territorial ties to varying degrees on the other. This raised anthropological awareness of the dangers of cultural localisation (Clifford, 1992, p. 99). Whether they deal with groups for whom the ethnic and cultural distinctiveness of places is still retained today, or whether they study the new “forms of solidarity and identity that do not rest on an appropriation of space” (Gupta & Ferguson, 1992, p. 9), anthropologists now seek to understand the complex ways in which culture is delocalised and locality is culturally and politically produced. What henceforth counts in anthropological enquiry is the manner in which places and the panoply of mobile human and non-human actors produce and transform each other. In this context, two questions are paramount: how are territorial ties being reconfigured in the age of transnational migration, and how can we make sense of human kinship to place in the age of mobility and technology? In what follows, I introduce major conceptions, in globalisation and transnational migration theories, of the disjunction between place and social identity and the way mobilities are transforming our understanding of the human bond to place. Such conceptions, as we shall see, are setting the intellectual ground for a processual and performative view of the self and the family.

40

L. TAYEB

2.2.1

From Places to “Flows”: Globalisation Theories

With the intensification of varied forms of movement at the end of the twentieth century, the status of territory changed from an effaced to an axial vector in cultural analysis. Social and anthropological thinkers started to include the dimension of space in the study of human interrelating. Arjun Appadurai’s “ethnoscapes of modernity” and Ulf Hannerz’s “global ecumene” are attempts to reimagine territory and account for the deterritorialised individuals and groups of the late twentieth century (Appadurai, 1996; Hannerz, 1992, 1996). Since “groups are no longer tightly territorialised, spatially bounded, historically unselfconscious, or culturally homogeneous”, previously rooted ethnic groups have turned into mobile ethnoscapes that puzzle the ethnographer. Unlike the stable, territorial community, the ethnoscape is a “landscape of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live: tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guest workers and other moving groups and individuals”; it is a displaced, inevitably changed ethnic self and identity, and a different culture transplanted into and transforming the urban landscapes of global metropolises (Appadurai, 1996, pp. 33, 48). Since ethnoscapes draw ethnography away from the territorial locus of stable ethnies towards the deterritorialised and moving individual and group identities of our contemporary globalised world, Appadurai seeks to establish a “cosmopolitan ethnography” or “macroethnography” able to grapple with the processes of producing locality and reproducing culture in the ethnoscape. For this, he argues that, rather than face-to-face contact and rootedness in homelands and communities, mass media and the imagination now play a salient role in social life: vision, perspective, image and imagination today (as much as concrete social spaces and relations) shape the processes of cultural reproduction (Appadurai, 1996, pp. 52, 54). In a similar neological spirit, Ulf Hannerz proposes to work with the “global ecumene” in response to anthropology’s loss of its familiar object of study, the bounded territorial society and culture. He defines it as an “open” “landscape of modernity” and as a space of interconnectedness and impossible isolation (Hannerz, 1996, pp. 44, 49). The aim is to acknowledge world interconnectedness and open cultural flow against the “assumption of a global mosaic” and the presumed independence of local social life and experience (Hannerz, 1992, p. 37). Hannerz links the notion of an ecumenical unit to two recent concerns: the need to account for the effect of “wider structures” or “frameworks” on local cultural practice, and awareness of the shift from

2

KINSHIP, MIGRANT MOBILITIES AND GLOBAL TECHNOLOGIES

41

the spatially organised mechanism of culture sharing to the much more diffuse and uneven “distributive view of culture”: culture is no longer reproduced at the small-scale level and evenly shared by members of a cultural community: it is mass-distributed, and its flow is becoming ever more complex as it slips through the control of the national state. The global ecumene concept thus takes into account the interplay of “wider structures” and “local responses” as well as the free and complex cultural flow enabled by the “distributive view” (1992, pp. 35, 36). James Clifford’s “culture-in-travel” is another conceptual way out of the ethnographic tendency to “freeze” and immobilise cultural life by associating it with a place of dwelling, and an attempt to grapple with the inevitable mobility and intermingling of cultures. Culture-in-travel is to be explored in “boundary areas” and “sites of travel encounters” (1992, pp. 99, 101). In an earlier essay, Clifford sees ethnography “as a form of culture collecting” thus totally rejecting the notions of “cultural wholes and boundaries” (1988, p. 231). Ethnography’s selective and structuring methods in addition to its tendency to associate culture with centers of dwelling rather than the peripheral spaces of travel, have, for Clifford, found their limits in a late twentieth-century interconnected world. To grapple with the complex, dynamic life of culture in transnational life, ethnographers must study culture-in-travel—the transportable, transposable culture of immigrants, guest workers and refugees and commoditised cultural items in global circulation; they must also pay greater attention to the ways in which the new media technologies contribute to making culture a quintessentially mobile phenomenon. During the last decade of the twentieth century, flow, with its connotations of liquid process and change, became a predominant metaphor of global modernity (Appadurai, 1996; Bauman, 2000). It created a binary opposition between a normalised state of sedentarism, fixity and social stability and a new, exceptional state of nomadic mobility provoking the dissolution of the stable social and cultural systems of the past. Manuel Castells uses the image of the “space of flows” as a way to configure space in the informational age and network society. Departing from the idea that space takes the material form that society takes, he argues that the space of flows is the “new spatial [form] and [process] that is emerging” in the global network society (2010, pp. 440–441). Like Appadurai’s “scapes” of modernity with their fundamental link to “motion” and “mediation” technologies (1996, p. 4), Castells’ network society concept links the new social structure to digital networks “activated by

42

L. TAYEB

microelectronics-based, digitally processed information and communication technologies” (2009, p. 24). In this sense, the network society is supranational and global and its “space of flows” is removed from the vague level of abstraction to the “material form of support” enabling the “processes and functions” of the network society: flows take the concrete form of “purposeful, repetitive, programmable sequences of exchange and interaction between physically disjointed positions held by social actors in the economic, political, and symbolic structures of society” (Castells, 2010, p. 442). 2.2.2

From National Societies to Transnational Social Fields: Transnational Migration Theory

Late twentieth-century globalisation theories have greatly contributed to thinking about the disjunction between space and social identity, and despite the fact that they take a macro perspective on mobility which generalises and abstracts flows to a great extent, they are the “backdrop” against which contemporary social thought on mobility is evolving (D’Andrea et al., 2011, pp. 150–151). In what follows, I examine some comparable conceptual developments in the more specific field of migration studies: here, the national society and culture constructs have also become unsatisfactory units especially with the intensification and growing complexification of postcolonial migrations to the west. Moving beyond its early concern with assimilation into a host country, migration studies at the end of the twentieth-century bifurcated into two orientations: diaspora studies and transnationalism. Both seek to find adequate theoretical and methodological tools to deal with social processes in excess of national territories. In comparison to its kindred concept, transnationalism, diaspora points to “more historically embedded migrations” characterised by a more or less “wounded” culture of uprooting and scattering, a measure of collective mobility and resettlement, and an imagined and memoried connection to a “salient” homeland that nurtures a personal or collective desire for return across generations (King & Christou, 2011, p. 457). In late twentieth-century studies of migrant mobilities, a new trend identified as diasporisation has been associated with “the ethnification of immigrant populations” in Europe, and the general shift in western nationalist policies “from assimilationism to multiculturalism”; diasporisation engendered an ethnified diasporic community’s “identification with

2

KINSHIP, MIGRANT MOBILITIES AND GLOBAL TECHNOLOGIES

43

a foreign homeland beyond the borders of the [western] nation-state” and the weakening of the cultural unity of the western territorial nation: dual empowerment of insider ethnic (sub)national identities and outsider immigrant minorities was thus believed to precipitate “the not-so-gradual decline of the nation-state” (Friedman, 1997, pp. 71, 84). The diasporisation of immigrant communities was also approached as a specific postcolonial development turning culture into a problematic anthropological field of enquiry mainly by challenging the previous separation between the non-west and the west: “[n]on-western cultures . . . [t]he honour-and-shame complex and all the rest are no longer confined to an elsewhere, outside the west; indeed, there is no easily identifiable ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ anymore” (Van der Veer, 1997, p. 92). Anthropology’s growing incapacity to locate culture was thus partly imputed to diasporisation as a specific postcolonial development (Van der Veer, 1997, p. 91). Seen as confounding of national inside and outside, diasporisation is close to transnationalism, though the latter is much more broadly understood as the ongoing maintenance of cross-border connections by migrant individuals, families or larger groups. A transnational optic sees late twentieth century (im)migrants as “transmigrants” who maintain simultaneous social, cultural and political ties to their homelands and their host nations (Glick-Schiller et al., 1992, p. 1; Levitt & Glick-Schiller, 2004, p. 1003). Homeland connections are maintained through frequent travel between host and home locations and a kind of “long-distance nationalism” largely enabled by the new information and communication technologies (Eriksen, 2010, p. 128). Though a largely underresearched area (Bradatan et al., 2010, p. 171), host land connections are rethought outside the old cultural assimilation model, shifting the focus away from culture and national integrity to citizenship and civic/political participation. As an analytical framework, transnationalism advances two major propositions: first, it endorses the tempered political view that integration in a host society and connection to one’s homeland are in no way “contradictory” or “incompatible”; rather, such social processes now unfold simulateneously and “reinforce one another”; second, it advances a “transnational social field theory of society” as an attempt to rethink society beyond the nation-state and break with methodological nationalism in social research generally (Levitt & Glick-Schiller, 2004, pp. 1003, 1007). Transnational social fields were at the beginning reduced to dual national locations, but migration researchers have ever since grappled with the complexity

44

L. TAYEB

of those fields and reassessed the theory’s central concept and premise. Levitt and Jaworsky recognise the “fluid social spaces” and “multilayered and multisited [arenas]” in which migrants get “simultaneous[ly] embedded” (Levitt & Jaworsky, 2007, p. 131). That is, if we break with the homogenising label of im/migrant and pay attention to politically differentiated varieties of cross-border mobilities (Faist, 2013, p. 1642), we can better appraise the “geographically diffuse migration systems” and “multiple scales” of transnational social fields: in particular, differences between first and subsequent generations, and differences between mobile professionals, labour migrants and refugees in terms of situatedness in and mobility through transnational fields are reckoned with (King & Christou, 2011, p. 456). One way in which the complexity of transnational social fields has been addressed is the translocal approach in sociology. In the previous chapter, I introduced translocality as a conceptual refinement in the transnationalism literature aiming to break with the inconcreteness of transnational social fields, the persistent national society logic behind them, and the image of migrants as drifters rather than dwellers in the field’s multiple layers. For Conradson and McKay, a translocal subjectivity “emerg[es] through both geographical mobility and multiple forms of belonging” (2007, p. 168), hence the importance of “local contexts and the situatedness of mobile actors” (Greiner & Sakdapolrak, 2013, p. 374). Since “transnational theories tend to put emphasis on flows between places”, the translocal approach more attentive to the “localized transitional identities” of migrants and foregrounding their “concrete localities and simple place-bound activities” offers honed conceptual and methodological tools to grapple with migrant mobilities (Mavrommatis, 2015, pp. 97, 98). The translocal approach not only frees locality from the nation-state form and national society structure by attending to scales within and beyond the nation; it also expands the field of research beyond migration to deal with varied forms of cross-border mobility and interconnecting (Greiner & Sakdapolrak, 2013, p. 375). Since contemporary migration and mobility have changed the conception of territory from a bounded societal place of dwelling to a transnational social field of networks and relations, it has become equally important to reconcile routes and roots, or travelling and dwelling. Anthropological and social research must now devise new theories of subjectivity and new research methods to make sense of spaces of movement and multiply situated individuals and groups. Diasporic,

2

KINSHIP, MIGRANT MOBILITIES AND GLOBAL TECHNOLOGIES

45

transnational or translocal subjectivities draw attention to ways of being, dwelling and belonging that confound clear-cut divisions between stasis and mobility, structure and process, systemic power and individual agency. As such they pull social enquiry towards the processual realm of practice and experience and the interplay between discursive structures and performative becomings within it. Pierre Bourdieu’s anthropological theory of practice marked the general shift towards experience and performance: his concept of habitus highlights the relation between a material environment, social individuals and the cultural practices of those individuals. As “a system of lasting, transposable dispositions which, integrating past experiences, functions at every moment as a matrix of perceptions, apperceptions, and actions, and makes possible the achievement of infinitely diversified tasks”, habitus is at the same time produced by a particular material environment and embodied (and thus transportable) by social individuals (Bourdieu, 1977, pp. 82–83). An embodied social and cultural place naturally and unconsciously generates what Bourdieu no longer considers the culture, but the complex cultural practice of individuals (p. 72). The concept of habitus decouples place and social self since it explains the way “certain habitual patterns of acting that are related to specific places become embodied in the self” and may be transposed in new environments: while inhabiting certain locations, individuals embody a habitus that predisposes them towards certain social forms of interaction; they accumulate a certain social and cultural capital that they are able to carry with them. Places may thus be left behind and still “endure in our bodies as a form of corporeal memory” (Burkitt, 2008, pp. 182–183). Bourdieu’s habitus engenders a reconception of culture as the performative interplay of social rules and individual practices. Culture is not an independent body of rules guiding social perception, interaction and action, and individuals are in no way subjected to its supreme dicta. What we take for culture is an aspect of the improvised actions of individuals as they enter into diverse fields of relation throughout everyday life. Viewed as process and practice, culture has its transcendent power infused in the everyday performances of individuals and subject to their imperfect, transformative or resistant practices (Bourdieu, 1977). With Bourdieu’s theory of practice in perspective, we can better see how “structures of power intermingle with processes of subjectivity and identity formation by means of mechanisms and resources of constraint and agency” (D’Andrea et al., 2011, p. 157). Both (cultural) practice and performance—which engendered a “performative turn” in the human and social

46

L. TAYEB

sciences in the wake of Judith Butler’s analysis of gender performativity (Licoppe, 2010)—are now part of a broad shift towards a posthumanism that does not proclaim the end of the human but its radical relationality: cutting with the rational, autonomous subject of humanism and the unembodied, already constituted subject of discourse, the posthuman subject is a corporeally “embodied”, societally “embedded” and inexorably “flowing in a web of relations with human and non-human others” (Boccagni & Baldassar, 2015, p. 3; Braidotti, 2018, p. 4). Partially situated by power, it is a becoming subject, provisionally constituted by the set of affect-ridden transversal intra-anthropological, man–machine and human–animal interconnections in which it is embedded. Indeed, taking a posthuman perspective on migrant subjectivities brings to the spotlight their “transversal alliances”, mobile states of being and belonging and emotional fields of kinship and interrelating (Braidotti, 2018, p. 6; Roelvink & Zolkos, 2015, pp. 46–47).

2.3 Community in the Information Age: From Societies to Mobilities As argued above, places and territorial units of dwelling are rethought through mobility: no longer conceived as fixed, self-contained and separate from people, places are “implicated within complex networks” involving varied mobile actors and their time-/place-bound performances (Sheller & Urry, 2006, p. 214). Likewise, the localised community of anthropological and social research has grown into a highly vexing concept. Traditionally, “[c]ommunity baggage” underpinned such anthropological tradition that “privileged collectivities as the primary locales and agents of sociality” and adopted a holistic view of all the elements of a group’s interaction. Now, both transport and information and communication technologies play a major part in “unpack[ing] the homology of collective identity, group, culture and place that formed the foundation of an earlier version of anthropology as the study of cultural communities” (Amit, 2002, p. 20). In addition, anthropologists grew aware of the constructed and hegemonic aspect of any presumably homogeneous community and the inadequacy of approaching individuals as incomplex members of allocated communities: “rather than providing a ready-made social unit upon which to hang analysis”, any proclamation of community must now receive “skeptical investigation” (Amit, 2002, p. 14). A shift from the non-western tribal or rural community to the urban ethnic group did nothing to revamp the concept of community but,

2

KINSHIP, MIGRANT MOBILITIES AND GLOBAL TECHNOLOGIES

47

instead, confirmed “the contingent relationship between collective identity and place” (Amit, 2002, p. 16). Recasting the old dichotomy between the west and non-west in the form of the global/local division has also proven an inadequate solution to the loss of the “isolated communities” of the past and the challenge of the “complex, ‘unbounded’ systems” of today (Eriksen, 2010, p. 118). Both the division between the local and the global and the assumed coherence, boundedness and passivity of the local in the face of global influences have been called into question with anthropology’s movement in the last decade of the twentieth century towards notions of interdependence and complexity (Friedman, 1990; Hall, 1997; Hannerz, 1990, 1997). The term community as I use it here includes both the modern largescale intimate and emotionalised national community and the presumably pre-modern, small-scale ethnic and cultural group. To begin with, the nation’s imagined community is based on the institution of a “fictive ethnicity” that “draw[s] much of [its] symbolic appeal from [real] kinship” (Balibar, 1991, p. 96; Eriksen, 2010, p. 131). The motherhood of the nation, the paternal cares of the State, as well as the strong brotherhood of the national community are common examples of family and kinship imagery in nationalism. Invented, unnatural (Gellner, 1983, pp. 48–49) and grounded in unfamiliarity and the absence of face-to-face contact (Anderson, 1983, p. 7), the national community is based on a political discourse that naturalises a social and political bond and emphasises the cultural distinctiveness and unity of its members. In other terms, nations may, for political reasons, ethnify their communities by drawing on kinship images, which makes the nation a kindred concept to ethnicity (Eriksen, 2010, pp. 9–10). In the twenty-first century, national communities appear to be helplessly losing an already fictive unity, coherence and separateness through the proliferation of cross-border movements and connections, and current anthropological research tries to grapple with such phenomena as ethnic revivalism and the growing ethnification of minorities and nations. Ethnicity is also being redefined through migration and cultural intermixing. Unlike race, it emphasises, not similar physical features, but “commonalities at the level of culture and social integration” functioning as “sources of solidarity and collective identification”; despite the persistence of race thinking today, ethnicity has become a much more viable mode of identifying groups and inter-group relationships in the nation-state world system (Eriksen, 2010, p. 8). Instead of primordial

48

L. TAYEB

orientation, ethnicity is approached as a modern form of community rooted in the history of modern European colonialism with its constitution of race and race relations, and in the current postcolonial blurring of the boundary between modern westerns and tribal others (Eriksen, 2010, p. 14). Since the idea of a self-generating ethnic category has lost credibility, what anthropology approaches as a modern ethnicity emphasises a group’s external relations, which means that the ethnic aspect of an individual’s or a group’s identity is activated only in certain situations of social contact, or is otherwise insignificant: “for ethnicity is essentially an aspect of a relationship, not a property of a group” (Eriksen, 2010, pp. 15, 16). Eriksen’s argument is built on Fredrick Barth’s groundbreaking idea that ethnic groups are defined by their boundaries (the maintenance of group identity in social interaction) rather than the content of their cultures. Starting from the premise that ethnic identities are strongly maintained rather than dissolved in situations of interethnic contact and interaction, Barth argues that ethnic groups do not develop their self-ascribed identities in isolation but in contact: boundaries are not only maintained despite, but also through interethnic contact and interaction, and ethnic identities develop much of their cultural content in processes of self-identification and dichotomisation activated by interaction at the level of the boundary (Barth, 1969, p. 15). From such perspective, the revived ethnic solidarities and sentiments of our age should not be perceived as a regressive orientation, but must, in large part, be construed as new ethnic identities and communities taking shape through the present processes of inter-group interaction in which they get involved. An “important ‘ethnicisation’ of the world is now taking place”, as groups get defined as ethnic categories and as minorities in relation to a larger, often dominant, national or regional system. This raises the problem of minorities in Western Europe and the United States, and the way they are to be managed in a polyethnic or multicultural framework (Eriksen, 2010, pp. 151–152). Politically speaking, the management of diversity has become a constant conundrum facing the western nation-state. The gradual movement from post-war assimilationist policies towards the conception of more elaborate multicultural social and political programmes has failed to provide solutions to the problems of increasing polyethnicity and cultural and religious diversity. Multicultural national societies are one of the salient contexts of the emergence of new community solidarities among

2

KINSHIP, MIGRANT MOBILITIES AND GLOBAL TECHNOLOGIES

49

im/migrants and the consequent creation of ethnic and religious identities apparently at odds with nationalist affiliation in the host society. To better understand the social and political impasse of multiculturalism, it is important to see the nuances of meaning separating the intimate and emotional national community and the mechanical and rationalised system of national society: a strictly modern concept, society depends on the nation-state form as well as a cold, rational, and contractual citizenship as the principle of membership and reproduction. It is the realm of human industry, control and progress, and as such it has been demarcated from nature; gradually, the scientific study of the human social order modeled itself on the biological study of the field and system of nature, which led to consolidating both the bounded system of society and the world system of nation-states and national societies (Urry, 2000, pp. 5– 11). With increasing levels of human mobility and changing technological forms of communication in the twenty-first century, anthropological and sociological research must adapt to its loss of society as “historic subjectmatter” and “organizing concept”: global mobilities directly challenge the structural unity and coherence of society, and inevitably lead social science to a “‘post-societal’ phase” (Urry, 2000, pp. 1, 3). From this perspective, multiculturalism is a political philosophy and project designed to reconceive national society in the age of mobility, polyethnicity and multiculture but has so far largely failed to retrieve the contractual order and social cohesion upon which the longevity of nations is based, as well as the spiritual and emotional force nurturing national community bonds. In political terms, the roots of this failure have often been traced back to the universalism-particularism duality on which the western project of modernity is based. Derived from the Enlightenment project and its construction of an opposition between a time/space-bound, particular and anti-rational traditionalism and a universal, rational and liberating modernism, the Universalism–Particularism binary opposition has guided western modernity on its path towards global reach. In other words, the expansion of the particular cultural values of western modernity over varieties of “traditions” has taken the form of a liberal and liberating universalism combating particular, traditional cultures. For Stuart Hall, this binary opposition shaped the anthropological study of culture by reinforcing a fundamental idea in anthropological research: that against “the distinctive, homogeneous, self-contained, stronglybounded cultures of so-called traditional societies . . . [where] cultural tradition saturates whole communities, subordinating individuals to a

50

L. TAYEB

communally-sanctioned form of life” stands “the ‘culture of modernity’— open, rational, universalist and individualistic”. By subordinating cultural particularity to the disinterested and “[neutral] . . . civic state”, the “culture of modernity” propagates itself as the universal ideal against which all particularisms, if not totally discarded, are at least “set aside in public life” (Hall, 2000, p. 225). The current liberal-universalist tradition, advocating “universal citizenship and the cultural neutrality of the state” thus rejects multiculturalism on the basis of its strong particularist bias, and its communitarianism. What it has faced in the course of the twentieth century is the demise of its own universalism: modern liberal universalism gradually loses its status as “the ‘culture that is beyond cultures’” and appears more clearly as “that particularism which successfully universalized and hegemonized itself across the globe” (Hall, 2000, p. 228) If liberalism faces the limits of its universalism and political fairness, communitarianism and its multicultural politics of recognition equally fails on two major grounds: first, it fails to reconcile what Gerd Baumann calls the “multicultural triangle”, whose three irreconcilable corners are national culture, an unlikely amalgam of the “rationalism” of the state and the “romanticism” of the ethnified nation, ethnic culture, whose equation of ethnicity with culture verges on dangerous absolutism, and religious culture, whose absolutism can function as a cover-up for national and ethnic political conflicts (Baumann, 1999, pp. 18–24). Second, by reifying ethnic cultures and communities, multiculturalism runs the risk of propagating false respect for difference at the same time as it overlooks the internal diversity of so-called communities and works with a summary view of community culture. This is what Baumann calls a “dominant” discourse of “culture” and “community”, as opposed to the “demotic” or internal discourse: while a “dominant” discourse tends to reify the culture of an ethnic minority, identifying it “as a substantive heritage that is normative, predictive of people’s behavior, and ultimately a cause for social action”, a “demotic” discourse presents a no more authentic picture since “people may reify their own culture as readily as they reify ‘other’ cultures ”, especially in situations where ethnic identity is mobilised to press for political recognition and rights (Baumann, 1996, pp. 10– 12). Since the culture of ethnic minorities “cannot be approached as if it were some heirloom woven in a pre-migration ethnic past” (Baumann, 1995, p. 726), then multiculturalism which works with an “ethnic-cumcultural community” notion necessarily essentialises ethnic communities

2

KINSHIP, MIGRANT MOBILITIES AND GLOBAL TECHNOLOGIES

51

and denies their “social complexity”: the dynamic flow of culture within and across ethnic boundaries, i.e. between ethnic minorities themselves and between a dynamic minority culture and a national one (Baumann, 1996, p. 17). Any study of community in the global age must take into account strategic reifications of “community culture” by both outsider accounts and insider views as well as the sociopolitical circumstances in which it is inevitably produced. One of the features of life in the twenty-first century is that individuals no longer derive their attachments from the certainty of roots and ancestry, but are driven to identify with newly produced communities and interact with cultural traditions in individually oriented ways. What Castells regards as the emerging global “network society” is characterised by the fact that both large-scale cultural affiliation and individual social interaction have been turned by the communication networks in which they take place into largely “[selective]” phenomena (2009, pp. 116, 120). In addition, the idea that today’s communities and community bonds are primordial orientations has been set aside in social research. Arjun Appadurai detected a misleading primordialism in the late twentieth-century revival of the ethnic community: acknowledging the affective, irrational aspect of ethnic attachments and conflicts, he rejected the primordialist explanation for its tendency to create an unsustainable division between a modern west and a hopelessly anti-modern rest: while ethnic primordialism is not an all-pervasive phenomenon in the non-western world, a general ethnicisation of the national community is a common tendency in Europe today (Appadurai, 1996, pp. 139– 143). Elena Pulcini equally rejected the sociological tendency to treat community and society as two stages on an evolutionary scale, or the understanding of community as “a pre-modern residue . . . destined to disappear and be ‘outstripped’ . . . by the modern gesellschaft ”; such understanding may lead us to misinterpret present-day community building as a primordialist orientation thus “downgrad[ing] the idea of community to a useless and even dangerous archaism” (Pulcini, 2010, p. 89). Community is thus more adequately approached as a form of socialisation that “co-exists ” with society and as “a new product of globalization”; affiliation in it invariably springs from a “need for community” as a response to the myriad challenges posed by our life in a globalised world (Pulcini, 2010, pp. 86, 88, 90). Indeed, migrants today negotiate their cultural identities in an increasingly complex field of relations a large part of which is virtual and digital.

52

L. TAYEB

Enabled by globalised transport and the new information technologies, their transnational relations have a huge impact on the way they embed themselves into social networks in home and host societies/communities. Developments in global transport and telecommunication, in particular, the rapid increase in the number of Low-cost Airlines around the world and the spread of wireless telecommunication from the 1990s onwards, encouraged individuals and families to embark on transnational labor plans. Increasing affordability of long-distance travel all over the world meant that migrants are able to maintain more frequent physical or face-to-face interaction with kinship and other networks of relation in their homelands. Wireless telecommunication first enabled more frequent cross-border communication thanks to the spread of cheap long-distance calls from either landlines or cell phones in the 2000s; these have recently been superseded by electronic social networking, instant messaging and free calling applications. These new “quick media” now play a fundamental role in reinforcing as well as transforming kinship and the family as they “[provide] alternative means of identification and kinship ties to embodied lived experiences of human interaction” (Friedman & Schultermandl, 2016, p. 9). The rapid spread of social media in the last two decades not only contributes to “the transnationalisation of the immigrant family experience” by “break[ing] the distance and time limitations that [previously] prevented ongoing family communication”; it also boosts migration by psychologically lightening the prospects of separation from kin and family (Bacigalupe & Cámara, 2012, pp. 1426, 1427). Similarly, the shift from national media to global media at the end of the twentieth-century undermined the physical boundaries of the nation-state. Since the 1990s, media critics have become aware that social experience is no longer mediated within the narrow confines of national space and time, since “the ‘simultaneity’ of social experience presumed by established models of broadcasting” is irrevocably disrupted by a new media order. Terrestrial television and national broadcasting directed to a community of citizens have been superseded by the multiple digital channels commercially targeting consumer communities below or above the national society level and making television a deterritorialised and individualised medium. While national media and the system of broadcasting previously played a pivotal part “in the constitution and maintenance of [national] communities through time and space”, the development of new technologies like narrowcasting, specialised media and more recently social media, “a new communications geography” and an altogether “new

2

KINSHIP, MIGRANT MOBILITIES AND GLOBAL TECHNOLOGIES

53

global media landscape” in which boundaries are thoroughly “permeable” has taken form (Morley & Robins, 1995, pp. 1, 4). This does not mean that individuals in today’s world no longer identify with cultural communities or ideologically uphold them. Rather, today’s communities are largely constituted by the “new forms of localised and fragmented media production and consumption” and that global media significantly “interact with questions of national, cultural and ethnic identity” (Morley & Robins, 1995, pp. 4–5). In other terms, “a certain displacement of national frameworks in favor of perspectives and agendas appropriate to both supranational and sub-national dynamics” gradually led to changing “the nature and scope of community” (Morley & Robins, 1995, pp. 26, 34). In a digitally interconnected world and national contexts of migration, ethnic groups and their cultures are better approached as modern, reimagined communities in which bounded social place and personal faceto-face interaction are no longer primary. The new digital communication technologies lead to the proliferation of both disembodied personal relations and virtual communities no longer determined by inheritance but by individual orientation and choice. Personal relationships lose their direct face-to-face aspect by taking the disembodied forms enabled by the new information technologies, which do not have the simple effect of “mitigating the limitations of physical geography”; by “mediat[ing] our interactions”, they also alter “the formation of our kinship ties” (Friedman & Schultermandl, 2016, pp. 5, 8). In sum, the new information technologies largely determine the forms and processes by which the transnational families and communities of today lose, maintain or transform an array of distant and close connections over large-scale historical times and personal life courses. They play a central part in restructuring the family and kinship relations, and reshuffling community ties and solidarities in the global arena. Since community is not left behind, but reimagined through migration and cultural deterritorialisation, the new mobilities paradigm in sociology has come to challenge a simple shift to a “nomadic metaphysics” conferring upon mobility a positive sense of placeless drift and nonidentity (Cresswell, 2006, p. 26). In other terms, the new paradigm rejects the conception of empowering nomadism by which in flux identities are open to endless transformation. Turning away from the notion that routes supersede roots (Fallov et al., 2013, p. 468), it takes into account the interplay of sedentary and nomadic activity and seeks to

54

L. TAYEB

understand the way routes or mobile performances are inevitably implicated in the constitution of roots or loci of belonging (Sheller & Urry, 2006, pp. 210–211). Moreover, culture is no longer seen as the stable property of individuals and groups but a changing dimension of the relations they get involved in as they move between places. Rather than categorise “people into [static] typologies of belonging” social research must move towards understanding the processes by which “the people dimension relates to mobility and place, and hence influences belonging” and the way such processes “change during the life stages and depend on the particular biography of individuals” (Fallov et al., 2013, pp. 469, 470). Reading migration in the wake of the mobility turn urges us to reconceive dwelling, rootedness and belonging not as given but as constituted through the mobile performances of networked subjects; it calls upon us to “[reconcile] rootedness and cosmopolitanism” by “refusing to see rootedness in territory and culture and cosmopolitan openness as oppositional” (Glick Schiller & Salazar, 2012, p. 5). It is only by seeing mobility as an intrinsic dimension of human experience that inevitably goes into the constitution of the manifold acts of emplacement through which individuals negotiate their everyday lives, that a normative stasis and sedentarism is overcome at the same time as it is incorporated into a mobile conception of social and material worlds (Sheller & Urry, 2006, p. 210). In the next three chapters, I study literary representations of migrant family mobilities from the mid-twentieth century to the beginning of the twenty-first century from the perspective of two broad paradigmatic shifts: the “post-societal” and post-community approach of the mobilities paradigm outlined above, with its break with methodological nationalism and normalised sedentarism (Urry, 2000; Amit, 2002; Sheller & Urry, 2006), and the ethico-political and aesthetic shift beyond cosmopolitanism and globalisation towards an alternative conception of co-living in our contemporary world. Indeed, human and cultural deterritorialisation in today’s world has done more than simply unsettle kinship systems; it has increased “the challenge of living together beyond the local, with difference, in the face of alterity” (Jazeel, 2011, p. 76). Both cosmopolitanism and globalisation as kindred conceptions of the worlding world and the current human condition of “living with difference” have been based on the contestable geographical modalities of “globe” and “cosmos”, which connote order, a controllable system, and a

2

KINSHIP, MIGRANT MOBILITIES AND GLOBAL TECHNOLOGIES

55

hegemonic hold on the future. Such Eurocentric, imperialist and homogenizing cosmology has recently led social scientists to seek alternative “mechanisms and political imaginations for living together” (Jazeel, 2011, p. 77). The purpose is to “rethink being-in-relation beyond the nationalist, imperialist, and globalist nexus” by making an ethically driven shift from cosmology to geography and ecology and from globe to planet (Moraru, 2015, p. 51). Open, relational and uncertain, planetary geography generates new ethical engagements with human togetherness and precariousness: “ethics of care” based on the position of stewardship towards human and other-than-human difference, and ethics of “bioconnective” relationality that goes beyond the territorial and closed domain of kinship to include the distant and unfamiliar other, non-human species and world ecology (Elias & Moraru, 2015, pp. xxiii–xxiv). In a similar vein, Judith Butler bases her view of planetary togetherness on “precarity” as a fundamental human condition (Butler, 2012, pp. 147–148). Pointing out the “multilocality and cross-temporality” of today’s “global ethical obligations”, Butler seeks to base her notion of “cohabitation” on an account of such ethical obligations that arise in our contemporary interconnected world (the fact of increasingly being “solicited by images of distant suffering”) (Butler, 2012, p. 135). Based on “our social condition as bodily beings” and therefore precarious and dependent on others, Butler presents a morally humble conception of cohabitation: she abandons a romantic humanist and humanitarian discourse in favour of the idea that cohabitation is an unchosen human condition and that ethical obligation and political action are to be grounded in precarity. The purpose of a future politics and ethics of cohabitation is to guarantee equality and plurality, reduce precarity and safeguard a fundamental human right to co/inhabit the earth (Butler, 2012, pp. 147–150, 148). Throughout this chapter, I have made an overview of global material changes affecting kinship practices in today’s world as well as theoretical and conceptual innovations in social and anthropological research adapting the mechanisms and processes of knowledge production to the novel ways in which individuals and families manage dwelling, belonging and mobility. We may conclude that to approach migrant family mobilities, we need to take into account the interplay of mobility with rootedness in places, communities and cultural affiliations. We need to grapple with the composite set of social fields, life courses, mobile practices and processes of interrelating. We need to bear in mind that human beings are

56

L. TAYEB

neither rational agents nor discourse-driven subjects; their inter/actions are shaped by, and implicated within an “assemblage” of affects, ecologies, technologies and immobile structures of power (Elliott & Urry, 2010, p. 14). In the next three chapters, I deal with three types of migrant mobilities, postcolonial, emotional and forced mobilities, and study their literary representations in global Anglophone novels from 1990 to the early twenty-first century.

References Amit, V. (2002). An anthropology without community. In V. Amit & N. Rapport (Eds.), The trouble with community: Anthropological reflections on movement, identity and collectivity (pp. 11–70). Pluto Press. Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. Verso. Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalization. University of Minnesota Press. Bacigalupe, G., & Cámara, M. (2012). Transnational families and social technologies: Reassessing immigration psychology. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 38(9), 1425–1438. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2012. 698211. Balibar, E. (1991). The nation form: History and ideology. In E. Balibar & I. Wallerstein (Eds.), Race, nation, class: Ambiguous identities (pp. 86–106). Verso. Barth, F. (1969). Introduction. In F. Barth (Ed.), Ethnic groups and boundaries: The social organization of cultural difference (pp. 9–38). Little, Brown & Company. Bauman, Z. (2000). Liquid modernity. Polity Press. Baumann, G. (1995). Managing a polyethnic milieu: Kinship and interaction in a London suburb. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 1(4), 725–741. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3034958. Accessed 18 Nov 2018. Baumann, G. (1996). Contesting culture: Discourses of identity in multi-ethnic London. Cambridge University Press. Baumann, G. (1999). The multicultural riddle: Rethinking national, ethnic and religious identities. Routledge. Boccagni, P., & Baldassar, L. (2015). Emotions on the move: Mapping the emergent field of emotion and migration. Emotion, Space and Society, 1–8. https:// doi.org/10.1016/jemospa.2015.06.009. Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a theory of practice (R. Nice, Trans.). Cambridge University Press. Original Edition: Bourdieu, P. (1972). Esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique, précédé de trois études d’éthnologie kabyle. Librairie Droz.

2

KINSHIP, MIGRANT MOBILITIES AND GLOBAL TECHNOLOGIES

57

Bradatan, C., Popan, A., & Melton, R. (2010). Transnationality as a fluid social identity. Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture, 16(2), 169–178. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504631003688856. Braidotti, R. (2018). A theoretical framework for the critical posthumanities. Theory, Culture & Society, 1–31. https://doi.org/10.1117/026327641877 1486. Burkitt, I. (2008). Social selves: Theories of self and society (2nd ed.). Sage. Butler, J. (2012). Precarious life, vulnerability and the ethics of cohabitation. The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 26(2), 134–151. http://www.jstor.org/sta ble/10.5325/jspecphil.26.2.0134. Accessed 06 Nov 2015. Carsten, J. (2004). After kinship. Cambridge University Press. Castells, M. (2009). Communication power. Oxford University Press. Castells, M. (2010). The rise of the network society (2nd ed.). Blackwell Publishers. Clifford, J. (1988). The predicament of culture: Twentieth century ethnography, literature and art. Harvard University Press. Clifford, J. (1992). Travelling cultures. In L. Grossberg, C. Nelson, & P. A. Treichler (Eds.), Cultural studies (pp. 96–116). Routledge. Conradson, D., & McKay, D. (2007). Translocal subjectivities: Mobility, connection, emotion. Mobilities, 2(2), 167–174. https://doi.org/10.1080/174501 007013811524. Cresswell, T. (2006). On the move: Mobility in the modern western world. Routledge. D’Andrea, A., Ciolfi, L., & Gray, B. (2011). Methodological challenges and innovations in mobilities research. Mobilities, 6(2), 149–160. https://doi. org/10.1080/17450101.2011.552769. Elias, A. J., & Moraru, C. (2015). Introduction: The planetary condition. In A. J. Elias & C. Moraru (Eds.), The planetary turn: Relationality and geoaesthetics in the twenty-first century (pp. xi–xxxvii). Northwestern University Press. Elliott, A., & Urry, J. (2010). Mobile lives. Routledge. Eriksen, T. H. (2010). Ethnicity and nationalism: Anthropological perspectives (3rd ed.). Pluto Press. Faist, T. (2013). The mobility turn: A new paradigm for the social sciences? Ethnic and Racial Studies, 36(11), 1637–1646. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 01419870.2013.812229. Fallov, M. A., Jørgensen, A., & Knudsen, L. B. (2013). Mobile forms of belonging. Mobilities, 8(4), 467–486. https://doi.org/10.1080/17450101. 2013.769722. Friedman, J. (1990). Being in the world: Globalization and localization. In M. Featherstone (Ed.), Global culture: Nationalism, globalization and modernity (pp. 311–327). Sage. Friedman, J. (1997). Global crises, the struggle for cultural identity and intellectual porkbarrelling: Cosmopolitans versus locals, ethnics and nationals in an

58

L. TAYEB

era of de-hegemonisation. In P. Werbner & T. Modood (Eds.), Debating cultural hybridity: Multicultural identities and the politics of anti-racism (pp. 70–89). Zed Books. Friedman, M. & Schultermandl, S. (2016). Introduction. In M. Friedman & S. Schultermandl (Eds.), Click and kin: Transnational identity and quick media (pp. 3–24). University of Toronto Press. Gellner, E. (1983). Nations and nationalism. Cornell University Press. Glick Schiller, N., Basch, L., & Blanc-Szanton, C. (1992). Transnationalism: A new analytic framework for understanding migration. Annals of the New York Academy of Science, 645(1), 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-6632. 1992.tb33484.x. Glick Schiller, N., & Salazar, N. B. (2012). Regimes of mobility across the globe. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 1369183X.2013.723253. Greiner, C., & Sakdapolrak, P. (2013). Translocality: Concepts, applications, and emerging research perspectives. Geography Compass, 7 (5), 373–384. https:// doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12048. Gupta, A. & Ferguson, J. (1992). Beyond ‘culture’: Space, identity and the politics of difference. Cultural Anthropology, 7 (1), 6–23. http://www.jstor.org/ stable/656518. Accessed 25 Sep 2013. Hall, S. (1997). The local and the global: Globalization and ethnicity. In A. D. King (Ed.), Culture, globalization and the world system: Contemporary conditions for the representation of identity (pp. 19–39). University of Minnesota Press. Hall, S. (2000). Un/settled multiculturalisms: Diasporas. Entanglements: Zed Books. Hannerz, U. (1990). Cosmopolitans and locals in world culture. In M. Featherstone (Ed.), Global culture: Nationalism, globalization and modernity (pp. 237–251). Sage Publications. Hannerz, U. (1992). The global ecumene as a network of networks. In A. Kuper (Ed.), Conceptualizing society (pp. 34–56). Routledge. Hannerz, U. (1996). Transnational connections: Culture, people, places. Routledge. Hannerz, U. (1997). Scenarios for peripheral cultures. In A. D. King (Ed.), Culture, globalization and the world-system: Contemporary conditions for the representation of identity (pp. 107–128). University of Minnesota Press. Haraway, D. J. (1997). Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan © _Meets_ Oncomouse TM : Feminism and technoscience. Routledge. Jazeel, T. (2011). Spatializing difference beyond cosmopolitanism: Rethinking planetary futures. Theory, Culture & Society, 28(5), 75–97. https://doi.org/ 10.1117/0263276411410447.

2

KINSHIP, MIGRANT MOBILITIES AND GLOBAL TECHNOLOGIES

59

King, R., & Christou, A. (2011). Of counter-diaspora and reverse transnationalism: Return mobilities to and from the ancestral homeland. Mobilities, 6(4), 451–466. https://doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2011.603941. Levitt, P., & Glick Schiller, N. (2004). Conceptualizing simultaneity: A transnational social field perspective on society. International Migration Review, 38(3), 1002–1039. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27645424. Accessed 14 Jun 2014. Levitt, P., & Jaworsky, B. N. (2007). Transnational migration studies: Past developments and future trends. Annual Review of Sociology, 33, 129–156. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.soc.33.040406.131816. Licoppe, C. (2010). The ‘performative turn’ in science and technology studies. Journal of Cultural Economy, 3(2), 181–188. https://doi.org/10.1080/175 30350.2010.494122. Mavrommatis, G. (2015). South Asian tales: Ethnic entrepreneurs and narratives of spatialized transnational identities emerging in an East London (UK) inner-city area. Diaspora Studies, 8(2), 89–103. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 09739572.2015.1029710. Moraru, C. (2015). Reading for the planet: Towards a geomethodology. University of Michigan Press. Morley, D., & Robins, K. (1995). Spaces of identity: Global media, electronic landscapes and cultural boundaries. Routledge. Pulcini, E. (2010). Rethinking community in the global age (R. Barritt, Trans.). Iris, II (3), 87–101. Rifkin, J. (1998). The Biotech century: Harnessing the gene and re-making the world. Penguin Putnam. Roelvink, G., & Zolkos, M. (2015). Affective ontologies: Post-humanist perspectives on the self, feeling and intersubjectivity. Emotion, Space and Society, 14, 47–49. https://doi.org/10.1016/jemospa.2014.07.003. Sheller, M., & Urry, J. (2006). The new mobilities paradigm. Environment and Planning a, 38, 207–226. https://doi.org/10.1068/a37268. Smith, A. D. (1986). The ethnic origins of nations. Blackwell Publishers. Smith, A. D. (2007). Nations in decline: The erosion and persistence of modern national identities. In M. Young, E. Zuelow, & A. Sturm (Eds.), Nationalism in a global era: The persistence of nations (pp. 171–192). Routledge. Smith, Z. (2000). White teeth. Penguin Books. Schneider, D. (1984). A critique of the study of kinship. The University of Michigan Press. Strathern, M. (1992a). After nature: English kinship in the late twentieth century. Cambridge University Press. Strathern, M. (1992b). Parts and wholes: Refiguring relationships in a post-plural world. In A. Kuper (Ed.), Conceptualizing society (pp. 75–104). Routledge.

60

L. TAYEB

Urry, J. (2000). Sociology beyond societies: Mobilities for the twenty-first century. Routledge. Van der Veer, P. (1997). ‘The enigma of arrival’: Hybridity and authenticity in the global space. In P. Werbner & T. Modood (Eds.), Debating cultural hybridity: Multicultural identities and the politics of anti-racism (pp. 90–105). Zed Books. White, G. W. (2000). Nationalism and territory: Constructing group identity in southeastern Europe. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

CHAPTER 3

Postcolonial Migrant Mobilities: Hanif Kureishi’s and Zadie Smith’s Transcultural Families

Given the tenacity of the family in our contemporary era, the view that migrant mobilities might lead to the total breakdown of family and kinship relations and the creation of drifting individuals free of the burden of kin and tradition is no longer reliable (Jallinoja & Widmer, 2011, p. 4). The traditional individualisation thesis in social thought has been tempered by increasing attention to the way individuals evolve through (rather than against) relationality, which implies “shifting the focus away from individuals to relationships and to socially significant ensembles that are constituted by those relationships” (Jallinoja & Widmer, p. 5). Starting from the general thesis that the family does not break down in transnational migration contexts, but rather takes new forms and patterns of relationship which continue to gratify the individual’s fundamental need for interconnection (Smart, 2011, p. 17), I study, through Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000), micro and everyday family practices embedding individuals into dynamic families and larger social groupings despite conflict and transformation. Kureishi’s and Smith’s novels represent the transnational family as a stifling monotonous domesticity and a muddle of transcultural relationships and transnational histories leading the individual to seek fulfillment in alternative, extra-familial relations, and construct self-knowledge and understanding through real or metaphorical journeys. Those coming of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Tayeb, Kinship in the Age of Mobility and Technology, Palgrave Studies in Mediating Kinship, Representation, and Difference, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69889-8_3

61

62

L. TAYEB

age journeys in turn lead to the re-assertion of kinship ties coupled with a now mature ability to relate those ties to a wider (national) society and (planetary) human collectivity. It is worth noting that The Buddha of Suburbia and White Teeth belong to an earlier phase of postcolonial global writing in which nomadic movement and identity metamorphoses are desired states which tend to be positively equated with freedom from roots and tradition. Written in the last decade of the twentieth century, such texts are concerned with a “subversive” type of mobility for the postcolonised as a response to the oppressive regime of “colonial mobility” (Murray & Upstone, 2014, p. 47). Based on the awareness that “colonialism is about movement through space, but it is not mobile”, and that much of it engendered violence and oppressive fixity for the postcolonised, postcolonial literary texts of the 1990s aim “simply to appropriate the mobile” as a ready mode of “subversion” (Murray & Upstone, pp. 42–44, 47). As such, they are to be distinguished from an early twenty-first-century wave of narrative texts in which roots are “as significant as movement” and “mobility and immobility are not easily divorced” (Lagji, 2019, p. 7). With this intellectual frame in mind, I approach the characters’ mobilities in Kureishi’s and Smith’s novels as “resistant rhythms” or postcolonial migrant mobilities whose nomadic trajectories are tactical manoeuvres designed to circumvent an oppressive sedentarism and fixity based in colonial structures of power (Murray & Upstone, p. 47). I use the novels’ spatial and historical maps to trace the links between nineteenth and early twentieth-century British colonial history and the emerging problem of ethnic and cultural diversity towards the end of the twentieth century. While Kureishi’s approach to family and community interrelating is spatial, focused on urban geographies, Smith’s is much more time focused, attuning the spatial metaphor of roots to the temporal images of origin and (family) genealogy (albeit with a view to transcending them). Overall, I hold the novels’ longitudinal (The Buddha of Suburbia) and historical (White Teeth) visions particularly valuable for the study of early postcolonial migrant mobilities and their psychosocial effects on first and second generations. Throughout this chapter, I also study the correlation of family practices to deep societal and technological changes in the two novels, which underscores the fact that social processes are inseparable of technology’s determinative and transformative functions. Kureishi explores the role played by communication technologies and mid-twentieth-century

3

POSTCOLONIAL MIGRANT MOBILITIES …

63

culture industries in the proliferation of depthless transient images of the real and the consequent blurring of the distinction between fact and fiction, or truth and performance in our contemporary world. Depicting the migrant as a postmodern “player” using cultural traditions to his/her own advantage, Kureishi questions “dominant” and “demotic” discourses of ethnic culture and represents migrant kinship practices as the outcome of past macro journeys, and present micro mobilities and processes of interrelating in urban space. Zadie Smith refers to biotechnological developments in the late twentieth century as a way to unveil the role played by the “DNA mystique” or the “gene icon” (Nelkin & Lindee, 2004, p. 14) in deepening anxiety about personal and familial identity instead of freeing culture of past racist thinking. She perceptively links social fears of migration and miscegenation to the biotechnological anxiety around the impure types and “polluted lineages” of nature (Haraway, 1997, p. 60). Given their predominant concern with the hegemonic construction of ethnic and cultural mixtures as deviations from a “natural” purity of type and lineage, both novelists critically engage with the liminal zone between nature and culture: Kureishi discredits the association of “naturalness” with endogamy and (cultural) purity by ironically representing racial and cultural hybrids as the un/fortunate sufferers of unnatural mixtures: Karim Amir’s inherited bundle of family and community relations appears as an unfortunate legacy that he is burdened with and obliged to weigh against a certain specimen of normality and naturalness. Like Smith in White Teeth, Kureishi departs from the common view of mixed blood and trans-culture as something unnatural leading to the unsettlement of individuals, families and nations. Instead of simply dismissing this common view as hidebound or shortsighted, however, the novelists call into question the very division between natural and unnatural, pure and mixed, and the whole tendency to normalise cultural entities and differences. What the novels debunk, in other words, are discursive regimes which pit the natural against the unnatural as a way to legitimise cultural and ideological systems. Both the mixed-race Karim Amir in The Buddha of Suburbia and Irie Jones in White Teeth reach a mature understanding of their family genealogies and histories coupled with a political awareness of the ways in which the hegemonic discourses of tradition, nationalism, science and political ideology use nature as grounding of culture and ideology. What is at first experienced as the unfortunate lottery of birth in one “abnormal” family is gradually assimilated as a constitutive process that is as much gratifying as constricting. It is also tempered by awareness of ideological

64

L. TAYEB

constructions of abnormality and of the necessity of taking the cultural for what it is rather than veiling it by the legitimating robes of the natural. Proclaiming the breakdown of “nature” as well as social order and system, both novelists turn their attention to the making of relationships through time and space adopting a “micro” “processual” approach and a “micro”, “family practices” view of kinship (Brettel, 2001, p. 57; Carsten, 2000, p. 14; Holdsworth, 2013, p. 8).

3.1

From Nuclear Families to Urban Practices of the Family: Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia

At the beginning of Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia, Karim Amir, the son of a lower middle class interracial couple, gives vent to his deep adolescent spleen: “I pulled the curtains on the back garden. The room immediately seemed to contract. Tension rose. I couldn’t wait to get out of the house now. I always wanted to be somewhere else, I don’t know why” (Kureishi, pp. 4–5). The suburban domestic scene onto which the narrative opens tragicomically presents the conjugal and familial rift that is beginning to set between the conformist lower middle class English mother of Karim and his Anglo-Indian father recently converted into a Buddhist guru. Indeed, Karim’s domestic claustrophobia and his need to leave the South London suburbs to the inner city indicate a crisis of family and individual identity set in the context of a metamorphosing British society in the wake of three decades of postcolonial immigration and post-war social, political and cultural change. Centered on Haroon’s and Anwar’s family households and domestic dramas, The Buddha of Suburbia blurs the boundaries between transnational minority family issues and western nuclear family issues by joining race to social class and resisting unitary definitions of (migrant) individuals and communities. Karim Amir encapsulates social class and race struggles; he is both a second-generation immigrant lightly shouldering colonial legacies and an English teenager tempted by the possibilities of 1970s London. Through Karim’s personality and line of action, the novel also resists thematic divisions setting off postcolonial issues of hybridity, racism and resistance from postmodern issues of multiplicity, nomadism, and hyperreality. Kureishi deftly interlaces minority and multicultural issues with the representation of

3

POSTCOLONIAL MIGRANT MOBILITIES …

65

a radically changing British society pressured by the spread of a postmodern media culture (Kellner, 1995, p. 234). Such thematic amalgam is enabled by the novel’s focus on the sphere of the family and family relationships: Karim and Jamila, the two major second-generation immigrant figures in the novel, embark on their separate urban journeys and play out their different struggles against family conventions and ties. Following the break-up of their nuclear families, their personal developments unfold in terms of movement from prescribed to chosen ties, and from broken to reconstituted relationships. Kureishi builds up the duality of birth and choice, inheritance and making of kinship ties, through Karim Amir’s journey out of his family cocoon, tracing familial and collective legacies in the process of selforientation in the future. What appears as a self-liberating movement outward and forward paradoxically re-orients the character towards the past as he attempts to sort out the muddle of relationships into which he has been born. Though the sociocultural context is one in which individuals no longer take their families for granted but tend to sort through complex relations and model their individuality through conscious choice and adjustment, Kureishi’s narrative does not assert the primacy of “routes” over “roots”, choice over inheritance. It rather moves in the direction of a nuanced view of, and dialectical interplay between them: as he calmly witnesses the break-up of his nuclear family and willfully moves through a set of reconstituted, unconventional families and households, Karim Amir tests a series of chosen relationships on the way to re-connection and appraisal of the value of genuine, timetested kinship. His spatial and social mobility matches a metaphorical journey into understanding his position in a complex web of familial and trans/national kinship ties ultimately tempering his mobility and enhancing his re-connection. The opening of the narrative introduces Karim’s atypical insider/outsider social position as a mixed-race Englishman and secondgeneration immigrant rooted in the South London suburbs and bound for an indefinite future spatial and social mobility. Representing the South London suburbs as a site of roots, Karim Amir subverts the immigrant’s association of territorial ties and origins with a national homeland. The second-generation immigrant, represented by Karim, Allie and Jamila, is rooted in the suburbs, and his/her ethnic and cultural identities are further complicated by class and cultural origins in the urban geography of London. Rita Felski takes the representation of suburban social space

66

L. TAYEB

and lower middle class status in Kureishi’s novel as an indication of the centrality of class issues, particularly, the way received views of suburbia and the “nonidentity” of the lower middle class are changing in the 1960s and 1970s. The combination of conventional images of lower middle classness with social trends indicating the profound transformation of both urban and suburban social space suggests that Kureishi’s novel is primarily “a story about the permeability of class divisions and the new possibilities of social mobility in post-war Britain” (Felski, 2000, pp. 34, 38). Karim Amir’s suburban, lower middle-class “roots” are a mirror of his social and cultural in-betweenness, which further complicates his “racial” in-betweenness: his aspiration to an upper middle-class status away from the suburbs runs in parallel to his (second generation) migrant’s claiming of Englishness. Bromley’s in-betweenness prefigures the complex class and ethnic position of Karim: he defines himself as an insider (combining an in-born and in-bred Englishness) and conquers London with an awareness of his suburban social handicap, yet he is later subjected to an ethnic outsider image. As a complex in-between space, part of the city and external to it at the same time, Karim’s suburban “roots”—appended to his hybrid ethnic “roots”—thus complicate his in-between, insider/outsider position and his resistive spatial practices in the city of London. The parameters of class, race and urban geography making up Karim’s social position seem to trigger his adolescent restlessness, and his maturing is predominantly an effect of space, spatial movement and shifting relationships to family and community in space. Indeed, whether they choose mobility or immobility, Kureishi’s characters embark on different physical or internal journeys which are bound to transform them. Their shifting identities develop as effects of the spaces and relationships they enter into and of willed or enforced moves from culturally prescribed to reconstituted or chosen ties. Haroon, Eva and Charlie display the same restlessness of Karim; like him, they willfully discard “origins” and “traditions”, and make their varied “assault[s] on London” (Kureishi, 1990, p. 150). Revolted by the residues of patriarchal authority in her family, Jamila embraces the 1970s radical politics and plays out the farce of her arranged marriage within a politically engaged, left-wing collectivity. Even Karim’s mother, the settled and socially conformist Margaret, is jostled into a new life after her divorce, as she takes a new partner and transforms her domestic space “from being their place … into her home”

3

POSTCOLONIAL MIGRANT MOBILITIES …

67

(Kureishi, p. 144). Kellner places this change in the context of modernity explaining the way identity loses its “unproblematical” aspect and “becomes more mobile, multiple, personal, self-reflexive and subject to change and innovation … One can choose and make—and then remake— one’s identity as one’s life” (Kellner, 1995, p. 231). Karim’s personal story is thus not simply an individualist quest for self-achievement; in the context of post/modern cultural and social change, it can also be perceived as a journey into “remaking” his identity that negotiates self, place, mobile practices and social interrelating. Two spatial polarities are, indeed, entwined in Karim’s intra-urban physical journey: the “urban-suburban relationship” cannot be dissociated from the “national and cultural contexts” and the international issues involving England’s imperial past and post-imperial, multicultural present (Bentley, 2008, p. 162). As it foregrounds a somewhat self-contained urban space as the most determining aspect of the second-generation immigrant’s consciousness and cultural identity, The Buddha of Suburbia networks such urban space within its national and international fields, and forces Karim Amir into recognition of those other parameters of his space and identity. London appears as “a semi-detached metropolis” which “hover[s] interstitially between [a] British nation-space [and] some nationless world-space” (Ball, 1996, p. 9). Karim multiplies movement and interrelating within the suburban/urban space of London, yet his status as second-generation immigrant places such interrelating in both national and international geographies. Though endorsed by the bipartite structure of the narrative, the spatial division between the suburbs and the inner city, and, correspondingly, Karim’s neat progress from suburban stasis and rootedness to a nomadic life in the inner city is unsustainable in the novel. A pull towards re-connection undermines the suburban-urban division with its correlative celebration of postmodern nomadic movement against rootedness in family and community, and postcolonial hybrid in-betweenness against “a more conventional multiculturalism, in which distinct communal identities are given value” (Upstone, 2010, p. 53). A focused study of Karim’s “practices of the city” (de Certeau, 1984, p. 93) and related family practices shows that spatial movement in the novel does not lead, in a simple and mindlessly destructive way, to the individualist disconnecting from family relationships (Upstone, p. 49); instead, mobility engenders the making of a socially embedded self through reconstitution of a series of (family) relations into durable and emotionally sustaining kinship relations.

68

L. TAYEB

First, Kureishi blurs the boundaries he initially sets between the suburbs and the city by associating mobility with emancipation from different mechanisms of spatial exclusion and identitarian straitjacketing inherent in both suburban and urban space. The division between a parochial mentality in the suburbs and a supposedly cosmopolitan openmindedness in the inner city is totally undermined. Karim Amir undergoes racist treatment in both suburbia and the inner city: in the suburbs, he goes through unheeded experiences of racist exclusion and contempt, yet later, an upper middle-class circle of theater directors and show business professionals emphasise his ethnic and cultural difference and turn a blind eye on his Londoner identity. In addition, what is experienced by him as mild or subtle racism in both suburbia and the inner city takes in Jamila’s neighbourhood the form of open violence since the area where they live is “full of neo-fashist groups” (Kureishi, p. 56). The suicide of Gene, Eleanor’s West Indian ex-boyfriend (p. 201), and the violent attack on Changez by National Front activists (p. 224) provide the reader with a discrepant view of urban space which blotches Karim’s rosy view of London and casts into doubt its inclusive cosmopolitanism. Through sparse conversations with Jamila, Tracey and Terry, Karim is forced to look upon a different urban reality that is pervaded by violent racial and class conflict, or as Jamila puts it, “the real world … the world of ordinary people and the shit they have to deal with” (p. 195). Further, Karim’s nomadic and transgressive mobility is not restricted to urban space. Susan Brook describes him as a “suburban flâneur” who does not solely undertake the “vertical journey” from the suburb to the city centre, but also daily “lateral journeys across suburbs” (Brook, 2005, pp. 219, 220); Brook calls attention to the “tension between mobility and stasis … [in] Kureishi’s representation of suburbia” (p. 221). In suburban space, mobility takes the form of idle walking and cycling as well as making short journeys by bus (Kureishi, p. 63). Karim knows “all the streets and every bus route” (p. 7), and his highly competent knowledge of urban space allows him to have an equally high level of performance that enables him to resist suburban monotony and stasis and struggle against exclusion. Much of the narrative follows Karim’s erratic everyday movement in urban space: criss-crossing the suburbs in the first part, and making journeys back and forth between the suburbs and the inner city in the second part. Such urban spatial practices (de Certeau, 1984, pp. 93– 96) or what Lefebvre calls everyday “rhythms” (Lefebvre, 2004, pp. 5–7) signal both resistance and belonging: on the one hand, Karim is endowed

3

POSTCOLONIAL MIGRANT MOBILITIES …

69

with an enabling and transgressive mobility that stands for his struggle against being bound-up into place and (family) relationship described as his major incentive since the beginning. On the other hand, his micro mobile practices have the emotional and psychological effect of creating a strong bond between him and the city and nurturing his belonging to it, which makes mobility an important “dimension of local belonging”: taking a mobilities perspective on Karim’s bond to (South) London allows us to decouple belonging and rootedness and to see the role played by the micro processes and spaces of mobility in the creation of local bonds and the emplacement of migrants within social fields (Fallov et al., 2013, p. 469). A mobilities perspective further allows us to see the relation between mobility and interrelating since migrants use their mobility in the creation and sustaining of various intra- familial relationships. It debunks the “dispersal hypothesis” in family sociology which builds a fundamental opposition between the individual and the social, mobility and the family (Holdsworth, 2013, p. 2). Thinking of the family through mobility alternatively yields a valuable understanding of “relational forms of mobility” and of the way “forms of connectedness are constructed, maintained and severed through mobile practices” (Holdsworth, p. 3). Placed in the context of the family, Karim’s mobility, his “leaving” of suburban “origins” behind and journey to the inner city, is not a simple individualist unmooring, since it significantly matches shifting domestic arrangements following the dissolution of his and Jamila’s families (Kureishi, p. 117). Karim’s liberatory mobility apparently endorses the individualisation thesis and dispersal hypothesis, yet attention to the relationship between mobility and interrelating allows us to see the link between Karim’s urban spatial practices and his family practices and to see the way kinship relations are subtended by mobility. At the beginning of the novel, Karim’s claustrophobia and longing for release are effects of his own family home and his later urban journey at first appears as a rejection of kinship and community. The nuclear family (in its suburban lower middle class form) is depicted as an unproductive institution, and the whole “notion of the ‘perfect family’ is destabilised”: for the liberal individualist, it connotes a repellent right-wing Thatcherism. Karim’s prizing of mobility and fluidity further endorses a different notion of “cool” family, where bonds can be slackened and the individual’s “right to be disconnected” is observed (Upstone, 2010, p. 43). The radical change so much coveted by him is

70

L. TAYEB

experienced in terms of a domestic deracination and exciting nomadic movement between different private and reconstituted family spaces, without commitment to anyone of their members: I had a lot of spare time, and from leading a steady life in my bedroom with my radio, and with my parents downstairs, I now wandered among different houses carrying my life-equipment in a big canvas bag and never washing my hair. I was not too unhappy, criss-crossing South London and the suburbs by bus, none knowing where I was. Whenever someone … tried to locate me, I was always somewhere else, occasionally heading to a lecture and then heading out to see Changez and Jamila. (Kureishi, p. 94)

For Sara Upstone, this is indicative of a “postmodern didacticism” which prevails in Kureishi’s early novels against “a ‘moral’ perspective” on family and community values adopted in later works (pp. 41, 52). Karim’s journey to the inner city in the wake of his parents’ divorce presumably liberates him from a dull suburban life he associates with his mother. Part anti-conservative rejection of lower middle-class social conformity, part liberal individualist abhorrence of the western nuclear family values of order, restraint and responsibility for others, Karim’s “striking out for happiness” (Kureishi, p. 8) and his “celebration of extra-marital sexuality” (Upstone, p. 44) are political gestures against the institution of the family and (national) cultural values. Karim’s nomadic family life at this stage indicates his individualist disconnection and celebration of chosen over “natural” “blood” relations. As opposed to culturally prescribed and inherited relationships, choice refers, in one respect, to the modern individualist drive to free oneself of family and social bonds and, in another, to individual consumer culture expanding choice from material and cultural products to relationships and attachments and politically imagined “selves”, families and communities. Not only is Karim’s Englishness his chosen national identity against the purist, unitary views of both the English and the Asian minority communities; at a more private level, Karim also chooses his father’s unrestraint over his mother’s conformism, and willfully embraces non-conformist forms of domesticity like Jamila’s commune and Haroon and Eva’s nomadic family model following Eva’s professional conversion into a house designer (Kureishi, pp. 128, 216–218, 260). In addition to joining a loosely reconstituted family composed of his father, Eva and Charlie, and experiencing the excitement of both urban space and

3

POSTCOLONIAL MIGRANT MOBILITIES …

71

a domestic space free of patriarchal order and stasis, Karim embarks on an interracial and inter-class love relationship with Eleanor and gradually comes into intimate contact with both working-class fellow actors and upper middle-class theatre producers and directors. Entering a series of picked out and extra-familial relationships, he clearly associates personal prosperity with a realm outside the family. His individualism manifests in the transformation of relationships from being an imposed, morally binding, intricate web of socially organised relations to chosen “pure relationships” conducted separately and much more intimately (Giddens, 1992, pp. 2, 96). Karim isolates relationships and conducts them in a dyadic, intimate way; he also maintains kinship relations through what Janet Finch terms “negotiated commitment” and “working out” (qtd. in Giddens, p. 96). In one sense, Karim welcomes his parents’ divorce for it alleviates his commitment to family, and instead of family break-up and dispersal, what he experiences is movement to greater choice and negotiation. Kureishi thus cuts with the traditional negative view of divorce as destructive of marriage and family ties and positively depicts, in the words of Bob Simpson, the “unclear” families that form in its wake, thus associating divorce for Karim with “the expansion of choice in the conduct of personal relations” (Simpson, 1994, p. 833). Indeed, the tension between mobility and stasis, dispersal and connection structures Karim Amir’s coming of age, intra-urban journey from the suburbs to the inner city on the way to building his career as an English theater actor of Asian origins in the cosmopolitan world of London show business. Placed in the context of the family, Karim’s journey takes a different significance, and appears as a journey into the remaking of kinship ties. As he grows into maturity, Karim moves from the liberal individualist value of free choice to awareness of the inescapability and value of time and space-nurtured kinship ties. Though he flees the suburbs and expunges his part-Indian origins, Karim is later obliged to return to suburbia physically in need to maintain varied post-divorce kinship relations. In addition, he unintentionally makes an imagined journey to his Indian homeland as he plays the roles of Mowgli and a Changez-inspired Indian immigrant (the colonial exotic and contemporary versions of his otherness). Susan Brook explains that suburbia “forms a point of return as well as departure” for Karim (2005, p. 221), which attests to affective relations to both family and (suburban) neighbourhood. Dominic Head similarly detects “an undercurrent that runs counter to the theme

72

L. TAYEB

of escape, and that implies the need for suburban roots to be recognized” (2002, p. 220). Indeed, Karim’s realisation that the “suburban stigma [Eva] wanted to scour right off her body … was in the blood and not on the skin” is followed by the equally mature and compromising recognition that Indians “were [his] people, and that [he]’d spent [his] life denying or avoiding that fact” (Kureishi, pp. 141, 212). Through varied and multi-directional journeys in urban space, Karim comes to a more intricate vision of the social and racial maps subdividing London. He confronts the cultural nationalism embraced by varied characters as Shadwell and Anwar, and “identifies … the contradictions and prejudices that are activated when an old England meets” a new hybrid Englishness (Bentley, 2008, p. 165). His father’s affair with Eva, morally questionable divorce and utilitarian embrace of an exoticised and commoditised eastern spirituality are perceived as exciting and inventive at the beginning; later they are barely tolerated by Karim and appear to indicate his father’s deep immigrant old age malaise and accentuate Karim’s “nervous [emotional] state” (Kureishi, p. 266). Turning a blind eye on the past, focused on unbridled self-gratification in the present, and cutting himself from kin and family, Karim thus falls prey to the psychological vicissitudes of social mobility and extra-familial and extra-community inter-relating. He experiences doubt and moral confusion in the process of situating himself in relation to the “origins” he has presumably cast aside and the British national community and upper middle class culture he aspires to. Through his journey into self-remaking, he gains awareness of the impossibility of choosing or discarding identities at will: he moves towards acknowledging both suburban and hybrid cultural roots, and lays claim to an inclusive national identity, where Englishness is no longer “in the blood” (Kureishi, p. 114). Since the migrant’s urban odyssey is inseparable of technology, Karim’s liberal individualist “choice” must be placed in the context of the midtwentieth-century ascent of technologised culture industries. Indeed, the crisis of the nuclear western and minority South Asian family is significantly correlated to a rampant media and consumer culture on the one hand, and an equally mediated transnational political culture including civil rights movements, Marxism, feminism, and anti-racism on the other. Emblematised by the divergent paths of Karim and Jamila, these two trends attest to the way mid-twentieth-century mass media shaped both individual and group identities. Whether we follow Karim’s liberal individualist orientation or Jamila’s anti-racist, anti-patriarchal “politically

3

POSTCOLONIAL MIGRANT MOBILITIES …

73

engaged … brand of individualism” (Ranasinha, 2007, p. 246), “identity in contemporary society” appears to be “increasingly mediated by media images which provide the models and ideals for modelling personal identity” (Kellner, 1995, p. 247). Karim’s family household is impregnated by a popular mass culture diffused by such diverse media as the print media, TV and the music industry, and dominating the everyday suburban lives of Karim, Allie and Margaret: brothers daily “wrestling over the Daily Mirror”, Allie going to bed with fashion magazines as Vogue and Harper’s and Queen and Margaret “[dying] for” the popular sitcoms and TV series, “Steptoe and Son, Candid Camera and The Fugitive” (Kureishi, pp. 14, 19, 20). In contrast, Jamila’s identity models are “more advanced”, picked from French avant-garde artists and American Jazz singers and civil rights activists, and from “reading non-stop, Baudelaire, and Collette and Radiguet … borrowing records of Ravel, as well as singers popular in France, like Billie Holliday” and acting Simone de Beauvoir, she “soon turned to Bessie and Sarah and Dinah and Ella … [and] in her purse … carried a photograph of Angela Davis” (Kureishi, pp. 52, 53). Spurred by a depoliticised and commoditised popular culture on the one hand and a “high” culture of political engagement and social commitment on the other, Karim’s and Jamila’s divergent drifts from conventional families comparably unfold in a late modern world in which much of social life is determined by mass media and communication technologies. Two audio-visual culture industries, music and the theatre industry, dominate and shape Karim’s personal development throughout the novel. As a teenager, he embraces the pop music of the 1970s and eagerly follows Charlie’s social ascension into a pop star. Charlie’s ascension shows the waning countercultural influence of the 1960s hippie generation and the advent of glam rock and punk, or the shift from subcultural social subversiveness to “an individualist hedonism carrying with it the excitement of sexual excess”: by quickly discarding old music styles and adapting to new ones, Charlie “represents the process by which original and potentially subversive subcultural movements are quickly absorbed into consumer society and become part of the establishment that the originators of the movement set themselves against” (Bentley, 2008, pp. 169, 170). This is what Horkheimer and Adorno regard as the dangerous “hollow ideology” of the culture industry—its “debasement of culture” as a result of the “fusion of culture and entertainment” and art’s commodification— since the subjection of artworks to the forces of the market sustains

74

L. TAYEB

their political “purposelessness” (2006, pp. 56, 60, 65); in addition, the technological medium of the artwork diverts attention from its content and reduces “message” to “medium”, to use McLuhan’s formulation, since “[t]he effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance” (McLuhan, 2006, p. 114). By the end of the novel, Karim gets conscious of the way mobility may be exploited by consumer capitalism and ends up rejecting the “[hedonist] sexual excess” and “throwaway pop culture” embraced by Charlie (Bentley, 2008, p. 169); at the end of his New York stay, he comes to the mature understanding: “[Charlie] didn’t interest me at all. I’d moved beyond him, discovering myself through what I rejected” (Kureishi, p. 255). Karim’s career as a theater actor, and his later ascension to the broadcast soap opera industry, further indicate the spread of a postmodern media and consumer culture characterised by the predominance of the image and a new commodification of images of reality instead of the material products of a declining industrial era (Ball, 1996, pp. 22–23). Through Karim’s and Haroon’s career shifts and choices, Kureishi depicts the media-dominated and market-oriented postmodern culture of 1970s London, characterised by the “proliferation and dissemination of images without depth” and tending to shape new postmodern identities “theatrically through role playing and image construction”: in contrast to Jamila, Karim and Haroon do not take identity seriously and choose to “[ground it] in play, in gamesmanship, in producing an image”, thus coming out as postmodern “players” who “know the rules and the score and act accordingly” (Kellner, 1995, pp. 234, 242). In line with Kellner’s rejection of the “anti-hermeneutical … account that postmodern culture is fundamentally flat and one-dimensional”, Haroon and Karim’s identity games may be read as mobile social practices that are “saturated with ideology and polysemic meanings”, enacting a mild form of resistance to racist and colonialist exclusions despite the characters’ apparent noncommittal attitude (Kellner, p. 236). Haroon’s conversion into Buddhist guru, which is presumably designed to cure suburbanites of their spiritually deadening culture, and help them “find an entirely new way of being alive” (Kureishi, p. 36) is not only “fake” and “a stratagem for the possession of Eva” (Gilbert, 2001, p. 123) using their “mutual interest” in a glamorous eastern spirituality as a way to conquer her heart (Kureishi, p. 28); through such manoeuver, he comes out as a postmodern player, “free to change and produce [him]self as [he] chooses” (Kellner, p. 243) and

3

POSTCOLONIAL MIGRANT MOBILITIES …

75

a postcolonial Asian other who commodifies the image of Buddha and “successfully market[s] back to the English warmed-over versions of their own popular appropriations of Indian culture” (Ball, p. 23). Like Haroon’s, Karim’s play-acting shows his commodification and “tactical” “use” of cultural stereotypes to his own advantage (de Certeau, 1984, p. 32). One can note the ironical discrepancy between Shadwell’s assertion that Karim is “cast for authenticity and not for experience” and Karim’s later awareness that “if [he] wanted the additional personality bonus of an Indian past, [he] would have to create it” (Kureishi, pp. 147, 213). In Karim’s journey back to his origins, the accent is laid on creation and imagination as well as performance and simulation. Karim gains knowledge of his origins through the lenses of the “neo-fashist” mentality of the upper middle class London circles, and, like his father, “return[s] to an imagined India” (Kureishi, pp. 74, 157). Yet, in using stereotyped cultural images and roles to his own advantage, Karim enacts a subtle and devious form of resistance: since the roles imposed on him, in both Shadwell’s and Pyke’s theater productions, are part of the mechanisms of exclusion meant to underscore the fact that “his new ‘English’ identity is not deemed appropriate” (Bentley, 2008, p. 164), Karim decides to “[divert] the system without leaving it” (Certeau, p. 32). He uses those roles to succeed his acting career and ultimately assert his right to Englishness, encompassing both a spatial locus (symbolised by the inner city) and an inclusive de-ethnicised national identity. By the end of his journey, the self-proclaimed Englishman, Karim Amir, manages to get recognition of his Englishness by successfully integrating the London theater industry and gaining “visibility”, yet in the process he also comes to terms with his Asian origins, “finding much love, warmth, and friendship within a growing ‘immigrant’ community”; in contrast, for Jamila, an Asian female caught between the tyranny of Indian traditions and the racist hostilities of an exclusionary host society, “origins” must be rejected since they “spell patriarchal control” and threaten to cut short her personal growth (Bald, 1995, pp. 82, 86). Marriage and the family collide with Jamila’s unbridled individualism and the subversive counterculture she embraces, yet she does not so much reject kinship and the family as reconstitute them. Unlike Karim, who shamelessly drifts away from family and responsibility, Jamila perversely takes responsibility for her family when she accepts Anwar’s arranged marriage for her. Linking her “choice” of false acquiescence to the ideologically subversive subcultures of the 1970s, Karim reflects:

76

L. TAYEB

We lived in rebellious and unconventional times after all. And Jamila was interested in anarchists and situationists and Weathermen, and cut all that stuff from the papers and showed it to me. Marrying Changez would be, in her mind, a rebellion against rebellion, creative novelty itself. Everything in her life would be disrupted, experimented with. She claimed to be doing it only for Jeeta, but there was real, willful contrariness in it, I suspected. (Kureishi, p. 82)

A reversal of received gender identities—Changez’s “feminine” gentleness utterly subordinates him to Jamila’s rules in a mere game of arranged marriage—further plays havoc with Orientalist images and stereotypes in Kureishi’s text, and foregrounds Jamila’s agency through her movement to negotiated and freely constituted relationships. Though entirely coercive, Jamila’s arranged marriage is “imaginative[ly] [reconceived]” by Kureishi as he makes her consent to the union but “herself arrange her sexual life”, and consequently “remain within her South Asian community”, instead of being constrained to leave it (Aguiar, 2018, p. 87). Rather than husband and wife, Jamila and Changez become good friends and unconventional family in the commune. Karim even regards Jamila and Changez as his real family: after testing a series of relationships and domestic spaces, he declares: “It was only with these two that I felt part of a family. The three of us were bound together by ties stronger than personality, and stronger than the liking or disliking of each other” (Kureishi, p. 214). While they both appear to break family ties, Karim and Jamila later re-connect to their families and lean towards re-constituting kinship relations. As it acknowledges the unstable and shifting nature of identity, Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia ends with Karim’s mature rejection of selfish individualism and his embrace of social responsibility, which runs in parallel to his gradual re-connecting to family and community. In a way, the varied levels of Karim’s emotional attachments, city, nation, community and family, are captured in the final words of Karim: And so I sat in the center of this old city that I loved, which itself sat at the bottom of a tiny island. I was surrounded by people that I loved, and I felt happy and miserable at the same time. I thought of what a mess everything had been, but that it wouldn’t always be that way. (Kureishi, p. 284)

3

POSTCOLONIAL MIGRANT MOBILITIES …

77

Karim’s mixture of regret and hope indicates the at once fortunate and onerous loss of a social world in which relationships are taken for granted and prescribed social roles easily slipped into. Individuals in our contemporary world are obliged to sort out “messy” relationships in the process of self-identification and self-location in family, community and nation.

3.2

The Century of Immigration and Biotechnology: Zadie Smith’s Millenial Families

Towards the end of White Teeth (2000), Irie Jones, driven to the edge by an nth family argument and rising levels of pregnancy hormones in her blood, bursts into a long speech that articulates a central issue in the novel: in the cosmopolitan world of North London, some families are burdened by history and ideology while others seem to lead a peaceful existence free of the burden of the past: “Did you know this is how other families are? They are quiet … . What a peaceful existence. What a joy their lives must be. They open a door and all they’ve got behind it is a bathroom or a lounge. Just neutral spaces. And not this endless maze of present rooms and past rooms and the things said in them years ago and everybody’s old historical shit all over the place… . And every single fucking day is not this huge battle between who they are and who they should be, what they are and what they will be… No attics. No shit in attics. No skeletons in cupboards. No great-grandfathers.” (Smith, 2000, pp. 514–515)

Such social division apparently sets off transnational and transcultural families, with a history of miscegenation, migration and cultural crosspollination, from a white middle class norm, where order and harmony characterise intra-family relationships. It is also suggested by the specious contrast between the rowdy family households of the Joneses and Iqbals on the one hand and the conflict-free and harmonious domesticity of the Chalfens on the other. Indeed, Zadie Smith creates a false division between discordant and like-minded, mixed and pure families, and through the false purity and harmony of the Chalfens debunks the assumption of monocultural individuals, families, and societies. The Joneses, the Iqbals and the Chalfens display different patterns of ethnic and cultural mixture and comparably witness intra-family discord; they

78

L. TAYEB

metonymically represent contemporary British society and confound the assumed social division between prototypical white family and “other”, socially aberrant, and culturally different minority family. Yet if Zadie Smith resists such old-new binaries as white and non-white, homogeneous majority society and the heterogeneous mix of minority communities and their cultures, what is it that Irie Jones regards as a craven family peace and quietude and that she associates with a utopian “neutral space” outside history and ideology? As it acknowledges the hybridity of all families and the impossibility of neutrality, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth opposes two models of family and two approaches to the question of individual and collective identity in a globalised world: the dogmatic and opinionated approach, which subordinates the individual to the collective forces of tradition, religion, ethnic nationalism and capitalism, and the carefree, politically unengaged approach which sets individuals and the families in which they are embedded free of the past and collective forces. This boils down to an opposition between the private, chimerically “neutral” space of the individual and his/her family and the varied collective, politically infused and ideologically charged forces of “Race. Land. Ownership. Faith. Theft. Blood” (Smith, p. 457). Whether they are parents, children, husbands or wives, family members manage relationships in the framework of a multicultural national society that is overcome by the forces of globalisation while slowly emerging out of its imperial past; their personal relations are influenced by the racialist and colonial history of the last two centuries in addition to the contemporary global forces of corporate capitalism, techno-science, religious fundamentalism, east-west divisions and pent-up, eruptible hostilities. While history has undeniably produced the accidental mixtures of the present and Englishness, both past and contemporary, is “shaped by transnational forces” (Jay, 2010, p. 169), individuals and families are thrown into disarray as soon as they give in to macro processes and adhere to collective political agendas. Smith’s novel combines the contemporary with the historical vision, links the small-scale to the macro levels of nation and planet, and shows the way in which tension and self-contradiction arise at the interplay between the personal, private level of the family and varied collective forces and grand plans. Focused on the transnational ethnic minority families of the Iqbals, the Joneses, and the presumably English middle class Chalfens, the novel also pays special attention to the cultural effects of late twentiethcentury technological developments in molecular biology and genetic

3

POSTCOLONIAL MIGRANT MOBILITIES …

79

engineering on increasingly intermixed families and nations. Smith crosses the boundaries of social fiction to explore the technical discourse of late twentieth-century biotechnology and its ideological and cultural implications relating the secular determinism of science to that of religious and cultural fundamentalism. Acknowledging repetition and the inexistence of neutral spaces, White Teeth projects an ideal family space in which relations can only grow and thrive if collective forces are unveiled and resisted. 3.2.1

Families in the Webs of History and Ideology

The way families are inevitably embroiled in the complex webs of history and ideology is suggested by four major chance individual events which largely determine subsequent life courses: the 1945 friendship of Archie and Samad related to the history of the Second World War, the Shoah and the British Raj; the 1974 chance meeting and (re)marriage of Clara Bowden and Archie Jones related to the colonial history of Jamaica and the Caribbean; the 1984 temptation of Samad Iqbal by Poppy Burt-Jones in a parents’ meeting in his twin sons’ school related to colonial desire and guilt; and the 1990 contact established between the Iqbals and the Joneses on the one hand and the Chalfens on the other as a result of their kids’ adolescent addiction to fags in school; this event reflects the persistent colonial relations of the past: while smoking fags and the Glenard Oak school ironically link back to the mercantile history of the Caribbean and the slave trade, Irie and Millat’s colonial otherness is indicated by the mentoring relations they consequently establish with the Chalfens. These four events and their immediate implications are narrated in the first three parts while the last part links the 1992 return of Majid Iqbal from Bangladesh and the chaotic completion of the FutureMouse© project to the end of the millennium. It places developments in the children’s relationships and those of their parents in the context of the now globally networked and multicultural national British society. Other key national and global events like the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall and Rushdie Affair and the 1990s scientific advances in the field of genetic engineering are inserted into the characters’ personal developments and patterns of relationships. At the collective level, these events mark the transition from a postcolonial to a global world: the fall of the Berlin Wall marks the end of the Cold War and the strengthening of the “capitalist world-economy” (Wallerstein, 1990, pp. 35, 38). The Rushdie Affair nationally marks the rise of ethnic and religious minorities

80

L. TAYEB

to self-consciousness and their struggle for political recognition. Internationally, the event attests to the capacity of mass media to mobilise people at a global scale, and the capacity of one event to have transnational repercussions and link people around the world in unprecedented ways. Reflecting on a “Manhattan Fatwa”, the mobilisation of a group of American writers in support of Salman Rushdie in Broadway, New York, Ulf Hannerz argues that anthropologists must henceforth “move beyond mere astonishment over new mixtures and combinations” and “cultivate new understandings of how the world hangs together, of transnational connections, in the organisation of meanings and actions” (1996, p. 4). The 1990s advances in biotechnology, epitomised in the novel by Marcus Chalfen’s FutureMouse© project, are also pivotal techno-scientific developments. They mark a salient transition to a globalised, corporatised technology that violates the integrity of natural species, turns them into patentable properties (Rifkin, 1998, pp. 8–9), and creates an “‘empty’, ‘enterprised up’ nature” instead of the old nature which solidly underpinned human cultural activity (Haraway, 1997, p. 102; Strathern, 1992, p. 195). Of course, those global developments are incorporated in Smith’s narrative and made to serve her critique of British multiculturalism and racism. Juxtaposed to the fall of the Berlin Wall with its optimistic “freeing up of movement and migration between east and west”, the Bradford book burning and Rushdie affair “inflamed racial tensions within Britain’s multicultural cities and highlighted certain divisions between east and west, sacred and secular communities” (Procter, 2006, p. 114). While the Rushdie affair betrayed the specious unity of the national community and the brittle foundations on which the notion of “Happy Multicultural Land” rested (Smith, p. 465), the fall of the Berlin Wall inaugurates the “new world disorder” about to emerge in the wake of the collapse of old divisions and boundaries, and the political certainties they used to provide (Botting, 2005). Advances in genetic engineering and their technical details, popular misunderstandings, and ideological implications are narrativised through the fishy FutureMouse© project of Marcus Chalfen and enable “Smith’s dismantling of the grounds for racism” (Head, 2002, p. 236). The scientific discourse of molecular biology and transgenics with its dubious ideological and epistemic import is conveyed through a private conversation between Marcus Chalfen and Irie Jones during one of her visits to his study; Irie not only gets a glimpse of the “amazing” world of genetic engineering, but also its eugenic dimension beyond the medical

3

POSTCOLONIAL MIGRANT MOBILITIES …

81

humanitarian goal of controlling oncogenes and curing cancer. The link between the scientific determinism of genetic engineering, “eliminating the random”, and a Foucauldian knowledge/power symbiosis, “WORLD DOM-IN-ATION” is implied in Marcus’s explanation, which suggests that the new technological capacity to manipulate and recombine genes will inevitably slip from oncological research to eugenic programmes (Smith, p. 335), and that “genetic engineering technologies are, by their very nature, eugenics tools” (Rifkin, 1998, p. 116). The secret link between biotechnology and eugenics is later explicitly indicated in the conference room where Marcus Chalfen introduces his mentor, Dr Marc-Pierre Perret, the French eugenicist working in the Nazi sterilisation programme and saved by Archie Jones one day in May 1945. In short, Zadie Smith interweaves global political events and technological developments with the transnational family histories of the Joneses, Iqbals and Chalfens and shows the meeting of their individual paths in present day multicultural Britain and cosmopolitan London to be a product of both colonial legacies and late twentieth-century globalisation. 3.2.2

Bizarre vs. Commonplace Mixture: The Paradoxes of Globality

Apparently minority and atypical, the multicultural family is represented as the new norm in the cosmopolitan space of London, and multiculturalism is seen as a deep transformation that operates within the family sphere to affect both the individual and society at large. On the one hand, ethnic and cultural mixture is de-dramatised, banalised and, instead of deviant social phenomenon, is an image of society. On the other, internal conflicts within transnational families suggest that an ideal social cohesion and order has been irretrievably lost and that transnational roots and genealogies are a source of confusion and discord. Even though the characters inhabit a world in which diversity is ordinary and hybridity is “everyday” and normal (Moss, 2003, pp. 11–12), the London playground in which the offspring of colonialism and twentieth-century immigration materialise, is a space of tension between the contemporary and its history, between commonplace mixture and incoherent and “colliding” ethnic backgrounds, between the unnatural mixtures of the past and the banal hybridity of the present: This has been the century of strangers, brown, yellow and white. This has been the century of the great immigrant experiment. It is only this long in

82

L. TAYEB

the day that you can walk into a playground and find Isaac Leung by the fish pond, Danny Rahman in the football cage, Quang O’Rourke bouncing a basketball and Irie Jones humming a tune. Children with first and last names on a direct collision course. Names that secrete within them mass exodus, cramped boats and planes, cold arrivals, medical checks. (Smith, p. 326)

The tension that is captured by Smith has its roots in generational differences between those who bore the physical and psychological pain of migration and those whose colliding first and last names register the historical trauma of such mobility; it further arises in the social rift between the “angry … young white men” who cling to a lost notion of national purity and their society’s invaders who “contaminate” national “blood” and “penetrate” territory. On one hand, the novel projects the utopian possibility that the legacies of colonialism and twentieth-century immigration can be envisioned as a peaceful and intimate “slip[ping] into each other’s lives” rather than social division and conflict. On the other, the contrast between the two images of “a man returning to his lover’s bed” and “angry” men “roll[ing] out at closing time into the poorly lit streets with a kitchen knife wrapped in a tight fist”, conveys the huge discrepancy of two socio-political perspectives on late twentieth-century mobility and intermixture: intimate clasping of each other’s “foreign” bodies, or (armed) conflict and exclusion (Smith, p. 327); accepting the present pervasiveness of mixture and hybridity or measuring it against a past “norm” of purity and homogeneity; social cohesion within a “reframed model of national identity” (Bentley, 2013, p. 485), or social strife and loss of a “gregarious and outgoing idea of society” (Botting, 2005, p. 27). White Teeth is focused on both vertical inter-generational tensions and horizontal social divisions which together prevent the easy acceptance of “all the [mixing and] mixing up” (Smith, p. 327). Both are registered in the intimate sphere of the family and linked through the interlocking of individual actions and collective forces. Past accidental mixtures and their contemporary ramifications are related to wider socio-political forces: Archie Jones and Clara Bowden, Samad and Archie, Magid and Marcus “slip into each other’s lives”, and the intimate ties of inter-marriage, friendship and “intellectual mentor[ing] and twin[ning]” they interweave between themselves are directly connected to the mazy history of the British Empire (McMann, 2012, p. 627). The different personality types

3

POSTCOLONIAL MIGRANT MOBILITIES …

83

and ideological views which Irie, Millat, Majid and Joshua develop as they grow up in a late twentieth-century world are also related to contemporary national issues and global trends. In short, the personal and familial is deeply entangled with the collective and conflict and contradiction is invariably linked to the issue of genetic and cultural mixture. To begin with, tension lies in the generational divide between mixing parents and mixed up offspring, and family relationships are ridden by conflict and discord: to resolve his internal conflict between the call of the body to sexual gratification and the call of his mind to resist western cultural influences, Samad decides to send his son Majid to his home country to receive the “untainted principles” of Bengali culture (Smith, p. 193); Irie leaves her parents’ house after discovering a long-hidden secret, her mother’s false teeth, and has to go through a journey into her matrilineal Jamaican descent before deciding upon the futility of any search for roots. Alsana burns Millat’s “secular stuff” after she watches his participation in the Bradford book burning on TV; and after Majid’s return from Bangladesh, the twins are unable to confront each other and, like Zeno’s arrows, are “running at a standstill” (Smith, pp. 237, 466). Samad is disillusioned by both his sons’ ideological orientations: Millat’s “distorted” version of Islam and tradition suggested by his embrace of KEVIN’s principles coupled with a belligerent attitude induced in him by American gangster movies, and Majid’s obsessive cleanliness and mimicry of the west inculcated in him by the colonial education he has received in Bangladesh (Smith, p. 407). Finally, through an implausible orientation to animal rights, Joshua embraces the principles of FATE, a “pioneering” organisation and precursor of the Environmentalist movement, and ends up opposing his father’s scientific objectivism and rationality. Even though his attraction to FATE is induced by his passion for its founder, Joely, Joshua somehow deviates from the path pre-set by his “good genes ” and destining him to a brilliant scientific career, and like Majid and Millat, betrays parental hopes (Smith, pp. 314, 478–479). Second, internal ethnic and ideological divisions in contemporary British society further complicate first and second-generation interrelationships. What has come to be seen as late twentieth-century commonplace mixture or “multicultural drift” (Hall, 2000, p. 231) is placed in the context of a “crisis” of Englishness and “the idea of the nation” (Bentley, 2013, p. 483). Smith’s White Teeth can be read as a narrative that addresses the irresolvable political contradiction in the idea of a multicultural national community: both liberal and communitarian

84

L. TAYEB

views are ironised and rejected in the novel. Western liberal universalism is questioned through the links the text establishes between colonialism, racism and the rise of liberal western democracy in addition to the inadequacy of universal citizenship value to plural, multi-ethnic societies. Even though liberal “achievements are not to be lightly discarded”, liberal universalism has proven to be one cultural particularism that presents itself as universal, and so-called state neutrality “works only when a broad cultural homogeneity among the governed can be assumed” (Hall, 2000, p. 228). Hence, Irie Jones is at first attracted to Chalfenism, the epitome of western liberalism in the novel, yet the fake sympathy for the other shown by Marcus and Joyce is later betrayed by the dubious genetic determinism of both Marcus’s recombinant DNA research programme and Joyce’s horticultural revolution. The “happy playgrounds for our children” Joyce intends to create are totally utopian and her faith in the “gardens of diversity and interest” proves to be sham and hypocritical when she merely exchanges contempt for sympathy in her dealing with Millat’s extreme otherness (Smith, p. 310). Through Joyce Chalfen’s intercourse with cultural difference, liberal universalism slips into “thinly-veiled … liberal intellectual racism” (Moss, 2003, p. 15). Communitarianism is also questioned by Smith since the assumption on which it hinges—that communities are culturally homogenous and discrete and that “due recognition” of their particular cultural identities is “a vital human need” (Taylor, 1994, p. 26)—is totally rejected in the novel. Through the racial, cultural and religious fundamentalism of characters like Samad Iqbal and Hortense Bowden, Smith shows the tyrannous aspect of “community” and the value of individual freedom from the false purity of racial and cultural identity. Both the multicultural nation (monoethnic individuals aggregating into monocultural communities which together form a multicultural nation) and the hybrid individual, “which …suggests a ‘mix’ of discrete races or ethnicities” are dismissed as inadequate conceptions, and a different model of multiculturalism which “should accept a mixing identified at the level of the individual rather than the nation” is represented by Irie Jones and her child (Bentley, 2013, 496). Smith rejects an old conception of hybridity that is suggestive of an exceptional mixture of two separate races or cultures and proposes an understanding of the contemporary, socially pervasive hybridity as “a contradictory and haphazard phenomenon” that both individuals and nations must embrace (Head, 2002, p. 186).

3

POSTCOLONIAL MIGRANT MOBILITIES …

85

Global processes and ideological programmes further beset the idea of a peaceful multicultural and multi-ethnic nation. Corporate capitalism, indicated by the global hair business (Smith, p. 279) and the massmediated and commoditised notions of physical beauty, leads adolescent Irie Jones to develop an excruciating sense of her physical “wrongness ”, whereby Caribbean blood and “Jamaican frame” painfully fail to measure up to the standard image of western “slender, delicate” beauty (Smith, pp. 265–267). In this instance, a commonplace genetic, “racial” diversity is put in check by the spread of global cultural homogeneity and instead of the laudable diversity of the English, we have a discredited racial hybridity that is suppressed by the global dissemination of commoditised cultural images and items. P. K’s Afro Hair salon sells a western image of beauty epitomised by the long straight and silky hair to black women, yet uses the global trade in natural Thai, Pakistani, and Indian hair and synthetic hair. That’s how culture and capital become complicit in the suppression of diversity. In the case of Millat, a global consumer culture made up of American Kung Fu action movies, hip-hop music and Nike clothing associated to “a strange mix” of Caribbean and Asian cultural elements contributes to the creation of Raggastani identity as an antagonistic and belligerent subcultural community (Smith, p. 231). Later, he falls under the influence of global Islam when he joins KEVIN and embraces its fundamentalist anti-western political principles. Such organisation appears to be just another instance of the western cultural influences Samad has tried to ward off his sons. While Irie is driven by a global trade in white beauty to reject her mother’s genetic legacy, Samad is deeply disillusioned by what he regards as his sons’ corruption by colonial education on one hand and religious fundamentalism on the other (Smith, p. 407). 3.2.3

Family Genealogies

Even though generational divides are a source of tension between fathers and sons, and mothers and daughters, relatedness is established through family history and genealogy. A sense of identity is acquired through understanding the individual’s place in a long family history which is inevitably entangled with inter/national history in the novel. In a way, relationships need to be traced back to their “origins” in order to make sense to people in the present; individuals struggle with a sense of meaninglessness and confusion until they create their own family myths, or gain knowledge of their place in a family genealogy however chaotic it

86

L. TAYEB

may be. Relationships and genealogies are not dismissed as meaningless, but treated as a formative component of individual identity, and Smith is clearly interested “in how identities develop through families and genealogies” (Jay, 2010, p. 161). Hence, Archibald Jones’s post-divorce suicide attempt is not induced by desperate love for his wife, but by the fact that “he had lived with her for so long and had not loved her” (Smith, p. 8). A long but meaningless marriage relationship drives Archie to despair, while rebirth must work through the creation of a meaningful relationship: his chance meeting and marriage to Clara Bowden. Two particular family genealogies are traced in the novel: Samad Miah Iqbal’s links to Mangal Pande, the supposed rebel whose act of defiance sparked off the Sepoy revolution, and Irie Jones’s matrilineal line of descent from Clara, through Hortense and Ambrosia Bowden revealing the earlier contamination of her maternal bloodline by the white English blood of Captain Durham connoting both colonial power and a religion, Jehovah’s Witnesses (Smith, p. 359). Samad shapes his identity through the heroic image of his ancestor, Mangal Pande: during the Second World War, he faces the challenge of living up to Pande’s act of courage, and because of an accidentally crippled hand, he ends up serving with the “buggered battalion” on a “bridge-laying” tank (Smith, p. 89). Samad’s war experience not only affiliates him to the British Empire, but also leads to the growth of his lifelong friendship with Archie Jones and the creation of “a kind of silk-thread bond between them” (Smith, p. 88). After migrating to London in 1973, a family friendship is established between the Iqbals and the Joneses while the memory of Mangal Pande is kept alive in O’Connell’s, “Archie’s and Samad’s home from home”, and “the kind of place family men come to for a different kind of family” (Smith, pp. 183, 184). At once a public “urban space where conventional British historiography can be questioned and countered” (Dyer, 2004, p. 93), and a private familial space where an ancestor’s photograph can be displayed, O’Connell’s links Samad’s past ancestral ties to Mangal Pande with his present friendship with Archie Jones as two primary constitutive relationships in his life. Smith combines the vertical relating to ancestry and horizontal friendship interrelating and illustrates the way individuals evolve in the context of immigration and diaspora. The fatality of heredity and ancestry is contrasted to the accidental nature of friendship relations and the unexpected ways in which individuals evolve in the globalising world of the present. Samad continues to affirm roots and belonging despite his own transformation and his sons’ unpredictable

3

POSTCOLONIAL MIGRANT MOBILITIES …

87

metamorphoses; Irie Jones, in contrast, ends up affirming the accidental relationships of both her chaotic Jamaican past and her English present. Towards the end, the “land of accidents” Samad faces with horror, “sound[s] like paradise to her. Sound[s] like freedom” (Smith, p. 408). Irie Jones’ journey into family history and genealogy is different from that of Samad since it is a journey into family secrets. While Samad inherits what he believes is a distorted official version of his ancestor’s act of bravery and builds the family myth of heroism through obsessional memory and historical revision of Mangal Pande’s story, Irie Jones grows up into an adolescent malaise that revolves around the accident of her parents’ marriage which leads to her growing up as a hybrid, mixedrace girl in white England. She embarks on a journey into race, class and colonialism as she weighs Bowdenism against Chalfenism, chaotic family trees and relationships against genealogical order and “purity”. The chance meeting of Archie and Clara Bowden and the unlikelihood of their union shows the accidental nature of all births and “birthplaces” to recall Samad’s words (Smith, p. 407). Struggling with the inadequacy of her black body to an English homeland, Irie accidentally starts frequenting the Chalfens’ family household in the framework of “a constructive conduct management … programme” meant to reform Millat’s and Irie’s deviant and excessive behaviour (Smith, p. 303). After embarking on a journey into Chalfenism and discovering the genealogical order and handed down knowledge of their family tree and history (Smith, pp. 337–338), Irie stumbles upon her mother’s false teeth, an “item in a long list of parental hypocrisies and untruths, … another example of the Jones/Bowden gift for secret histories, stories you never get told, history you never entirely uncovered, rumour you never unraveled” (Smith, p. 379). Her decision to leave the family home and move to her grandmother’s house is dictated by her need to understand her Jamaican family past and unravel the secrets that explain the persistent inter-generational discord. The family history Irie at last uncovers is a series of accidents entangled with the colonial history of the Caribbean and revolving around the “contamination” of the Bowden bloodline with white English blood. Not a public marriage alliance in the traditional sense, the union of Captain Durham and Ambrosia Bowden is figured in terms of a transfer of substance between racially different bodies coupled with the transfer of a culture, the religious culture of Jehovah’s Witnesses; cross-racial impregnation means “the Truth entered the Bowdens that winter of 1906 and

88

L. TAYEB

flowed through the blood stream directly from Ambrosia to Hortense” (Smith, p. 359). For Hortense Bowden roots are not associated with a homeland or an ethno-culture and tradition, but with a religion, “the Witness Church is where my roots are” (Smith, p. 409). Here, Hortense dissociates biological and cultural transfer since she roots herself in the religious culture that comes to her through her English father, yet considers cross-racial mixture unnatural, and unintended by God: “Black and white never come to no good. De Lord Jesus never meant us to mix it up… . When you mix it up, nuttin’ good can come. It wasn’t intended” (Smith, pp. 384–385). There is a double irony in the fact that Hortense here refers to her daughter’s marriage to Archie Jones while overlooking the fact that she herself is mixed race and that her religious roots are also colonial and “white”. Ultimately, Irie Jones discovers the chaotic, accidental and unpredictable nature of her own bloodline. Her adolescent malaise, caused by the discrepancy between the “blue-eyed baby” she might have been at the contingent moment of her conception and the “Jamaican frame” she inherits, and by the heavy colonial legacy of her mother and grandmother, gradually develops into enchantment with the “land of accidents” and its liberating possibilities (Smith, pp. 68–69, 265, 408). Towards the end, she develops a utopian “vision” of some time in the future “when roots won’t matter any more because they can’t because they mustn’t because they’re too long and they’re too tortuous and they are just buried too damn deep” (Smith, p. 527) 3.2.4

Family Genetics

In Irie Jones’s family history of interracial mixture, the emphasis is laid on biogenetic inheritance; there is a movement from the culturally resonant and emotionally charged notion of “blood” ties to the abstract and highly contingent notion of genetic inheritance. In addition, the narrative focus on black-white miscegenation establishes a link between the scientific discourse of (molecular) biology and the history of western racism. Through the character of Marcus Chalfen and his scientific career, Smith addresses the late twentieth-century transition in racist thought from biological essentialism, associating an innate human identity with heredity and blood ties, to genetic essentialism, stripping the gene of its limited biological significance and moulding it into “a symbol, a metaphor, a convenient way to define personhood, identity and relationships in socially meaningful ways”; such recent cultural development is

3

POSTCOLONIAL MIGRANT MOBILITIES …

89

endorsed by “genetics as a science of differences” and leads to regression from social environment to nature as predeterminant of behaviour and difference (Nelkin & Lindee, 2004, pp. 15, 16), or a “shift from nurture to nature in the biotech century” (Rifkin, 1998, p. 148). Even though it “promotes a fundamental change of scale in the perception and comprehension of the human body” thus outdating the notion of race and rendering dermal differences insignificant (Gilroy, 2000, pp. 19, 37, 47), genetics reconfirms the power of nature to determine identity. Smith is further interested in the social and political implications of the new genetic engineering technologies or the new capacity to manipulate and recombine genes: transgenics is not a simple return to or reaffirmation of the rule of nature; it collapses the old distinction and relation between nature and culture by genetically recasting a “new nature” and “technologis[ing]” a domain that has previously been circumscribed within nature: “life itself” (Franklin, 2000, pp. 188, 195). As “a specific mode of the appropriation of living nature”, biotechnology is a form of late twentieth-century Foucauldian biopower, now placed in the hands of scientists and global biotech companies (Franklin, pp. 190, 193; Rifkin, 1998, p. 8). Indeed, Smith goes beyond a simple representation of genetic engineering as biopower and establishes a historical continuity (through the mentor-student relationship between Mark-Pierre Perret and Marcus Chalfen) between it and early twentieth-century eugenics, which culminated in the Nazi sterilisation programme and the Holocaust. For Mindi McMann, a shift from eugenics to genetic engineering is correlated to the shift from race to multiculturalism in Smith’s novel so as to unveil the persistence of racism behind the veil of scientific objectivity and multicultural toleration and benevolence (2012, p. 626). Ashley Dawson equally notes the eugenic overtones of Marcus’s project and reads his FutureMouse as an “embodiment of the tightly knit utopian and dystopian possibilities of the new biotechnologies” (2007, p. 154). Irie is aware of the danger of “eliminating the random”, the secret goal of Marcus’s FutureMouse© Project, since randomness for her connotes not the simple action of oncogenes in cells, but socially the mutations activated by diasporic migrations within a white national body. Literally, eliminating the random refers to the exclusion of bad or deficient genetic elements in the biogenetic march towards greater natural efficiency and productivity, and consequently a dangerous reduction of natural diversity (Strathern, 1992, p. 37). The Chalfens themselves suffer from the “boredom inherent upon

90

L. TAYEB

‘inbreeding’” and the exclusivity of their “good genes” (Braun, 2013, p. 225; Smith, pp. 314–315). Apart from unveiling the residual racism in, and the jeopardising of nature by biotechnology, Zadie Smith is also interested in genetic intermixture as natural motor of the commonplace hybridity of the present, and presents inter-ethnic and inter-cultural mixture as constitutive of a new “multicultural Englishness” (Bentley, 2013, p. 496). Genetic engineering is from this perspective a technological tool which crosses natural boundaries between species and violates the sanctity of “pure life” (Haraway, 1997, p. 60): For Donna Haraway, part of the anxiety around and objection to transgenic border-crossing is an old western clear-cut distinction between nature and culture and firm belief in “purity of type, natural purposes [and] sacred boundaries” (p. 61). For the racist and xenophobe, biotechnology kindles already simmering fears of cross-racial mixture: More fundamentally, in the midst of a nation where race is everywhere reproduced and enforced, everywhere unspeakable and euphemized, everywhere deferred and treated obliquely—as in talk of drug wars, urban underclasses, diversity, illegal aliens, wilderness preservation, terrorist viruses, immune defenses against invaders, and crack babies—I cannot hear discussion of disharmonious crosses among organic beings and of implanted alien genes without hearing a racially inflected and xenophobic symphony. (Haraway, pp. 61–62)

In White Teeth this negative view of mixture is discarded by maturing Irie Jones, whose birth represents since early in the narrative, the proliferation of genetic possibility through the natural combination of maternal and paternal genes. Expressing the wonder of genetic intermixture now enabled by his cross-racial union with Clara Bowden, Archie Jones pictures his unborn child as a blue-eyed baby: “Her and me have a child, the genes mix up, and blue eyes! Miracle of nature!”. In his comic enthusiasm, the blue eyes “passed from rare genetic possibility to solid fact”, but Irie Jones is born with the disillusion that she predominantly inherited the genetic makeup of her grandmother and missed the Englishness of her father and the “European proportions” of her mother (Smith, pp. 69, 265). Despite her English “genes”, Irie develops an adolescent infatuation with the Chalfens wanting what she immaturely perceives as “their Englishness, their Chalfishness, the purity of it” (Smith, p. 328);

3

POSTCOLONIAL MIGRANT MOBILITIES …

91

she even assimilates herself to Marcus’s FutureMouse©, imagines herself as a “transgenic creature” (Braun, 2013, p. 222) and longs to “merge with the chalfens, to be of one flesh; separated from the chaotic, random flesh of her own family and transgenically fused with another. A unique animal. A new breed” (Smith, p. 342). Of course, the irony of her adolescent wish is later revealed when she embraces the randomness of her own family and becomes aware of the dangers of both “technologically enabled choice” geared to efficiency and perfectibility (Strathern, 1996, p. 37; Rifkin, 1998, pp. 33–35), and “the doctrine of types and intrinsic purposes” which “[erases] history … and … piously narrate[s] a kind of timeless stasis in nature” (Haraway, p. 61). Irie’s self-liberation from the dangers of Marcus Chalfens’ genetic programming and determinism, her grandmother’s apocalypticism, and Samad Iqbal’s firm belief that “tradition was culture, and culture led to roots, and these were good” (Smith, p. 193), is realised at the end of the novel through the conception and birth of her child: the scientifically unprovable paternity of Irie’s daughter acts as a force of disruption of genetic, cultural and religious determinisms. In a way, the fetus underscores the futility of the search for roots, the impossibility of going “back, back, back to the root, to the fundamental moment when sperm met egg and egg met sperm—so early in this history it cannot be traced” (Smith, p. 527). Preferring “permanent secrets” and the freedom from the past they enable, she rejects science’s capacity to unveil all secrets by its ever-deepening scales of visibility and like Archie Jones’ liberation of FutureMouse, she conceives a child that is free of the burden of paternity. 3.2.5

“Cool” Families

Like Karim in The Buddha of Suburbia, Irie Jones makes a journey back into family and ethnic origins; her search is genealogical (mapping both family and colonial histories) and genetic, adjoining science to the “human muddle” of contemporary life (Gill, 2013, p. 20). For her, the paradox of globality and national multiculturalism is that hybridity is on the way to becoming a “non-issue” (Moss, 2003, p. 12) and yet is at the same time a source of the worst familial and national anxiety over roots and identity. The three families represented in the novel reassert the value of the family beyond the notion of white normality and conventional “rightness”, and show the “variety of ways of forming and being a family” in a transnational and multicultural context (Fernàndez, 2009,

92

L. TAYEB

p. 154). In other words, a sense of “wrongness” of self and family is gradually discarded as Irie Jones becomes aware of varied collective forces constraining individual lives and creating confusion and misunderstanding. Even though she concedes that neutral places are inexistent in our globally interrelated world, where all kinds of primordialisms get activated in a hopeless search for authenticity and recognition, she links her vision of a future time “when roots won’t matter any more” to a craven family peace and harmony that can, in the context of the novel, be called the “cool” family (Smith, p. 527). The transnational family can be a favourable site of personal development and sustaining relations if the collective deterministic forces of religion, tradition and ideology are taken lightly and a “postsecular … radical indeterminacy” is instead embraced (Huggan, 2010, p. 763). The notion of the cool family is joined to the notion of the “cool” nation, which Stuart Hall takes as a cornerstone value in the New Labour political discourse of multiculturalism (2000, p. 221). The plurality which characterises contemporary British society should be accepted as a constitutive element of the “new [British] ethnicity” most directly embodied by Irie’s child (Bentley, 2013, 496). At the private level, the kind of decision that would send one nine-year-old child flying back to Bangladesh and would irrevocably mess up family relations is totally dismissed as misconceived and disruptive of family quietude and happiness. In this complex web of personal, family, and colonial histories, Archie Jones emerges as the true hero of the novel and the “point of resistance to various fundamentalisms with which the novel presents us” (Bentley, 2013, p. 498). For Fred Botting, Archie Jones is the champion of accidentalism which is opposed to apocalypticism in the novel. He displays an “unconscious everyday liberalism” and “an inherent goodness” that set him above the other characters as some kind of model (Botting, 2005, p. 34; Bentley, 2013, p. 498). In addition, the fact that he resorts to coinflipping as arbiter of decisions stands for his belief in chance and accidents and their capacity for regeneration and transformation. Coin-flipping also stands for his exclusion of collective forces, his rejection of fundamentalist certainties with their pre-set plans and predictable results, and his “celebration of the contingent and chaotic stuff of social life” (Head, 2002, p. 187). His multiple humanitarian actions of saving—saving Dr. Sick twice and liberating the mouse from its confinement in the technologised domain of the laboratory to scamper back to nature—stand for the post-human ethics endorsed by Smith’s novel.

3

POSTCOLONIAL MIGRANT MOBILITIES …

93

Smith’s and Kureishi’s novels apparently subscribe to a nomadic conception of selfhood valuing deterritorialisation and endless becoming and associating mobility with liberation from the hegemonic discourses of cultural identity, yet both texts ultimately re-embed the self in the familial and social. Karim Amir and Irie Jones do not release themselves from family bonds at the end, nor seek self-fulfillment in an individualist unmooring or an anti-social spurning of responsibility. What their journeys into adulthood and maturity spell are the inescapable legacies of colonialism and racism, the need for individuals to situate themselves into personal and collective histories of mobility, and the need for polities and nations to devise the adequate political discourse to address the increasing diversity and cross-border connectivity of populations at the end of the twentieth century.

References Aguiar, M. (2018). Arranging marriage: Conjugal agency in the South Asian Diaspora. University of Minnesota Press. Bald, S. R. (1995). Negotiating identity in the metropolis: Generational differences in South Asian British fiction. In R. King, J. Connell, & P. White (Eds.), Writing across worlds: Literature and migration (pp. 70–88). Routledge. Ball, J. C. (1996). The semi-detached metropolis: Hanif Kureishi’s London. ARIEL, 27 (4), 7–27. Bentley, N. (2008). Contemporary British Fiction. Edinburgh University Press. Bentley, N. (2013). Re-writing Englishness: Imagining the nation in Julian Barnes’s England, England and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. Textual Practice, 21(3), 483–504. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502360701529093. Botting, F. (2005). From excess to the new world order. In N. Bentley (Ed.), British fiction of the 1990s (pp. 21–41). Routledge. Braun, M. (2013). The mouseness of the mouse: The competing discourses of genetics and history in White Teeth. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 48(2), 221–236. https://doi.org/10.1177/0021989412468414. Brettel, C. B. (2001). Not that lineage stuff: Teaching kinship into the twentyfirst century. In L. Stone (Ed.), New directions in anthropological kinship (pp. 48–70). Rowman & Littlefield. Brook, S. (2005). Hedgemony? Suburban space in The Buddha of Suburbia. In N. Bentley (Ed.), British fiction of the 1900s (pp. 209–225). Routledge. Carsten, J. (2000). Introduction: Cultures of relatedness. In J. Carsten (Ed.), Cultures of relatedness: New approaches to the study of kinship (pp. 1–36). Cambridge University Press.

94

L. TAYEB

Dawson, A. (2007). Mongrel nation: Diasporic culture and the making of postcolonial Britain. University of Michigan Press. de Certeau, M. (1984). The practice of everyday life (S. Rendall, Trans.). University of California Press. Original Edition: de Certeau, M. (1980). L’invention du quotidien. Union générale d’éditions. Dyer, R. (2004). Generations of black Londoners: Echoes of 1950’s migrants’ voices in Victor Headley’s Yardie and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. Obsidian III, 5(2), 81–102. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44479696. Accessed 18 Nov 2018. Fallov, M. A., Jørgensen, A., & Knudsen, L. B. (2013). Mobile forms of belonging. Mobilities, 8(4), 467–486. https://doi.org/10.1080/17450101. 2013.769722. Felski, R. (2000). Nothing to declare: Identity, shame and the lower middle class. PMLA, 115(1), 33–45. http://www.jstor.org/stable/463229. Accessed 18 Nov 2018. Fernàndez, I. P. (2009). Representing third spaces, fluid identities and contested spaces in contemporary British literature. Atlantis, 31(2), 143–160. http:// www.jstor.org/stable/41055369. Accessed 18 Nov 2018. Franklin, S. (2000). Life itself: Global nature and the genetic imaginary. In S. Franklin, C. Lury, & J. Stacey (Eds.), Global nature, global culture (pp. 188– 227). Sage. Giddens, A. (1992). The transformation of intimacy: Sexuality, love and eroticism in modern societies. Stanford University Press. Gilbert, B. M. (2001). Hanif Kureishi. Manchester University Press. Gill, J. (2013). Science and fiction in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. Journal of Literature and Science, 6(2), 17–28. http://www.literatureandscience.org/. Gilroy, P. (2000). Between camps: Nations, cultures and the allure of race. Penguin. Hall, S. (2000). Un/settled multiculturalisms: Diasporas, entanglements. Zed Books. Hannerz, U. (1996). Transnational connections: Culture, people, places. Routledge. Haraway, D. J. (1997). Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan © _Meets_ Oncomouse TM : Feminism and technoscience. Routledge. Head, D. (2002). The Cambridge introduction to modern British fiction: 1950– 2000. Cambridge University Press. Holdsworth, C. (2013). Family and intimate mobilities. Palgrave Macmillan. Horkheimer, M., & Adorno, T. (2006). The culture industry: Enlightenment as mass deception. In M. G. Durham & D. M. Kellner (Eds.), Media and cultural studies: Keyworks (pp. 41–72). Blackwell Publishers.

3

POSTCOLONIAL MIGRANT MOBILITIES …

95

Huggan, G. (2010). Is the ‘post’ in ‘postsecular’ the ‘post’ in ‘postcolonial’? Modern Fiction Studies, 56(4), 751–768. http://www.jstor.org/stable/262 86955. Accessed 18 Nov 2018. Jallinoja, R., & Widmer, E. D. (2011). Introduction. In R. Jallinoja & E. D. Widmer (Eds.), Families and kinship in contemporary Europe: Rules and practices of relatedness (pp. 3–12). Palgrave Macmillan. Jay, P. (2010). Global matters: The transnational turn in literary studies. Cornell University Press. Kellner, D. (1995). Media culture: Cultural studies, identity and politics between the modern and the postmodern. Routledge. Kureishi, H. (1990). The Buddha of Suburbia. Faber & Faber. Lagji, A. (2019). Waiting in motion: Mapping postcolonial fiction, postcolonial mobilities, and migration through Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West. Mobilities, 14(2), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2018.1533684. Lefebvre, H. (2004). Rhythm analysis: Space, time and everyday life (S. Elden & G. Moore, Trans.). Continuum. Original Edition: Lefebvre, H. (1992). Élément de Rhythmanalyse. Éditions Syllepse. McLuhan, M. (2006). The medium is the message. In M. G. Durham & D. M. Kellner (Eds.), Media and cultural studies: Key works (pp. 107–116). Blackwell Publishers. McMann, Mindi. (2012). British black box: A return to race and science in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. Modern Fiction Studies, 58(3), 616–636. Moss, Laura. (2003). The politics of everyday hybridity: Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. Wasafiri, 18(39), 11–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/026900503085 89837. Murray, L., & Upstone, S. (Eds.). (2014). Mobilising representations: Dialogues, embodiment and power. In L. Murray & S. Upstone (Eds.), Researching and representing mobilities: Transdisciplinary encounters (pp. 1–20). Palgrave Macmillan. Nelkin, D., & Lindee, M. S. (2004). The DNA mystique: The gene as a cultural Icon. University of Michigan Press. Procter, J. (2006). New ethnicities, the novel, and the burdens of representation. In J. F. English (Ed.), A concise companion to contemporary British fiction (pp. 101–120). Blackwell Publishers. Ranasinha, R. (2007). South Asian writers in twentieth century Britain: Culture in translation. Clarendon Press. Rifkin, J. (1998). The Biotech century: Harnessing the gene and re-making the world. Penguin Putnam. Simpson, B. (1994). Bringing the ‘unclear’ family into focus: Divorce and remarriage in contemporary Britain. Man, New Series, 29(4), 831–851. http:// www.jstor.org/stable/3033971. Accessed 2 Dec 2018.

96

L. TAYEB

Smart, C. (2011). Relationality and socio-cultural theories of family life. In R. Jallinoja & E. D. Widmer (Eds.), Families and kinship in contemporary Europe: Rules and practices of relatedness (pp. 13–28). Palgrave Macmillan. Smith, Z. (2000). White Teeth. Penguin Books. Strathern, M. (1992). After nature: English kinship in the late twentieth century. Cambridge University Press. Strathern, M. (1996). Enabling identity? Biology, choice and the new reproductive technologies. In S. Hall & P. Du Gay (Eds.), Questions of cultural identity (pp. 37–52). Sage. Taylor, C. (1994). The politics of recognition. In A. Gutman (Ed.), Multiculturalism: Examining the politics of recognition (pp. 25–73). Princeton University Press. Upstone, S. (2010). British-Asian fiction: Twenty-first century voices. Manchester University Press. Wallerstein, I. (1990). Culture as the ideological battleground of the modern world-system. In M. Featherstone (Ed.), Global culture: Nationalism, globalization and modernity (pp. 31–55). Sage.

CHAPTER 4

Cultural and Emotional Mobilities: Monica Ali’s and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Transnational Wives and Families

In their literary representations of postcolonial migrant mobilities, Hanif Kureishi and Zadie Smith depict the combined impacts of colonial legacies and globalisation on first and second generations of immigrants and tend to associate mobility with resisting spatial exclusion and the transgression of social, ethnic and cultural boundaries in multicultural host societies. In The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) and White Teeth (2000), the western metropolitan city and host nation appear as multicultural, potentially open and cosmopolitan spaces where the im/migrant strives for inclusion and recognition. Transcontinental national homelands are vague spaces of identification and paternal or maternal origins; they are significant only insofar as they provide the missing puzzle pieces in individual quests for understanding and self-positioning in complex familial histories and tangled webs of relationship. This chapter moves on from such postcolonial journeys to explore the relationship between global capitalism and the proliferation of both labour migrations and skilled labour mobility towards the end of the twentieth century. It takes the spread on a global scale of information technologies and accelerated travel, or what Elliott and Urry called “the explosion of fast mobilities”, as deeply transformative of the way individuals experience migration and relate to place and family (2010, p. 3). More precisely, late twentieth-century migrants are approached as multiply situated individuals obliged to manage kinship © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Tayeb, Kinship in the Age of Mobility and Technology, Palgrave Studies in Mediating Kinship, Representation, and Difference, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69889-8_4

97

98

L. TAYEB

relations across distance and borders. Combining theoretical insights and new directions in the fields of migration studies and mobilities studies, I study family mobilities in late twentieth-century transnational and diasporic contexts with a special focus on three issues: first, the power frameworks which structure mobility and immobility call our attention to the fact that mobility is a highly differentiated practice and that both mobility and immobility are fundamentally embodied states, i.e. inscribed on, and experienced at the scale of the body (Sheller & Urry, 2006; Conlon, 2011; Faist, 2013; Merriman & Pearce, 2017). Second, bearing in mind the important role played by culture in the perception and practice of mobility, I study the implications of cultural mobility and the way cultural imaginaries of mobility determine to a large extent the processes of migration (Salazar, 2010). Finally, since bodies on the move imply emotions and affective states on the move, I explore both “emotionalities”—the convergence of mobility and emotional management of relationships—and migrants’ “emotional geographies”—the way mobility shapes the migrant’s emotional relation to place (Christou, 2011). These issues are at the centre of two novels written in the first decade of the twenty-first century, Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003) and Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake (2003), which present a common interest in the impact of global economic, technological and social changes on the lives of immigrants and their family relationships. Both novels represent the complex psychosocial processes of familial and community interconnecting in the now blurry area between diasporic and transnational social fields, diasporic and transnational subjectivities. The Bangladeshi community of London’s East End depicted in Ali’s novel, and Lahiri’s Indian–American community sparsely inhabiting different cities on the Eastern Coast of the United States, are new diasporic communities with active, physically or virtually maintained transnational connections and forming as a result of changes in the patterns and forms of international migration. Indeed, the growing confusion of the concepts of diaspora and transnationalism in migration studies has to do with the way diaspora is understood and theorised in the global age. For Robin Cohen, globalisation leads to the formation and mobilisation of diasporas, new social formations and collective identities with high degrees of connection to, and assertiveness of homeland and ethnic culture in spite of mobility and displacement. Placed in the history of modern diasporas, this recent development is related to changes in the nature of diaspora itself: movement away from the “classical/prototypical” diaspora of traumatic dispersal

4

CULTURAL AND EMOTIONAL MOBILITIES: MONICA ALI’S …

99

and simultaneous abandonment of the postmodern idea of diaspora as a condition of radical deterritorialisation and nomadic flow of identity. A “modified reaffirmation of the diasporic idea” along with “ideas of home and often the stronger inflection of homeland” thus gradually took place (Cohen, 2008, pp. 2, 142). Departing from the idea that diaspora and transnationalism are largely overlapping concepts, I argue that the novels represent at the macro scale the intensive transnationalisation of immigrant diasporas in a globalised world and the way this reverberates in the lives of diasporic families now constrained to manage a life of physical, emotional, and cultural mobility. Such transnationalising of diaspora is technologically produced and enabled: the development of increasingly efficient global systems of transportation and telecommunication in the late twentieth century made available varied modes of connection to immigrants’ places of origin, and consequently strengthened emotional and identitarian bonds to home locations and presented periodical or final return as possible issues to the immigrant condition. New social practices and processes have emerged: a life of frequent physical mobility between two or more locations, the everyday struggle to maintain contact with left behind family members and the psychological and emotional processes arising from the fact of geographical separation or loss of physical proximity. The concept of diaspora I propose to work with refers to a transnational community away from an original homeland, a mobilised collective identity and consciousness and a particular social imaginary through which cultural images and values are filtered. I refer to more collective and “historically embedded” migrations in which classical images of collective trauma and dispersal are abandoned and the high emotional value of both diasporic community and homeland ties are emphasised (King & Christou, 2011, pp. 456–457). I also refer to diasporic formations that need to be actively “mobilised” and maintained through social networking, commemorative cultural practices and religion as a new connective tissue cementing solidarity and enabling “social cohesion” among migrants (Cohen, 2008, p. 141). Diasporic individuals, families and groups are thus multiply emplaced in an increasingly diversified social space interlinking various locations and extending beyond national borders; home and host societies as well as diasporic social formations are now seen as geographical and social spaces with which the immigrant individual/family simultaneously engages at material and symbolic levels building in the process a highly complex and dynamic “transnational

100

L. TAYEB

social field” and “transnational(ised) identities” (Glick Schiller et al., 1992, pp. 1–2; Levitt & Glick Schiller, 2004, p. 1003; Vertovec, 2001, p. 578). Within such fields, both places and identities lose their essential, homogeneous and static meanings; homelands and places of residence are no longer attached to reified cultures while diaspora identity is no longer understood as the simple combining of two national and cultural identities (Levitt & Jaworsky, 2007, pp. 131–132). As the study of Ali’s and Lahiri’s novels shows, first-generation immigrants engage in cultural and kinship practices which are far more complex than the simple choices of assimilation or migrant isolationism, and no simple inter-culturation between minority and western culture takes place; for the second generation, it is “the potential impact of growing up in a transnational social field” that takes us “beyond simply ‘home’ and ‘return’” (Levitt et al., 2011, p. 468). With the rise of the global cultures of cities and informationbased global cultural flow, attention has now shifted to the “multiple sites and layers” making up the field rather than the simple pattern of cross-generational assimilation (Levitt & Jaworsky, p. 130; see also King & Christou, p. 456). Since late twentieth-century diasporas are partly linked to the globalisation of labour, it is clear that Ali and Lahiri place their family mobilities in such context along with particular attention to an important and often overlooked change from the 1970s onwards: the increasing participation of women in global migration and labour (Kofman, 1999, p. 270). Both novels scrutinise the place of women in international migration and the (unacknowledged) forms of agency they develop both inside the domestic sphere of the family and the larger public realm of diasporic community and host society. Though beginning in the post-war period of early, predominantly male, “third world” immigration, the two family histories related in the novels aim at bringing women centre-stage in the migration narrative and cutting with stereotypical images of invisibility, dependency and passivity. Even though male characters in the novels initiate the immigration process, and their “choices” to leave a homeland for a western metropolis are an amalgam of cultural imaginaries and global economic factors, the wives they bring along devise ways to overcome homesickness and severe social isolation in the host society. The novels critically engage with the “dominant model of migration” in which “producing men” overshadow women constructed as both “passive followers and dependents” with little stakes in the labour market (Kofman, pp. 272,

4

CULTURAL AND EMOTIONAL MOBILITIES: MONICA ALI’S …

101

273), and “reproducers” whose unpaid labour of love promotes repetition rather than change (Gedalof, 2009, p. 82). The female characters’ journeys unfold in terms of movement towards economic agency and reclamation of the public sphere for Nazneen, Ali’s protagonist, and adjustment to the host society and active mobilisation of a diasporic community and social dynamics of relatedness in the case of Ashima Ganguli, Lahiri’s female protagonist. In both cases, the characters’ mobilities are both gendered and differentiated and the focus is laid on the way power processes determine the way mobilities are to be symbolically constructed and materially performed thus adjudicating the mobility of ones and immobility of others (Sheller & Urry, 2006, p. 211; Murray & Vincent, 2014, pp. 57–58). In what follows, I study Monica Ali’s Brick Lane and Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake as literary representations of migrant family mobilities whose contribution to social enquiry lies in their ability to capture in narrative form an intangible area of social life, the embodied and affective states as well as cultural and socio-political implications of displacement at both small and grand scale levels. Through the mechanisms of fictional writing, they show the micro processes of everyday domestic life and depict the embodied states of mobility and stasis; they convey the complex intimate sphere of private feelings and the unspoken emotions linking spouses or parents and children. Through their attention to temporal dynamics, they also provide biographical accounts spanning the characters’ shifting emplacements and relations across lifecourses. As I argue below, the novels’ ethnographic and sociological value lies in their capacity to engage with a number of migrant family-related issues: centralising two “traditional” housewives and mothers, Nazneen Ahmed and Ashima Ganguli, representing, within transnational contexts of migration to the liberal west, arranged marriage and conjugal practices, transnational kinship practices, generational conflicts and misunderstandings, and the emotional vicissitudes of family life in diaspora, and challenging easy distinctions between passivity and agency, reproduction and production, stasis and mobility.

102

L. TAYEB

4.1 Migration and the Im/Mobility of a Bengali Wife and Mother in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane A few pages from the beginning of Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, we enter the private oppressive world of Nazneen’s London flat and see the paradox of her migration to Britain after her marriage to Chanu Ahmed, a Bangladeshi resident in Britain, has been hastily arranged by her father: the mobility and change inherent to migration paradoxically lead Nazneen away from the open space and teeming sociality of her village in Bangladesh and condemn her to a monotonous, homebound matrimonial existence in a western metropolis. Brick Lane is undeniably centred on a female immigrant’s extreme social isolation and domestic confinement; it portrays the female immigrant’s predicament as abrupt and meaningless deracination following an arranged marriage, self-submission to the patriarchal demands of domestic confinement in an alien land, racist reduction to the stereotype of a submissive, defeated and backward South Asian woman, and exclusion through linguistic inaptitude and ethnic and sartorial appearance from participation in the social and economic life of the host society. Setting Nazneen’s story in the socio-political context of early female immigration to Britain, Monica Ali does replicate a common migration model, namely South Asian (and more broadly foreign) wives gaining residence rights in the framework of family reunification (Kofman, 1999, p. 270). In British immigration policy, women were perceived as passive migrants and economic dependents, who neither undertake the creative act of migration (an undeniably male prerogative), nor effect mobility through economic production. Nazneen’s extreme disempowerment and inability to make any choices or decisions on her behalf, as well as her compliance with matrimonial and maternal obligations at the beginning of the narrative seem to reinforce her association with the “reproductive sphere” which includes “both the embodied work of mothering … and the work of reproducing cultures and structures of belonging” (Gedalof, 2009, p. 82). The impossibility of periodical return to her homeland and easy communication with her sister Hasina (letters being the sole and intermittent medium of communication between the two sisters) also deepen Nazneen’s social isolation and disempowerment. Yet Ali’s Brick Lane rejects a simple progression from female submission to patriarchal religious and ethnic cultures towards empowerment through radical transformation and the shedding off of ethnicity and culture; it does not simply

4

CULTURAL AND EMOTIONAL MOBILITIES: MONICA ALI’S …

103

replicate dichotomies between migrant men and migrant women, nor usher the migrant female into the privileged (male) world of transgressive mobility and transformation. Nazneen clearly blurs the lines between inaction and agency, fixity and change, reproduction and production, stasis and mobility. She also moves towards a notion of liberal, self-willed choice that avoids polarising ethnic and western identity, and posing family values against liberal individualist values, and native ethnic and religious culture against the culture of the host society. Since the literary portrait of a Bangladeshi female immigrant is inescapably tangled with the postcolonial politics of representation, many critical readings have attended to the question whether Brick Lane is authentic image or Orientalist depiction of the Bangladeshi minority in Britain (Bentley, 2008; Cormack, 2006; Gunning, 2012); since the novel’s publication in 2003, critics have attended to the question whether Monica Ali perpetrates stereotypes about the Bangladeshi community in London’s East End (its stifling patriarchy, backward-looking resentment and nostalgia, underachievement and lack of gumption) as well as the Bangladeshi national community (revealed through the epistolary subplot of Hasina’s parallel life in Dhaka as a country that is stuck in the mire of political and patriarchal oppression, economic underdevelopment, corruption and backwardness) (Ahmed, 2010; Hiddleston, 2005; Perfect, 2008). Some critics noted the worrying contrast between a liberating western metropolis, London, and a merciless chaotic urbanity in the third-world city of Dhaka and their divergent impacts upon the two sisters’ destinies (Marx, 2006; Ziegler, 2007). What is notable in these critical accounts is the attempt to absolve the author of the obligation of authenticity and transparency and focus on the text’s formal techniques and aesthetic intricacy: Jane Hiddleston radically reads Ali’s novel as a self-consciously “flawed” reflection and an “experimental” text that is “split … between the hope for revelation on the one hand, and knowledge of the impossibility of any complete unveiling on the other” (p. 59). Taking a more moderate view of the novel’s experimental poetics, John Marx argues that “Brick Lane breaks with realism and its mimetic conceit” which makes it “the narrative presentation of a problem rather than the transparent rendering of reality” (p. 22). Dave Gunning resolves the problem of the text’s presumed “inauthenticity” by neutralising the very notion of authenticity in literature; instead of mimetically conveying (rational) knowledge of the other, literature’s goal is a partial understanding that is achieved in the rather emotional terrain of “empathy”;

104

L. TAYEB

from Gunning’s perspective, Ali’s text thus moves away from “authenticity” or “the representation of the knowable ethnic community … toward the idea of striving to understand others”, which makes it no less politically engaged since “empathy [is] a significant political goal” in the novel (Gunning, 2012, p. 810; see also Dawson, 2009, p. 127). To overcome the division between science and fiction, anthropology and literature, I put the literary to the service of the ethnographic by shedding light on Ali’s perceptive representation in Brick Lane of the intimate, domestic and everyday life of an immigrant and its “empathy” with the “pawns” of global immigration and trade. I take Brick Lane and the female Bangladeshi immigrant on which it is centred as a narrative account of a particular late twentieth-century diasporic condition whose virtue lies in its literary ability to render the private and the intimate, link the personal and the political, and convey valuable social knowledge despite ideological con/intent. Classifying Ali’s novel as either literature or anthropology would confirm the dichotomy between the fictional quality of literature and its concern with the universal element of human experience and the factual aspect of anthropology and its capacity to ascertain knowledge of human particularity (Ahmed, 2010, pp. 36–37). As I have argued in the introduction, this dichotomy is now being questioned on both sides as anthropology acknowledges its literary and “fictional” aspects and literature is valued for its ability to convey truthful accounts of human life. From this perspective, I refrain from categorising Ali’s novel as either anthropological text (which is bound to answer the requirement of factualness and scientific accuracy) or literary text that as fiction may eschew accusation of misrepresentation. Circumventing the binary, I take it as a narrative that incorporates dominant and resisting ideologies in its representation of migrant families and diasporic communities in a late twentieth-century globalising world. 4.1.1

Production, Reproduction and the Domestic Sphere

Brick Lane traces a Bangladeshi female immigrant’s slow transformation and empowerment from within her domestic space, and further depicts that transformation as a “psychological metamorphosis”, an inner process of constant mental reflection and psychic conflict, instead of open and outward rebellion (Dawson, 2009, p. 131). What takes centre stage in the novel is the silent everyday struggle of a Bengali wife to adjust to her new immigrant life in London, paradoxically taking the form of absurd social

4

CULTURAL AND EMOTIONAL MOBILITIES: MONICA ALI’S …

105

isolation and matrimonial drudgery. Reporting the disjointed stream of her inner thoughts and feelings, the narrative describes Nazneen’s “individual embodiment” of “(im)mobility”, hovering between minute details of her quotidian domestic labour and her psychic conflict between compliance with matrimonial obligations and negligence of a set of tasks which otherwise appear as meaningless as the arranged marriage to which she has willfully submitted herself (Conlon, 2011, p. 354). Identified by Chanu as a “good worker” when she first arrives in London, Nazneen’s predicament appears as a severe state of confinement in the reproductive sphere of matrimony and motherhood followed, years later, by entry into the productive sphere as a domestic tailor performing equally humdrum piecework (Ali, p. 22). In one sense, Nazneen is excluded from the privileged spheres of mobility and productivity: she is constrained by her gendered position in both the reproductive sphere of domestic labour and the productive sphere she later accedes to. Her rather exploitative and precarious job as a domestic tailor is not only performed in the domestic sphere and is a traditionally female job; it also fits the global gendered division of labour placing Nazneen in an informal, unregulated economy and granting her access to a feminised and unskilled job market which paradoxically fosters her “social inequality” and immobility (Marx, 2006, pp. 8–9; Faist, 2013, p. 1642). Despite the apparent hopelessness of Nazneen’s confinement, this part argues that Brick Lane worries the lines between male production and female reproduction and provides a complex image of intra-familial relationships in a late twentiethcentury fast-changing world. Nazneen’s agency does not consist in leaving systems of discrimination and exploitation or acceding to male spheres, but in effecting change and empowerment from within inferior, gendered positions in both the private and public divisions of labour. At the beginning of the novel, Nazneen’s belief in the naturalness of her gendered position—her mother once resolves her childhood inquisitiveness by the statement, “If God wanted us to ask questions, he would have made us men” (Ali, p. 80)—appears to be dictated by an Islamic religious discourse associating moral righteousness and spiritual immaculateness with self-surrender to fate and patriarchal authority. Her wavering thoughts and feelings revolve around three major figures of patriarchal and religious authority: her mother’s unfathomable, “saintly” feminine suffering, endurance and surrender (Ali, p. 46), her father’s ambiguous decision to marry her off to Chanu (Ali, p. 101), and her husband’s revolting self-division between secular and progressive belief in a “high”

106

L. TAYEB

western culture, and a reactionary insistence that Nazneen complies with the patriarchal norms of the Bangladeshi community of London’s East End (Ali, p. 45). Those three figures appear as “forms of seemingly unassailable authority” while “Nazneen’s need to understand, question and confront them drives the narrative” (Gunning, 2010, p. 97). As a way to make sense of her present life, Nazneen keeps remembering her childhood in Gouripur where her mother’s suffering is internalised by her as a defining feature, at once alluring and disconcerting, of the female condition; her growth into womanhood is sinisterly associated with “cast[ing] off her childish baggy pants and long shirt and begin[ning] to wear this long suffering that was as rich and layered and deeply coloured as the saris which enfolded Amma’s troubled bones” (Ali, p. 103). Here, fate and clothes are conflated and made to dictate feminine subordination and acquiescence, and along with her ethnic attire, Nazneen inherits from her mother an unexplainable urge to endure an unjust female condition by refraining from any self-assertive defiance of fate. This is most directly inculcated by the story of Nazneen’s birth or “the story of How You Were Left to Your Fate” (Ali, p. 15). Through her mother’s discourse of female endurance and submission to fate, Nazneen thus (mis)interprets her immigration to, and domestic confinement in London as a logical and suitable outcome of her wise acquiescence to her fate that is all the more sensible given Hasina’s sinister defiance of fate in her decision to elope and pursue a self-fulfilling love marriage. Later, however, Nazneen’s vision gets blurred as she can no longer determine the difference between the path of fate and the opposite path of rebellious self-assertion: studying her sister’s rebellious act, she begins to doubt that Hasina might be “simply following her fate” when she elopes with Malek; reflecting on Hasina’s subsequent life in Dhaka, she perceives it as “a baby rat, naked and blind, in the jaws of [fate]” (Ali, p. 340). Nazneen’s secret affair with Karim is also interpreted as self-surrender “to fate and not to herself” (Ali, p. 300). The discourse of fate ultimately loses all credibility when Nazneen learns through her sister’s confessional letter that their mother has committed suicide in defiance of the rule of female endurance and passive waiting. Meant to castigate her husband’s infidelity and put an end to her own suffering, the suicide of Nazneen’s mother casts a shadow of doubt on the religious/cultural dictum of wifely obedience and subordination and guides Nazneen to her decision to take control of her life and stay in London (rather than passively re-follow Chanu back to Bangladesh). Reversing her initial position as passive follower, Nazneen reconciles fate

4

CULTURAL AND EMOTIONAL MOBILITIES: MONICA ALI’S …

107

and action and moves from a passive acceptance to an active reworking of fate. Another source of patriarchal cultural indoctrination, but also active wielder of fate is Nazneen’s father. His decision to arrange Nazneen’s marriage to Chanu for her own good or in social atonement for Hasina’s opprobrium appears as a God-like pre-determination of her life course. A large part of Nazneen’s private thoughts at the beginning revolves around the reason and in/sensibility of her father’s choice of Chanu, and whether it is motivated by love or indifference to her. Nazneen’s father hardly seeks her consent when he asks her whether she wants to see the photograph of her future husband; in addition, the certainty of Nazneen’s consent—indicated by her evasive reply, “Abba, it is good that you have chosen my husband. I hope I can be a good wife, like Amma” (Ali, p. 16)—is put into doubt by Nazneen’s dutiful need to abide by her mother’s teachings as well as make amends for her sister’s disreputable act. Marian Aguiar studies the “structural conditions” surrounding Nazneen’s arranged marriage and argues that Monica Ali blurs the lines between arranged and forced marriage “show[ing] Nazneen’s decision as structured by her gender roles” (2018, p. 93). In other terms, the idea that Nazneen’s arranged marriage is predicated on her own free choice and consent is made entirely unconvincing and dubious, and her father rather acts as the blind wielder of her fate, and not the judicious and forbearing intermediary between her and her future husband. As she grows to know her husband, Nazneen wavers between two interpretations of her father’s determination of her fate: paternal care and concern for her well-being proven by the easy financial status of Chanu (Ali, pp. 20–21) and cold indifference betrayed by his need to dispense with a daughter’s heavy responsibility: Why did her father marry her off to this man? He just wanted to be rid of me, she thought. He wanted me to go far away, so that I would not be any trouble to him. He did not care who took me off his hands. If I had known what this marriage would be, what this man would be … ! (Ali, p. 101)

Later, distressed over her son’s illness and seeing her husband’s patience and kindness for the first time, she tempers her judgement of her father’s choice and starts to condone his dearth of paternal love and responsibility:

108

L. TAYEB

“Abba did not choose so badly. This was not a bad man. There were many bad men in the world but this was not one of them. She could love him. Perhaps she did already” (Ali, p. 120). Whatever the meaning and consequences of her father’s choice, Nazneen must throughout her married life with Chanu struggle to understand the wisdom of self-submission to a blind fate and weigh her own arranged marriage against Hasina’s love marriage. Her sister’s mishaps in Dhaka and her own disillusionment with her lover Karim later lead her to dismiss both arranged and love marriages in favour of an individualist quest for self-fulfillment and autonomy combined to her roles as mother, female breadwinner, and transnational wife. Nazneen’s mother and father wield a strong patriarchal cultural and religious authority, which predominantly monitors her adult behaviour in the present immigrant location; Chanu’s displays of care or indifference in their everyday matrimonial interaction further play an important role in de/stabilising the culture of endurance and passive waiting she has received during her childhood years in Gouripur. In the narrative present, Nazneen must constantly negotiate her own teachings and her performance of matrimonial duties in light of her husband’s treatment. Practicing religious rituals, like reading the Coran and praying, further acts as a psychological stabiliser in Nazneen’s internal war against conjugal rebellion. If her mother has defied fate by committing suicide and her father has showed a painful lack of paternal care and responsibility, Chanu is highly hypocritical in his display of education, culture and modernity, restricting these prerogatives to men and constricting his wife to the role of reproducer and preserver of tradition. Explaining the absurdity of his wife’s need to venture out of her domestic world in London, he conflates his own fear of disreputability with the traditional Bangladeshi dictum of female domestic confinement concluding in a warped logic that London should not act as a catalyst for Nazneen’s liberation: “anyway, if you were in Bangladesh you would not go out. Coming here you are not missing anything, only broadening your horizons” (Ali, p. 45). Chanu not only checks Nazneen in her attempts to accede to the public sphere of production and decision-making; he also adamantly refuses to stand by her in her struggle to rescue her sister Hasina. Any lack of care for her sister on his part or attempt to check her own mobility is met with an urge towards rebellion and negligence of wifely duty: “Unwashed socks were paired and put back in his drawer. The razor slipped when she cut his corns. His files got mixed up when she tidied.

4

CULTURAL AND EMOTIONAL MOBILITIES: MONICA ALI’S …

109

All her chores, peasants in his princely kingdom, rebelled in turn. Small insurrections, designed to destroy the state from within” (Ali, p. 63). Outwardly complying with a traditional marriage institution and gender role, Nazneen’s internal thoughts keep weighing cultural and religious teachings against her present immigrant life in London and ultimately lead her towards empowerment and liberation “from within” matrimonial and familial institutions. Chanu’s views fall in line with the dominant immigration pattern according to which women’s labour is restricted to the “reproductive sphere” which encompasses the uncreative work of transmitting “culturally specific histories and traditions regarding food, dress, family and other inter-personal relationships”; conceptually downgraded and “linked to sameness, being, ‘mere’ repetition, in contrast to the more dynamic and creative generation of difference and becoming that is associated with the public sphere of production”, women’s labour in the immigration context is largely invisible and unacknowledged (Gedalof, 2009, p. 82). In one respect, Ali’s Brick Lane confirms these views by placing so much emphasis on the extreme loneliness of Nazneen as well as the tediousness, boredom and uncreativity of her everyday domestic labour: Nazneen cleaned and cooked and washed. She made breakfast for Chanu and looked on as he ate, collected his pens and put them in his briefcase, watched him from the window as he stepped like a band leader across the courtyard to the bus stop on the far side of the estate. Then she ate standing up at the sink and washed the dishes. She made the bed and tidied the flat, washed socks and pants in the sink and larger items in the bath. In the afternoon, she cooked and ate as she cooked.… And the days were tolerable, and the evenings were nothing to complain about. (Ali, pp. 40–41)

In another respect, the novel debunks the gendered binary opposition between male productive work and the female reproductive labour of love: along with the emphasis on the unproductivity and unrewarding aspect of Chanu’s work in the public sphere (leading him to plan a return migration to Bangladesh), the novel traces Nazneen’s slow transformation and self-refashioning through both domestic labour and childcare and her hourly paid domestic sewing and piecework. At first, the domestic is associated with immobility and immigrant housewives are represented as engaged in lifelong waiting and inaction:

110

L. TAYEB

“It was her place to sit and wait. Even if the tornado was heading directly towards her. For her, there was nothing else to be done. Nothing else that God wanted her to do… . How difficult it was this business of sitting still” (Ali, pp. 101–102). The life of an immigrant wife and mother takes the disturbing dimension of lifelong “waiting in the form of bodily stasis” and immobility, thus confirming the “primacy of the mobile” (Bissel, 2007, pp. 278, 284). Later in her life, however, Nazneen regrets her inactivity as she realises that she could have fulfilled herself through the creative act of home-making in a new land: All those years ago she should have bought seeds. She should have sewn new covers for the sofa and the armchairs. She should have thrown away the wardrobe, or at least painted it. She should have plastered the wall and painted that too. She should have put Chanu’s certificates on the wall. But she left everything undone. For so many years, all the permanent fixtures of her life had felt so temporary. There was no reason to change anything, no time to grow anything. And now, somehow, it felt too late. (Ali, p. 342)

Monica Ali does not endorse an equation of female domestic confinement with passive waiting and inaction; she also refrains from associating liberation with a simple desertion of the domestic; as Sara Upstone argues, “Nazneen’s movement outwards is reinforced by a reconfiguration of the domestic space, too, into a site of gradual empowerment” (2010, p. 177); hence, the creative act of home-making in a new land throws light on the dynamic instead of repetitive aspect of female reproductive labour: after her husband’s death, Razia re-fashions her domestic space by putting an end to the business of “waiting”: her “flat had lost the feel of a settler camp, a temporary pitch in hostile terrain … and over the years she made the place a home” (Ali, p. 355). For Nazneen and Razia, creativity and change do not jar with carrying on the work of reproduction in the domestic sphere or with occupying a marginal gendered position in the labour market of the globalised garment industry. Their entrepreneurial venture at the end of novel enables them to access the public sphere of production and action, yet in no way does it push to the margin the domestic sphere and its reproductive labour. Nazneen starts to derive a sense of fulfillment and pleasure from her work as a domestic tailor (Ali,

4

CULTURAL AND EMOTIONAL MOBILITIES: MONICA ALI’S …

111

p. 486), and though she refuses to leave England at the end and abrogates her wifely role and duty, she assumes her position as mother as well as transnational wife and breadwinner for her extended family. 4.1.2

Nazneen and Hasina and the Private/Public Dichotomy

Studying Nazneen’s life and transformation in London independently of her sister’s trajectory enables a view of marital relations in the context of transnational marriage and migration and places Nazneen against male figures, namely Chanu and Karim. Though Karim acts as a catalyst of Nazneen’s sexual liberation and seems to connote the individualist quest for self-fulfillment associated with love relationships (as opposed to the conventional image of the loveless arranged marriage), he is ultimately aligned with Chanu since his presumed love for Nazneen is predicated on a romantic association between her quintessential Bangladeshi femininity and an idealised, culturally pure Bangladesh. At the end, Nazneen realises the speciousness of their love relationship and the impossibility of reaffirming it in a love marriage: “I wasn’t me, and you weren’t you… . What we did—we made each other up” (Ali, pp. 454–455). Putting an end to her affair with Karim at the same time as she takes the painful but relieving decision of staying in England may be seen as a significant mature abrogation of male presence, power and agency in her life and a decision to purge the domestic of male authority. Such reading is, however, incomplete since Nazneen’s confinement inside the domestic sphere of her flat in London is significantly juxtaposed to Hasina’s vagrancy and loss in the androcentric external world of Dhaka. Indeed, Monica Ali uses the epistolary subplot to build up a correspondence between the two sisters’ to and fro movements between domestic and public spaces. She links spatial divisions and boundaries in the western metropolis to the patriarchal mechanisms of women’s exclusion and marginalisation in urban Dhaka, and provides a planetary view of the highly gendered public/private, production/reproduction dichotomy. Seeing Nazneen’s story in conjunction with her sister’s leads us to see the difficulty of maintaining any private/public division or simply associating liberation with the public sphere. At the beginning of the novel, Nazneen’s association with the private sphere is suggested by her state of domestic confinement and the way the public sphere looms to her as hopelessly misty and unattainable. Her early life in London is marked by a clear-cut division between the domestic

112

L. TAYEB

space of her flat and an external world that extends from her immediate neighbourhood to encompass the metropolitan space of London, the national space of Britain, and a larger planetary space accessed through mass media and global events. It is further marked by extreme isolation from and lack of knowledge of her immediate surroundings in the Housing Estate in which she lives and the larger urban sphere she inhabits. Nazneen’s access to the world beyond her flat is enabled by the two main openings onto it, her window from which she silently interacts with the tattoo lady, and TV, a communication medium in which ice-skating shows have a particular effect on her thoughts and imagination. While the first indicates a social need to interact with people outside her ethnic enclave in the host society (“what she needed most was people. Not any people in particular [apart of course from Hasina] but just people” [Ali, p. 24]), the second stands for a mediated image of female freedom that seems unattainable from the perspective of a present state of incarceration inside her body and the “concrete slab of entombed humanity” she occupies (Ali, p. 76). Her transformation consists of a slow movement towards knowledge, understanding and mastery of the various spheres of this external world, a questioning of the private/public dichotomy and a re-envisioning of the private sphere. Various readings of Brick Lane associate Nazneen’s transformation and empowerment with the ability to access and master public space. Sara Upstone reads the novel as a “protest” narrative in which “movement into public space is the central metaphor” (2010, p. 173). Alistair Cormack links Nazneen’s access to the public sphere to her previous attempts at self-definition through the Bengal Tigers’ political collectivity and argues that in the end, “a true freedom that recognizes the entirety of Nazneen’s subjectivity would have to be conceived in the public realm as well as in the cloistered world of family and friendship” (2006, p. 713). Studying Nazneen’s nightmarish experience of loss in the Financial District of London early in the narrative, Nick Bentley contends that “the novel as a whole follows her gradual empowerment as she begins to come to terms with [this] alien environment” (2008, p. 88). For Kim Duff, Nazneen’s development may be read as a “[process] of identity formation in and through the negotiation and navigation of public and private spaces” and must thus be linked to one national/urban context, namely Thatcherite Britain and its burgeoning individualist entrepreneurial culture. Nazneen gradually emerges as a “diasporic postmodern flâneuse” whose “experiences of the urban spaces of Brick Lane become less-fear-ridden” thus

4

CULTURAL AND EMOTIONAL MOBILITIES: MONICA ALI’S …

113

“contribut[ing] to her identity formation within the city” (Duff, 2014, pp. 87, 110, 111). As already argued, Nazneen does not desert the domestic for the public sphere, but effects liberation through a re-invention and appropriation of domestic space coupled with a masterful access to the public realm and participation in the sphere of production. The duality of confinement and freedom cannot be easily mapped onto the private/public spatial division. In the case of private space, Nazneen’s early claustrophobia and loneliness is alleviated by oneiric journeys back to the open pastoral space of her village, in which she seems to make up for a lost community life. As her memories grow distant, she also moves from a state of waiting to a state of dwelling that encompasses both domestic and public spaces and reverses Chanu’s “diasporic discourse of return” (Upstone, 2010, p. 178). That “the village was leaving her” and that “more often, she tried to see and could not” (Ali, p. 217) is indicative of a transformation in the way Nazneen shall henceforth inhabit her London neighbourhood and gain confidence in its commercial streets and sprawling urbanity. It is no coincidence then that Nazneen’s village visions start to dim when she embarks on her journey towards production and financial independence. The public sphere should not however be emptied of power and its mechanisms of control and containment. For the migrant female other, it is especially inseparable from patriarchal power or the male gaze and racial power or the white gaze. Nazneen’s early ventures outside her flat subject her to the furtive glances of Bengali men, showing the way structures of patriarchal authority are transplanted and maintained in diasporic communities. They further subject her to the white gaze since her image combines an ethnic biological identity to a sartorial cultural identity marking her as a down-trodden South Asian Muslim woman. Her seeming invisibility in an urban crowd is twice interrupted by a moment of denuding visibility during which Nazneen gathers awareness of what Mrinalini Chakravorty terms “the biocultural limits” of her diasporic existence (2012, p. 509). The first occurs when Nazneen intentionally gets herself lost in London in painful empathy with her sister Hasina; though her initial state of invisibility gives her power to reverse the white gaze and subject the majority to scrutiny, she is soon spotted by a white woman whose condescending gaze and smile reminds Nazneen of her utter powerlessness and helplessness in white London: “The woman looked up and saw Nazneen staring. She smiled like she was smiling at

114

L. TAYEB

someone who had tried and totally failed to grasp the situation” (Ali, p. 57). The second moment of denuding exposure occurs when Nazneen goes shopping on Brick Lane in company of her husband; here the gaze is photographic since the woman, this time a photographer, points an “ethnographic” camera at Nazneen, to which the latter “adjusted her scarf. She was conscious of being watched. Everything she did, everything she had done since the day of her birth, was recorded” (Ali, p. 254). It is significant that in both cases, the god-like white gaze is also female, and serves to constrain Nazneen within an ethnic and gendered image that further bars her access to the public sphere and “the possibility of her autonomous self-fashioning” (Chakravorty, p. 509). If public space holds the promise of autonomy and liberation for Nazneen, in Hasina’s case, a third-world chaotic, cavernous and perilous urbanity awaits the young woman bereft of kin and community. In Dhaka, private space has an insidious and treacherous aspect and repeatedly grants Hasina a specious security as caring husbands or benevolent landowners keep revealing each time an ugly exploitative and abusive masculinity. In counterpart, the public sphere is associated with promiscuity and opprobrium, and grants Hasina no opportunity to fulfil herself or achieve independence. Her job in the garment industry is not only economically exploitative and assigns her to a precarious underclass position; it also subjects her to society’s deprecatory views of “garment girls” (Ali, p. 152). In Dhaka, there is no space that is capable of granting Hasina either security or liberation, and she seems to be condemned to cycles of flight and settlement. The epistolary part “dismantl[es] any easy equation of home and nation through the portrait of Hasina as literally homeless” (Chakravorty, 2012, p. 515). Whether Ali’s representation of Bangladesh confirms stereotypes or reflects the merciless condition of women in Bangladesh is certainly a pertinent issue if we examine the text’s politics of representation. What counts in the scope of this enquiry, however, is that Monica Ali juxtaposes two sisters’ journeys within two global metropolitan spaces in an attempt to get a planetary view of women’s subordination and spatial imprisonment. For Garrett Ziegler, Brick Lane contrasts the liberal city of London to the socially and politically constraining urban space of Dhaka, and “locates the possibility of [Nazneen’s] sexual, economic and political empowerment not in the rights claims enabled by state-based citizenship in the west, but rather through political membership in the neo-liberal capitalist metropolis ”; Ziegler thus contrasts Nazneen’s “liberal city” to Hasina’s

4

CULTURAL AND EMOTIONAL MOBILITIES: MONICA ALI’S …

115

simple access to an “urban life” and space that fails to offer any opportunity for self-fulfillment and liberation (2007, p. 148). For Ranasinha, Brick Lane undermines any “hierarchy” or “binary North-South division and framing” of Dhaka and London, and argues instead for “global integration” endorsed by the two sisters’ entanglement with a globalised garment industry which thrives on the exploitation of “informal labor pools made up of an underclass of women, migrants and stateless persons” (2016, pp. 59, 62). In a similar vein, John Marx argues against reading “the difference between the two sisters’ stories [as] a difference between advancement and failure”; instead, the sustained parallel between Nazneen and Hasina shows “the insistence with which [the novel] treats women’s labor as a global matter” at the same time as it presents “the feminization of labor as a family affair” (2006, pp. 11, 16, 22). Marx examines the idea that globalisation fosters sexism and trammels the “economic agency” of women by including them “into the paid workforce via [feminized] jobs” (p. 17). If such structure is created by the two sisters’ stories, no hierarchy is endorsed at the end as both Nazneen and Hasina manage to achieve some level of agency through their divergent choices: while Nazneen’s becomes a “story of self-actualization through work”, Hasina’s choice of pursuing love when she runs away with the cook is not dismissed as a heading on to failure but “a legitimate attempt to manage possibility” (Marx, pp. 18, 22). Indeed, Brick Lane investigates the question whether the public sphere of production and the economic opportunities of global trade can present migrant third-world women with possibilities of liberation, self-fulfillment and an “economic” or “calculative agency” (Marx, 2006, p. 20). In the end, through Nazneen’s and Hasina’s parallel stories, the novel adamantly refuses to endorse two hierarchies: the domestic/public sphere hierarchy is debunked by presenting Nazneen’s creative home-making and rewarding domestic labour at the end, and portraying a Hasina that insists on equating personal agency with the pursuance of the “domestic romance” (Marx, p. 21); though established, the London/Dhaka or North/South hierarchy is equally challenged by globalising the feminised informal economy through which the two sisters seek liberation and providing the reader with a planetary view of capitalist exploitation. In addition, “the measure of independence Nazneen achieves should not be decontextualised from the wider narrative, nor read as a blanket statement on the enabling west” (Ranasinha, 2016, p. 63). Nazneen’s access to the public sphere of the western metropolis is coupled by a long journey

116

L. TAYEB

towards understanding and intellectual as well as psychological maturity that plays an equally essential role in Nazneen’s liberation. 4.1.3

From “Male” Ideologies to Female Understanding: Nazneen’s Empowerment

Given Nazneen’s young age and inexperience at the beginning, (she is only eighteen when she is married off to Chanu and immigrates with him to London) the novel can be read as a journey into understanding and political maturity. Michael Perfect detects in Nazneen’s story a classical bildungsroman structure and qualifies Ali’s novel as a “multicultural bildungsroman” seeking thereby to capture her mixture of migration and personal formation as well the protagonist’s “reconciling of individuation and socialization”, free individual choice and familial responsibility at the end (2008, pp. 110, 119). Arguing against the simple reading of the novel as a stereotyping representation of the Bangladeshi individual and community and Nazneen’s story as a simple successful assimilation story, Perfect concludes that “Nazneen does not lose her identity in multicultural London but rather discovers it, with the novel celebrating the adaptability both of its immigrant protagonist as well as that of the multicultural metropole” (p. 119). Reading Nazneen’s development as a maturing process enables us to see her persistent confinement and inaction as the deceptive outward shell of her long internal journey into understanding and transformation leading to the climactic act of assuming control over her future by deciding to stay in Britain. Over the time span of the narrative (from 1985 to the aftermath of 9/11) Nazneen enters into varied familial and (intra-community) social relationships that ultimately enable her to decode social universes and cultural discourses at the local levels of her native village, Gouripur, her homeland, Bangladesh (perceived mainly through Dhaka, Hasina’s urban space of precariousness and loss), her East End London neighbourhood and its Bangladeshi community, and her British host society. In the wake of 9/11, she also gathers awareness of the global forces and processes that impact lives at those local levels: in particular, the global, politicised version of her faith, Islam and its relation to diasporic phenomena as cultural protectionism and ethnic primordialism, and the informal economy of globalised trade thanks to which she gains a large measure of independence and economic prosperity. Nazneen’s limited understanding is indicated in the first part of the novel (extending from

4

CULTURAL AND EMOTIONAL MOBILITIES: MONICA ALI’S …

117

1985 to the death of her son Raquib in 1988) by her child-like apprehension of her surroundings: she fantasises about visiting the tattoo lady, a poor, addicted, white working-class woman on the verge of mental breakdown. She watches ice-skating shows on TV with the easily transported imagination of a child, and whenever her gaze falls on white men or women, her collection of the outward details of their dress or gaits shows a total ignorance of the British national culture or metropolitan ways of life (Ali, pp. 19, 41, 56). Nazneen’s immaturity is also contrasted to other migrant women’s relative mastery of both minority and host society: Razia, Mrs Islam and Mrs Azad display high levels of understanding and independent thinking that ultimately enable Nazneen to form her own views on the way she may reconcile ethnic identity and integration in the host society. In light of her present immigrant life, Nazneen also revisits her childhood years in Gouripur before she could finally understand and question the discourse of fatalistic self-submission with which has been impregnated. Nazneen’s empowerment at the end of the novel is enabled by personal and political understanding gleaned piecemeal in the private sphere of the family, along with a progressive access to the public sphere of her neighbourhood and the wider urban space of London. Her private love affair with Karim temporarily provides her with an ethnic and religious collectivity through which she re-defines herself and her faith. Through the Bengal Tigers’ meetings and local and global politics, Nazneen discerns the difference between her own native version of Islam, and both Karim’s politicised Islam and Chanu’s secular cultural and national primordialism. Concerning the delicate issue of Ali’s representation of Islam in a preand post-9/11 world, the novel does provide insights into the way “globalisation has made Muslim identity increasingly a matter of individual agency, rather than a matter of cultural inheritance” (Ranasinha, 2016, p. 161). It shows the effects of varied technologies of communication and information (TV and later the worldwide web) on the female migrant’s negotiation of eastern and western identities and lifestyles, and her attempt to sort out the fundamentals of her faith from both a native religious discourse and an emerging discourse of global Islam. Ali challenges stereotypes by depicting the way Nazneen, a South Asian Muslim female, incorporates her faith in her own female liberation and socioeconomic integration into the western host society: “Nazneen embraces a performance of her identity without the stable compass points that her national and religious backgrounds have created, and without merely

118

L. TAYEB

assimilating into the mold of Mrs Azad” (Cormack, 2006, p. 706). Not only does the Coran continue to act as “a source of positive power” (Mustafa, 2009, p. 283) and is in no way conflated with its patriarchal uses and interpretations; Nazneen also manages to disconnect her faith from the fatalistic worldview blighting her existence and recognises that Islam “need not rule out free will and that active agency must be exercised even in the service of faith” (Ranasinha, p. 167). Indeed, Ali refrains from showing migrant female development as a matter of choice between reified and polarised cultural identities; she depicts Nazneen’s mobility in terms of performative dwelling in multiple sites within a multi-scalar, translocal field of relation, thus “integrat[ing] notions of fluidity and discontinuity associated with mobilities, movements and flows … with notions of fixity, groundedness, and situatedness in particular settings” (Greiner & Sakdapolrak, 2013, p. 376). On the whole, Ali’s migrants are better approached as translocal subjects “emerging through both geographical mobility and multiple forms of ongoing emplacement” (Conradson & McKay, 2007, p. 168) and even apparently re-rooting orientations like Chanu’s “ancestral return” is act of emplacement with further entangled “reverse” transnational connections (King & Christou, 2011, pp. 452, 454). Despite its questionable aspect, Nazneen’s liberation at the end of the narrative may be interpreted as a translocal performative act of “emplacement” taking the unlikely form of the sartorially and ethnically marked female immigrant and mother disowning patriarchal figures and fulfilling her initial ice-skating dream within the rink of a pluralised national space and community. By associating liberation with (self)-understanding and conscious choice and self-positioning, Ali refrains from basing migrant female empowerment on the embrace of a radical western liberal individualism. The measure of autonomy and choice her protagonist achieves at the end results from her newly found capacity to combine the resources of economic and personal freedom available in the globalised western metropolis with her ethnic and religious cultures, now reinterpreted through self-knowledge and understanding.

4

CULTURAL AND EMOTIONAL MOBILITIES: MONICA ALI’S …

119

4.2 “Motherhood in a Foreign Land”: The Indian–American Family and Diaspora in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake If Nazneen, Ali’s protagonist, undergoes an immigrant’s journey into understanding whose ultimate outcome is reinterpretation of inherited cultures, resistance of dominant ideologies and shaping of individual agency by bridging the gap between domestic and public spaces, Lahiri’s characters in The Namesake (2003) are divided along generational lines while inter-generational mis/understanding is the focal psychosocial field of the narrative world. Lahiri presents the intimate internal lives of varied first and second-generation characters, and navigates the private emotional terrain linking them to each other and attaching them to varied familial and national homes; she centralises a mother’s and her son’s internal struggles to reconcile double national allegiances and identities and emotionally adjust to a transnational mode of life. In other terms, she depicts diaspora as a “psycho-cultural space” and focuses on the “emotional ramifications of intergenerational miscommunication and misunderstanding” for diasporic individuals and families (Joshi, 2004, p. 85; Chung, 2016, p. 66). Her novel is at times intense in its emphasis on private emotions of homesickness and longing, loneliness and loss, disappointment and resignation, guilt and confusion. Indeed, The Namesake is marked by its author’s keen attention to “the emotional and affective states that accompany mobility” and that are believed to be “a key dimension of translocal subjectivities” and the experience of migration more generally (Conradson & McKay, 2007, p. 169). The turn to emotions is part of the translocal approach that re-centralises the “concrete localities” and “place-bound activities” of migrants (Mavrommatis, 2015, p. 98). Yet it is more broadly instigated by the new awareness in migration studies that “emotional content pervades transnational relationships”, and that emotions are directly relevant to the political and socio-economic issues brought into the study of migrant mobility (Skrbiš, 2008, p. 232; Boccagni & Baldassar, 2015, p. 1). Instead of “convenient and occasional resource called upon to explain certain peculiarities of transnational family life”, emotions in Lahiri’s novel are “a constitutive part of the transnational family experience itself” (Skrbiš, p. 236). Beginning with Ashima’s long travails and the harrowing prospect of “motherhood in a foreign land” (Lahiri, p. 6), the novel depicts the tragedy of immigration as an ironic and painful discrepancy between the first

120

L. TAYEB

generation’s struggle for connection across geographical distance and the second generation’s need to disengage themselves from familial ties and “private” ethnic cultures. It presents inter-personal and inter-generational understanding as a necessary condition for overcoming confusion and guilt and the weaving of meaningful webs of relation. It finally transcends the duality of travel and return, diaspora and homeland, and complicates first and second-generation immigrant identities by ushering them into a third space of transnational mobility and cosmopolitan miscegenation and cultural mixture. 4.2.1

Emotional Communication, Emotional Mobility and the Creative Work of Connection

Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane largely converge in their subversive representation of female immigration: they not only shed light on the private thoughts and feelings of dislocated South Asian housewives in their new immigrant homes; they also resist stereotypical views in migration studies of the biological and cultural work of female reproduction. Apparently replicating stereotypes of invisibility, passivity, inaction and stasis by making immigration the haphazard outcome of arranged marriages, the novels delve into the psychic internal world of housewives and mothers as a way to unveil the secret, unseen work of creative repetition and imitation: both Nazneen and Ashima illustrate “the dynamic messiness of the work of inhabitance” and “the possibilities of the repetition that undoes, or that recollects forward in order to birth something that is both new and familiar” (Gedalof, 2009, pp. 95–96). Indeed, “the work of preservation” involving everyday tasks of home-making, cooking and child-rearing should not overshadow the “endless subtle re-inventions and adaptations to a different range of possible private and public spaces” (Gedalof, p. 96). In The Namesake, the narrator dwells on cultural differences between Indian and American social lives, presenting Ashima Ganguli’s immigrant malaise as deprivation of the warmth and bustle of everyday extended family life. The normative quietude and extreme privacy of the American nuclear family harrowingly contrasts with the profuse relationships of Indian families and the pomp and ritual with which emotions are expressed and familial events commemorated. Here emotion and its social and cultural expression is of central importance, and is no longer

4

CULTURAL AND EMOTIONAL MOBILITIES: MONICA ALI’S …

121

perceived as a biological reaction outside the sociocultural (Ryan, 2008, p. 300). Sociologists are now aware of the “feeling rules” people conform to when expressing their emotions; they also pay stronger attention to the “emotion work” of migrants (Hochschild, qtd. in Ryan, p. 300). Emotions are a more delicate and complicated issue in the migration context given “the different ways in which people communicate and express emotion across culture” (Chung, 2016, p. 63). One way in which minute differences in the cultural expression of emotions stand out in Lahiri’s novel is the division between the private and public display of emotions setting white Americans apart from (South) Asians: lying on her bed in Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge and awaiting the delivery of her first baby, Ashima shares the room with three white American women, Beverly, Lois and Carol, and though sleeping with strangers for the first time, she wishes she could have an intimate conversation with them in which they can exchange about the experience of childbirth. “But she has gathered that Americans, in spite of their public declarations of affection, in spite of their miniskirts and bikinis, in spite of their hand-holding on the street and lying on top of each other on the Cambridge Common, prefer their privacy” (Lahiri, p. 3). Here, Ashima is culturally puzzled by the way Americans are capable of extremely intimate expressions and bodily displays of emotion in public at the same time as they mind strangers’ interference in their “public privacy”. A further contrast between the public and private display of emotions in Indian culture makes social interaction with white Americans difficult: For Ashima and Ashoke, getting too intimate with each other (saying words of endearment or calling each other by first names) is inappropriate in both private and public spaces. This is suggested by the shame and embarrassment Ashima feels when she steps in her future husband’s shoe upon her betrothal (Lahiri, p. 8). The physical intimacy of their future sexual life suggested by this brief moment should not give way to the communicative and affective openness of the western “pure relationship”, and Ashima’s shame stems for this overstepping of boundaries between them. For all their closeness and intimacy, Ashoke and Ashima will never experience the openness of the western “pure relationship” (Jamieson, 1999, p. 477), and their married life remains extremely codified in terms of affective and linguistic exchange. In contrast, Indians are voluble and demonstrative in their public displays of emotion towards kin and family: against the extreme discretion of the dyadic husband–wife relationship, stands the need of extended

122

L. TAYEB

family members to express their feelings towards each other through bodily presence and display of emotion, especially in particular social events like weddings, departures, or births and deaths in the family. The “deafening ascent” of the plane Ashima boards on her first trip to America has been watched by “twenty-six members of her family … from the balcony at Dum Dum Airport”, and Ashoke’s first trip away from home at the age of twenty-two (which ends in his traumatic train accident) is accompanied by the same public display of concern and emotion from his parents and his six siblings (Lahiri, pp. 4, 14). Later in America, their son, Gogol, is embarrassed, in the presence of his girlfriend Maxine, by their need to see a departing family member off and get news of their safe arrival though he knows that for them, “the act of travel is never regarded casually, that even the most ordinary of journeys is seen off and greeted at either end” (Lahiri, pp. 144, 150). What Ashima finds most desolate, however, is the lonely birth of her son and her own privation of familial care and festivity. Not only is she deprived of the maternal privilege of giving birth in her parents’ house and of the “[brief retreat] to childhood” that allows; she is also “terrified to raise a child in a country where she is related to no one, where she knows so little, where life seems so tentative and sparse”, and looking at her solitary childbirth and uncelebrated baby, “she can’t help but pity him. She has never known of a person entering the world so alone, so deprived” (Lahiri, pp. 4, 6, 25). Like the husband–wife discretion and emotional restraint, an Asian parent’s expression of love to a child is not communicated by words but by care-giving actions. Such cultural difference in the expression of emotion towards one’s child may be misinterpreted as a lack of emotion or may generate inter-generational misunderstanding, and overall, “emotional communication can … be complicated between the immigrant parent and American-born child” (Chung, 2016, p. 63). Angie Chung explains the difference between the western binary approach to emotion, in which distinct and openly expressed feelings make the parent–child relation less conflictual and “healthy”, and the Asian “relational perspective” in which emotions “may encompass a complex wellspring of contradictory feelings” and “problem solving is not always the ideal objective, especially if hiding personal feelings and struggles achieves the larger goal of preserving one’s dignity and sparing loved ones unnecessary pain and burden” (pp. 63–64). In The Namesake, parent-child miscommunication and emotional complexity is mainly conveyed through the incident of Gogol’s naming and its subsequent impact on his adult personality.

4

CULTURAL AND EMOTIONAL MOBILITIES: MONICA ALI’S …

123

Deeply entangled with Ashoke’s inherited literary taste and his traumatic train accident which leads to his rebirth and healing through ever distant travel, Gogol’s name has an accidental quality to it that is coupled with unspoken emotional value: in addition to Ashoke’s accident and the book’s accidental role in his rescue, there is the additional accident of the maternal grandmother’s lost letter and her subsequent loss of memory leading to the parents’ unwilling publicising of a private “pet name” as an alternative to the lost “good name” (Lahiri, pp. 26–28). Yet as soon as it is uttered, the name of the Russian writer of “The Overcoat” “stands not only for [Gogol’s] life, but [Ashoke’s]” as well and for Ashima, “a story she first heard with polite newlywed sympathy … now … makes her blood go cold” (Lahiri, pp. 28, 29). Notwithstanding its secret emotional import, the name will henceforth act a source of painful misunderstanding, and open an unbridgeable gap between Gogol and his parents. The apparently meaningless but also strange and ludicrous name will deepen Gogol’s immigrant malaise, foster his teenage introversion and later push him on “a legal rite of passage” to free himself and birth himself anew as Nikhil (Lahiri, p. 102). Likewise, Gogol’s father refrains from dispelling misunderstanding through open communication. Hiding his personal trauma from his son, he is repeatedly pained by his son’s indifference to or rejection of the name, signing his consent to the legal procedure of the name change “with the same resignation with which he signed a check or credit card receipt, his eyes slightly raised over his glasses, inwardly calculating the loss” (Lahiri, p. 100). Only when he experiences, years later, a traumatic repetition of the accident which has changed his life, does he tell his son the story of his near death and rebirth. While for Gogol, his father’s belated confession feels like lying, Ashoke’s responses show the complexity of affective display between Asian parents and their American-born children: “It never felt like the right time”, “It happened so long ago. I didn’t want to upset you” (Lahiri, p. 123). The unspoken emotional value of Gogol’s name and Gogol’s inability to recognise it is in Lahiri’s The Namesake strictly connected to the second generation’s inability to understand their parents’ painful dislocation, which is another, this time collective trauma. Indeed, the narrative creates a significant correspondence between Ashoke’s personal trauma, leading him to travel as far as possible from his home country, and Ashima’s immigrant dislocation, shared by her husband as well as a Bengali-American diaspora, and figured as a collective trauma. Like Gogol’s inability to

124

L. TAYEB

prize the emotional value of his name and understand his father’s personal trauma, the children of (Bengali) immigrants are marked by their inability to understand their parents’ collective trauma of deracination and life in a foreign land away from kin and family, coupled, later, with their painful resignation to their children’s Americanisation. For Ashima, the landscape of Cambridge has a chilly nightmarish quality when she first arrives and her “first real glimpse of America” consists of “[l]eafless trees with ice-covered branches. Dog urine and excrement embedded in the snow banks. Not a soul on the street” (Lahiri, p. 30). Later, young wives and mothers like Ashima have to put up with the constant painful longing for beloved family members in India. Everyday acts like reading Indian magazines, rereading, folding and unfolding letters, watching photographs of family members, or going over long preparations for trips back to India, buying gifts or knitting items of clothing, serve to alleviate the excruciating pain of absence and loss (Lahiri, pp. 41–42). As a biographical account of Ashima’s transnational life, Lahiri’s novel is a skillful representation of migrants’ “emotional geographies” and emotional mobility (Christou, 2011, p. 249; Kobayashi et al., 2011, p. 872). Much of the narrative conveys the emotional cost of migration and the way migrants manage their longing to left-behind places and family members. This is what Baldassar calls “[mediating] the emotional experience of the ‘absence’ of loved ones … by the creation of various types and degrees of ‘(co)presence’”: the migrant’s separation from family members engenders two emotional processes, “longing for” and “missing” kin or parental homes/homelands, and the emotional “managing” of absence through a compensatory contriving of forms of “co-presence” (Baldassar, 2008, pp. 248, 250, 252). Ashima Ganguli is the central character around whom the “management of longing” and the “creation of co-presence” revolves; apart from the varied technologies which create “virtual co-presence” like letters, telegrams, phone calls to India and later emails to reach her own children in America, she is also constantly engaged in devising varied ways to create “co-presence by proxy” (Baldassar, pp. 252, 253). “Co-presence by proxy” draws our attention to the high emotional value of objects which provide some kind of connection to loved ones; the tangibility of such objects and the fact that they embody missed kin and counteract forgetting shows the way “inanimate objects actually animate the practices, imagining and emotionality of transnational family life” (Baldassar, p. 258). Ashima’s careful handling of objects like letters,

4

CULTURAL AND EMOTIONAL MOBILITIES: MONICA ALI’S …

125

greeting cards, gifts, magazines and her father’s drawings in them shows that touching those objects is more important than any material value or content they may have and attests to the “embeddedness of individual bodies and minds in sociality and intersubjectivity” and the “need to be co-present to maintain social relationships” (Baldassar, pp. 258, 260). Apart from animated objects, activities like family celebrations, cooking and socialising with other Bengali immigrants also create “co-presence by proxy”. The concoction craven and prepared by Ashima during her first pregnancy is “a humble approximation of the snack sold for pennies on Calcutta sidewalks and on railway platforms throughout India”, and cooking and storing Indian dishes for days beforehand for the forty or so Bengali guests of Gogol’s fourteenth birthday party “is less stressful to her than the task of feeding a handful of American children” (Lahiri, pp. 1, 72). During Gogol’s rice ceremony, the Gangulis’ already extended circle of Bangali friends replace their own family members and play the roles of uncle, grandfather, or grandmother to Gogol, and though Ashima “can’t help wishing her own brother were here to feed him, her own parents to bless him with their hands on his head”, an approximation of the actual kinship-suffused ceremony is created in diaspora (Lahiri, pp. 39–40). Unlike Ali’s Brick Lane which opposes patriarchal husbands to confined wives, The Namesake links husband and wife in their struggle to maintain their Bengali culture and a measure of community life in diaspora. It is true that it largely associates Ashima with the reproductive sphere by representing her as “the bearer of tradition” (Badruddoja, 2006, p. 33; see also Bhalla, 2012, p. 119); it also genders her immigrant experience as a “lifelong pregnancy” in contrast to Ashoke’s rebirth and self-making through the bold and creative act of travelling away from home (Lahiri, p. 49). Yet the novel also intertwines the destinies of Ashoke and Ashima and creates a first-generation empathic bond between them. Ashoke participates in the preservation of Bengali culture and tradition in the domestic sphere and the mobilisation a Bengali diasporic community through active inter-relating and socialisation. Ashima’s primary work of cultural reproduction is also far from being merely passive or repetitive, but encompasses creative adaptation: during the first years of her immigrant life in America, “she begins to pride herself on doing it alone, on devising a routine” (Lahiri, p. 34), and though “motherhood in a foreign land” largely spurs her constant struggle to adapt to a quiet and lonely, nuclear, western model family life, a new specifically Indian– American matrimonial routine is created by appending bits and pieces

126

L. TAYEB

of an Indian notion of family life to her American home and urban landscape. Drawing our attention to Ashima’s middle class status in India and the fact that Bengali housewives enjoyed the privilege of domestic service, Madhurima Chakraborty argues that Ashima’s role of housewife in America involves a transformation “that speaks to the core of her performance of ethnic identity in the US, and affirms Lahiri’s characterisation of migrant acts as seemingly a copy of the authentic home, but actually a set of completely different performances determined by new circumstances” (2014, p. 615). From such perspective, cooking Indian food has a totally different “symbolic” and “semiotic” dimension in the transnational social field: it is not a burdensome domestic task Ashima is obliged to carry out but a means to relate to home through “culinary memories” and “[articulate] one’s sense of ethnic or national identity” (Mannur, 2010, pp. 14, 29). Ashima’s culinary activities and her first born’s rice ceremony also stand as instances of “cultural mobility” and the way culture undergoes adaptive change in transnational fields (Salazar, 2010, p. 53). In addition to the differentiated enactment of ethnic traditions and lifestyles, the first generation’s creative work of connection encompasses “giv[ing] in” and “trad[ing]” Indian for American styles and habits as well as “do[ing] what they can” (Lahiri, p. 65) when it comes to preserving their American-born children’s connection to Indian culture and tradition or counteracting their inevitable Americanisation in the world outside the sphere of family and diaspora. As I argue in the next part, the first and second generations do not stand on oppositional grounds of connection and disconnection, cultural purity and hybridity, but “straddle Bengali and North American cultures in different ways” (Ranasinha, 2016, p. 202). Given the complexity of Ashima’s “emotional acts of diasporic belonging” throughout the novel, critical readings of her character lean towards the conception of a model of transformation that cuts with either assimilative change or hybrid mixture of homogeneous and static polar identities (Christou, 2011, p. 249). For Madhurima Chakraborty, Ashima’s “migrant life” emerges “as a dialogic arena that, though the product of the interaction between home and host, is a distinct space with features unique to the contingencies of migrant life”; her dialogic view thus aims to break with the image of transgressive hybridity and mobility (Chakraborty, 2014, p. 611). Since Ashima belongs to an American-based South Asian diaspora “exemplary of contemporary forms of economic and

4

CULTURAL AND EMOTIONAL MOBILITIES: MONICA ALI’S …

127

cultural globalization and transnationalism”, she develops a cosmopolitan consciousness and mode of being (Schlote, 2006, p. 391). To make sense of Ashima’s transnational life, we must certainly overcome the binarism of home and host land, and pay attention to the constitutive effects of emotions and mobilities on migrants’ cultural articulations of belonging. Culture must be approached as a set of mobile practices and migrants’ articulations of belonging as inherently emotional and performative. Anastasia Christou uses the term “emotionalities” to refer to “discursive, embodied, practiced and narrated experiences of mobilities that reflect belonging and exclusion” (2011, p. 250). A reading of Ashima’s emotional and cultural mobilities or “emotionalities” thus reveals her everyday creation of a third space of differentiated performance of a rather heterogeneous home culture, along with the negotiation and incorporation of elements of a host culture and social sphere in which the boundaries between American and global, national and cosmopolitan outlook, tend to blur. 4.2.2

The Second Generation and the Struggle for Disengagement

Lahiri’s The Namesake depicts the second generation’s struggle to disengage themselves from familial spaces, diasporic communities and ethnic cultures through the three figures of Gogol, Moushumi and Sonia. Gogol’s story takes the form of an unresolved ethnic bildungsroman that occupies a large part of the narrative, beginning with his birth in Cambridge a few months after his newly wed mother arrives in America and ending with an uncertain kind of maturity gained through filial empathy and understanding and a series of unsuccessful love relationships. For Min Hyoung Song, Gogol “is an exemplary representative of the Asian children of post-1965 immigrants of professional background”, a “Child” burdened by both familial and national expectations and struggling “with the not always pleasant feeling of being a marionette whose lifelikeness distracts from the strings pulled by a puppeteer” (2007, pp. 355, 356). In other terms, Gogol’s struggles consist throughout the narrative of pulling himself free of expectations, or “the uneventful life circumscribed by the allegory of reproductive futurism”, his “predicament” being above all “the felt need to go off in a direction of his own choosing” (Hyoung Song, p. 366). Such reading draws our attention to the importance of the class component in Gogol’s experience and elucidates the play of class and ethnicity in Gogol’s American

128

L. TAYEB

upbringing and his adult assimilation of American culture. Tamara Bhalla similarly argues that “class is a structuring theme” in The Namesake, observing the way ethnicity and minority status have a minimum effect on Gogol’s experience with his American girlfriends (2012, p. 110; see also Ranasinha, 2016, p. 199). That Ruth is the child of hippies, and Maxine the child of wealthy upper class cosmopolitan Americans reflects a largely de-ethnicised image of Gogol as the privileged child of middle class professional (Indian) Americans, whose sense of inferiority and embarrassment stems from a too bland and over-restricted social success and economic privilege. Though elements of Gogol’s ethnic background pop up and “draw a line” between him and Maxine, there is no way we can disentangle the lure of whiteness from the lure of upper class culture and privilege in Gogol’s attraction to the Ratliffs (Lahiri, pp. 136–138, 138). Yet for all his privilege and unnoticed ethnic background, Gogol’s love adventures and relationships stem from a deep-felt need to reinvent himself and disconnect from the kind of life and education his parents have handed him down. Wondering about Maxine’s natural connection to her parents’ world, Gogol realises the real and “biggest difference between them”: “There is none of the exasperation he feels with his own parents. No sense of obligation. Unlike his parents, they pressure her to do nothing, and yet she lives faithfully, happily, at their side” (Lahiri, p. 138). Gogol’s inability to connect to his parents’ ethnic and cultural roots is coupled with an immature reluctance to understand their traumatic dislocation and immigrant longing and nostalgia. Disengagement takes the physical form of deserting the parental home and reinventing oneself by inhabiting different domestic spaces and homes. Moving to New Haven in his first semester at College, Gogol soon creates a sense of home and attachment to his room at Yale and later embarks on a series of moves, travels and new settlements designed to take him as far as possible from his parents’ world (Lahiri, p. 108). His choice of a career in architecture is already one way of breaking with the Indian-American privileging of medicine and engineering as prospective professional fields, and through alternative homes and culinary tastes, Gogol reinvents himself away from his parents’ expectations. He not only avoids his father’s alma mater, MIT, but also later settles for a professional career in New York, avoiding as much as possible the places his parents know and the path his father followed (Lahiri, p. 126). With Maxine, Gogol inhabits upper class white American homes for the first time and experiences their “different brand of hospitality”; falling

4

CULTURAL AND EMOTIONAL MOBILITIES: MONICA ALI’S …

129

in love with her, he also falls in love with “the house, and Gerald and Lydia’s manner of living” (Lahiri, pp. 136, 137). During this brief relationship, prior to the sudden death of his father, Gogol is attracted to domestic spaces and eating habits so much different from his parents’, and guiltily enjoys brief moments of utter disconnection from his parents’ existence and his duties’ towards them. Spending his summer holidays with Maxine’s family in the lake house in New Hampshire, he is not only eerily transported by the trip and the different landscape; he also “grows to appreciate being utterly disconnected from the world” (Lahiri, p. 154). Later, hearing a phone ring in the house from the depths of his sleep underscores the nightmarish aspect of connection and the precious freedom that the Ratliff’s “cloistered wilderness” has given him (Lahiri, p. 158). Beginning with his early years at college and his decision to change his name, Gogol’s disengagement from his parents’ world is brought to a prompt end when his father dies of a heart attack, hundreds of miles away from his Boston home and his wife Ashima. It is significant that the loss of his father serves to re-connect Gogol to his family, diasporic community and ethnic culture and finally tips the balance towards filial duty and responsibility. Moushumi Mazoomdar, Gogol’s ethnic wife, illustrates the secondgeneration female immigrant’s need to sever ethnic ties via the radical act of rejecting the very institution of marriage through which Indian women are contained and controlled, as well as arranged marriage as the social mechanism through which the biogenetic and cultural integrity of the diasporic community is maintained. Moushumi stands for the embittered female whose adolescent meekness and bashfulness is exacerbated by constant parental pressure not to date white men. She also stands for the too common second-generation rejection of the endogamous arranged marriage in favour of the glamorous, self-liberating exogamous love marriage. Caught between the flippancy of western love relationships and the stifling prospect of an arranged ethnic marriage, Moushumi settles for an illusory love marriage to Graham, her American fiancé, which, however, disastrously fails to be contracted when she discovers his deprecatory and racist views of her own culture and community. The panicky aspect of any connection to one’s ethnic origins or possibility of conforming to parental expectations is suggested by Moushumi’s twin academic and sexual rebellions: immersing herself in the French language and culture in addition to embracing a Parisian style cosmopolitanism provide her with the possibility of freeing herself of the oppressive colonial

130

L. TAYEB

dualism which structures her existence and constricts her into a gendered faithfulness to ethnic culture and tradition. Her sexual rebellion does not simply indicate rejection of her community’s moral codes; it is also indicative of a neurotic approach to love, or a severe lack of self-confidence vis-à-vis emotional engagement with white men. While Paris fosters her sexual transformation, it is the very act of throwing herself into transient sexual relations with multi-national men that “intoxicated her more than any of the men had” (Lahiri, p. 215). It is worth noting that Gogol’s and Moushumi’s acquiescence to an arranged marriage after their aborted attempts to disengage themselves from parental traditions stands again for the creative repetition and imitation that characterises diasporic life. Not only does arranged marriage evolve into “assisted marriage” (Badruddoja, 2006, p. 39) and is “recast as choice”; the narrative of Gogol and Moushumi’s brief romance and marriage reconciles the arranged marriage practice to “the neo-liberal ideals that give shape to [their] transnational community” (Aguiar, 2013, pp. 196, 197). Despite their ethnic closeness, which gives their love relationship an illicit incestuous aspect in the eyes of white Americans (Lahiri, pp. 203–204), they momentarily succeed in turning a “fulfillment of an [ethnic] expectation” into a freely chosen and emotionally fulfilling relation (Hyoung Song, 2007, p. 359). Their marriage also stands as an instance of the way the second generation “[capture] the delicate balance between cultural prerogatives and personal agency” (Field, 2004, p. 168). Through Moushumi’s unfaithfulness followed by divorce, Lahiri shows the way the second generation adapt ethnic traditions to the liberal individualist values of America, and questions at the same time the arranged marriage discourse for its inadequacy as a solution to the malaise of the second generation. At the end of the novel, Ashima not only regrets bringing Moushumi into Gogol’s life; she also finds the individualist act of divorce an adequate solution to her son’s mishap as parental “pressure” “to accept, to adjust, to settle for something less than their ideal of happiness … has given way … to American common sense” (Lahiri, p. 276). In contrast to Gogol and Moushumi, Sonia may be taken to illustrate the successful second generation’s straddling of two worlds, and their gradual forging of new post-ethnic kinship ties to America and to their countries of origin. In the private sphere of the family, mutual understanding grows to link Sonia to her mother, and help both adapt their relationship to the demands of cosmopolitan existence. If Moushumi is

4

CULTURAL AND EMOTIONAL MOBILITIES: MONICA ALI’S …

131

the female ethnic counterpart of Gogol, his little sister Sonia is the largely non-conflictual type of child who negotiates change within the sphere of parental interrelating. She is, of course, equally estranged from her parents’ culture: she prefers her secluded American life to the social bustle of both diaspora and the Indian homeland, and American culinary, sartorial and hair styles to Indian food and traditional haircut and dress; after an eight-month stay in India, Gogol and Sonia are happy to slip back into their American lives and put the long stay “behind them, quickly shed, quickly forgotten, like clothes worn for a special occasion, or for a season that has passed, suddenly cumbersome, irrelevant to their lives (Lahiri, pp. 87–88). During her teen years, she lives her little rebellions and pressures her mother into accepting her American style high school life: “they argue violently about such things, Ashima crying, Sonia slamming doors” (Lahiri, 107). But Sonia’s little un-Indian changes like cutting her hair short, cutting her jeans or later, secretly dating boys and choosing a college education in California, do not prevent her from staying by her parents and assuming filial responsibility. Gogol’s extremely tense relationship to his parents and his claustrophobic need to get away from their world contrast to Sonia’s companionate relationship to her mother: on occasions, she goes to India with her mother to attend weddings in the family, but she also talks her mother into accepting Gogol’s relationship to Maxine, and she is the one her mother is able to reach when Ashoke dies of a heart attack in Cleveland (Lahiri, pp. 120, 166, 171). Since parents appear to have equally changed, learning the futility of arguing with their children or expecting them to stay close to them and to their native culture, transformation consists of “mutual intergenerational accommodation” (Ranasinha, 2016, p. 201). Sonia’s engagement and marriage differentiate her from both Gogol’s and Moushumi’s failures to strike a balance between western love relationships and the much abhorred Indian arranged marriage. Towards the end of the narrative, she is engaged to Ben, “half-Jewish, half-Chinese” American “raised in Newton close to where Gogol and Sonia grew up” (Lahiri, p. 270). Their different ethnic backgrounds do not prevent them from being close: what unites them is a new complex second-generation space and identity, and in their union a further complexity is introduced by ethnic Americans this time marrying each other, compounding their already complex bi-ethnic and bi-national heritage. For Robert Field, “Lahiri’s fiction honors the complexity of identity inherent in the second generation of immigrant Americans” but in projecting a more complex

132

L. TAYEB

third-generation space, her work “points to the transience of ‘ethnic American’ in favor of a transnational, post-ethnic global ethos” (2004, pp. 167, 174). At the end of the novel, Gogol greets a mature Sonia embarking on a new married life with Ben, and “he can easily imagine her, a few years from now, with two children in the back seat” (Lahiri, p. 284). Planning her daughter’s marriage in Calcutta during the same time of the year she and Ashoke married, Ashima is not simply acquiescing to Sonia’s and Ben’s union; she has equally internalised the American ideal of individual happiness knowing that Ben will bring happiness to her daughter “in a way Moushumi had never brought it to her son” (Lahiri, p. 276). It is also significant that Sonia’s matrimonial relationship to Ben, unlike Gogol’s relationships, is associated with reproduction, kinship and social responsibility, and so it serves to link her to a cultural identity, albeit a complex or transnational one. 4.2.3

“Pilgrims” or “Vagabonds”? Transcending the Dualism of Diaspora

If Sonia settles to a marriage relationship that projects the new “postethnic” space that will be occupied by the third generation, Gogol’s aborted love relationships followed by his failed ethnic marriage give him none of the fulfillment of relatedness and continuity of kinship. His homecoming in the last chapter equally evokes “the futility of [his] travels” and makes him appear “somehow unfulfilled as a person, out of place, dislocated, directionless” (Hyoung Song, 2007, p. 366). Nevertheless, Gogol’s dislocation and travels are not a simple reflection of the dualism of diaspora; they are also largely associated with a new rootless cosmopolitan existence, and underscore the second generation’s forward leap from a “traditional” to a “cosmopolitan modernity” (Badruddoja, 2006, p. 44). For Natalie Friedman, Lahiri’s The Namesake breaks with the traditional immigrant narrative of exile or assimilation and “recasts” Indian–American immigrants “as cosmopolites, members of a shifting network of global travelers whose national allegiances are flexible”. Through her portrayal of a different cast of characters, Lahiri thus “resists the desire to attach the label hybrid” to them in favor of “tourist” and “wanderer” which suggest the twin processes of “Americanization and cosmopolitanism” (Friedman, 2008, pp. 112, 118, 119). To begin with, Lahiri’s The Namesake builds a significant contrast between father and son: Ashoke chooses a life of travel in the wake of a

4

CULTURAL AND EMOTIONAL MOBILITIES: MONICA ALI’S …

133

traumatic train accident that leaves him paralysed for over a year (Lahiri, p. 20), and his individualist choice is liberating in spite of the fact that it “carries the trace of this trauma” (Hyoung Song, 2007, p. 363); In contrast, Gogol’s personal trauma, a “mismatched name” that he has helplessly sought to “correct”, pushes him on a series of travels away from his roots in Massachusetts to free himself of his parents’ hidebound diasporic mode of life and “reinvent himself” (Lahiri, p. 287). Gogol is unable to break free or choose a direction of his own making and he keeps returning home. In one way, Gogol’s “banal” cycles of travel and return show his inability “to travel all that far from the familiar” and serve as a counterpoint to his parents’ “deracination and dislocation”; thus “in a sense, Lahiri consigns this child of immigrants to the bin of triviality … [and] elevates the immigrant who deserves respect and admiration not only for making the voyage to America but also for struggling to maintain ties to a faraway homeland” (Friedman, 2008, pp. 123, 124). Indeed, Gogol does gain understanding and empathy with his parents’ dislocation at the end of the narrative and feel the pettiness of his own travels and trauma: Gogol knows now that his parents had lived their lives in America in spite of what was missing with a stamina he fears he does not possess himself. He had spent years maintaining distance from his origins; his parents, in bridging that distance as best they could. And yet, for all his aloofness towards his family in the past, his years at college and then in New York, he has always hovered close to this quiet, ordinary town. … for most of his adult life he has never been more than a four-hour train ride away. And there was nothing, apart from his family, to draw him home, to make this train journey, again and again. (Lahiri, pp. 281–282)

Gogol also realises the self-deceiving aspect of his maintained distance from home and family and prizes the value of his name after the loss of both his parents (the one through death, the other through a reverse deracination) and his family home on Pemberton Road. With the loss of the intimate family space that substantiates his real existence as Gogol, he is left with an unreal invented name, utterly homeless and orphaned. Gogol’s reading of “The Overcoat” indicates both newfound intergenerational understanding and a tragic holding on to a belated sense of roots and family that is painfully slipping away from his hands.

134

L. TAYEB

In a way the seriousness of the first generation’s travel may be linked to modern mobility, and what Zygmunt Bauman calls “the [modern] figure of the pilgrim” whose movement is both purposeful and “identitybuilding” (1996, pp. 21, 22). Divested of its religious, saintly significance, modern pilgrimage is defined as: what one does of necessity, to avoid being lost in a desert, to invest the walking with a purpose while wandering the land with no destination. Being a pilgrim one can do more than walk—one can walk to. One can look back at the footprints left in the sand and see them as a road. One can reflect on the road past and see it as a progress towards, an advance, a coming closer to; one can make a distinction between ‘behind’ and ‘ahead’, and plot the ‘road ahead’ as a succession of footprints yet to pockmark the land without features. Destination, the set purpose of life’s pilgrimage, gives form to the formless, makes a whole out of the fragmentary, lends continuity to the episodic. (Bauman, pp. 21–22)

One way in which Ashoke invests his intrepid act of immigration with meaning is to associate mobility to the farthest reaches of the earth with life, freedom and self-fulfillment: driving his family to Cape Cod and walking with his son to the very tip of remaining land, Ashoke’s selfconfident and purposeful march ahead is contrasted to the uncertainty of Gogol, who will henceforth guard the memory of this binding journey and his father’s words, “Remember that you and I made this journey, that we went together to a place where there was nowhere left to go” (Lahiri, 185, 187). Ashoke’s pre-marital trauma not only invests his travels with a sense of mission and purpose; it also later consecrates his family and children to such an extent that his first-born child becomes a symbol of his rebirth and the now sacred continuity of life. The association of mobility and reproduction in a foreign land with life itself makes Ashoke’s act of immigration to America a modern pilgrimage with a pinch of the holy in it. In contrast, Gogol’s travels are futile, and have no pre-set purpose or destination apart from the urgent need to discard a loathed diasporic community and culture. The second generation’s mobility may be placed in the context of late twentieth-century global consumer modernity. For Zygmunt Bauman, the modern figure of the pilgrim disappears and gives way to varied successors like the “postmodern vagabond”, distinguished from early modern vagabondage by reversal of the ratios of mobility and settlement:

4

CULTURAL AND EMOTIONAL MOBILITIES: MONICA ALI’S …

135

The early modern vagabond wandered through the settled places; he was a vagabond because in no place could he be settled as the other people had been. The settled were many, the vagabonds few. Postmodernity reversed the ratios. Now there are few ‘settled’ places left… . Now the vagabond is a vagabond not because of the reluctance or difficulty of settling down, but because of the scarcity of settled places. Now the odds are that the people he meets in his travels are other vagabonds—vagabonds today or vagabonds tomorrow. The world is catching up with the vagabond, and catching up fast, the world is re-tailoring itself to the measure of the vagabond. (Bauman, 1996, pp. 28–29)

The second generation’s travels reveal an inability to settle down or invest mobility with meaning, and the second-generation immigrant turns into a “cosmopolite” for whom Americanisation is far from being “the endpoint of travel” and the “voyage is no longer unidirectional, or even bi-directional, but is continuous and global”; America also appears as a space of wandering instead of settlement, and Gogol’s love relationships come to illustrate the fluidity of both social space and relationships (Friedman, 2008, pp. 114–116). If Gogol’s dilemma is his inability to model himself on the purposeful mobility of his father, the old Ashima is also someone who can no longer enjoy the dualism of home and exile marking her earlier mobility: while the young Ashima suffers the pains of dislocation and permanent longing, the ageing mother and widow plans to divide her life between her brother’s family in Calcutta and her children and Bengali friends in Northeast America, thus living up to her name, “without borders, without a home of her own, a resident everywhere and nowhere” (Lahiri, pp. 275–276). Ashima develops from a dislocated immigrant housewife longing to reach home by letters or phone calls or struggling to recreate it through an actively constructed Bengali-American diaspora, to “a true cosmopolitan traveler” and citizen of the world without a home of her own in any one place or community (Friedman, 2008, p. 123). Christiane Schlote links Ashima’s cosmopolitanism to her social class and the rather “advantageous economic circumstances” of her transnational mobility and status; transportation and telecommunication technologies also “function as ubiquitous motifs of transnationalism’s everyday material realities” (Schlote, 2006, pp. 397, 399). In contrast to Ali’s Brick Lane, in which planes loom at the beginning and the end of the novel as the means through which travel and return are a lifetime destiny or decisive turning-point in the life of an immigrant family, Lahiri’s The Namesake

136

L. TAYEB

presents air travel between a home and host destination as a frequent affordable act which elevates the Gangulis to the level of global tourists and cosmopolites. Towards the end of the novel, Ashima is sadly “throw[ing] away bit by bit” the domestic and diasporic world she has constructed in America (Lahiri, p. 280), and is embarking on a new cosmopolitan mode of life in which infrequent and frightening overseas phone calls and lost mail will be replaced by the banal and instant communication enabled by the new information technologies. Planning to divide her future years between India and America (spending six months in her brother’s home in Calcutta and six months with her children in America), she also learns to send and receive emails and belatedly, almost reluctantly, reap the benefits of internet communication. Home-made food lovingly cooked for parties in which dozens of Bengali friends are invited will also have to be replaced by take-away food, “available to her from restaurants, brought up to the flat by servants, bearing a taste that after all these years she has still not quite managed, to her entire satisfaction, to replicate” (Lahiri, pp. 276–277). Thanks to the globalisation of cuisine and culinary taste, Ashima’s culinary nostalgia will henceforth fade as a global consumer culture in which native food is now commoditised and made available to both diasporic communities and cosmopolitan “gourmet tasters … in the greenhouse of global culture” is spreading across both America and the world (Werbner, 1997, p. 12). For Ashima, the loss of her husband is compounded by the loss of a neat transnational existence in which homesickness and longing as well as the creative work of maintaining ties to home, have been possible. Now the boundaries separating home and diaspora, Indian and American cultures have become surmountable and inconsequential in the emerging global world. My study of cultural and emotional mobilities in twenty-first-century narratives of life in diaspora has attempted to construct sociological and ethnographic knowledge by annexing two highly complex and immaterial components of transnational family life, culture and emotion, and examining the way they get entwined with the mobile practices of individuals, families and larger groups and their enactment of multiple acts of belonging. To reiterate a point I discussed in the introduction, both Ali’s Brick Lane and Lahiri’s The Namesake yield valuable knowledge of social experience thanks to their attention to the characters’ growth over lifecourses or their “longitudinal models of subject development” (Aguiar et al., 2019, p. 10). With respect to the transnational family

4

CULTURAL AND EMOTIONAL MOBILITIES: MONICA ALI’S …

137

and the gender and inter-generational relations impacting it, “memories and narratives” are unique in their capacity to yield knowledge and understanding of “the gendered implications of transnationalism” (Chamberlain & Leydesdorff, 2004, p. 229). As for the multiple layers of transnational family experience, “personal life records” are the only way to access “emotions and the complex question of belonging” (Skrbiš, 2008, p. 234). Departing from such assumption that literature has a unique capacity to capture an important “affective dimension” in experiences of (im)mobility (Lagji, 2019), I attempted throughout this chapter to study the affect-ridden introspective journeys of Ali’s and Lahiri’s novels, their infusing of the private uneventful existence with the macro historical sense, and their narrative “distillation” of collective experiences (Crawshaw & Fowler, 2008, p. 458) aiming thereby to shed light on the inseparability of the physical mobilities of families and the emotions and cultural imaginaries involved in such mobility.

References Aguiar, M. (2013). Arranged marriage: Cultural regeneration in transnational South Asian popular culture. Cultural Critique, 84, 181–214. https://www. jstor.org/stable/10.5749/culturalcritique.84.2013.0181. Accessed 18 Nov 2018. Aguiar, M. (2018). Arranging marriage: Conjugal agency in the South Asian diaspora. University of Minnesota Press. Aguiar, M., Mathieson, C., & Pearce, L. (Eds.). (2019). Mobilities, literature, culture. Palgrave Macmillan. Ahmed, R. (2010). Brick Lane: A materialist reading of the novel and its reception. Race and Class, 52(2), 25–42. https://doi.org/10.1177/030639681 0376335. Ali, M. (2003). Brick Lane. Black Swan. Badruddoja, R. (2006). Resisting the white polea feminist ethnographic study: Second generation South Asian-American women, US racialization projects, and the arranged marriage. International Journal of Sociology of the Family, 32(1), 19–60. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23028785. Accessed 18 Nov 2018. Baldassar, L. (2008). Missing kin and longing to be together: Emotions and the construction of co-presence in transnational relationships. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 29(3), 247–266. https://doi.org/10.1080/072568608021 69196. Bauman, Z. (1996). From pilgrim to tourist: Or a short history of identity. In S. Hall & P. Du Gay (Eds.), Questions of cultural dentity (pp. 18–36). Sage.

138

L. TAYEB

Bentley, N. (2008). Contemporary British fiction. Edinburgh University Press. Bhalla, T. (2012). Being (and feeling) Gogol: Reading and recognition in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake. Melus, 37 (1), 105–129. http://www.jstor. org/stable/41440715. Accessed 18 Nov 2018. Bissel, D. (2007). Animating suspension: Waiting for mobilities. Mobilities, 2(2), 277–298. https://doi.org/10.1080/17450100701381581. Boccagni, P., & Baldassar, L. (2015). Emotions on the move: Mapping the emergent field of emotion and migration. Emotion, Space and Society, 1–8. https:// doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2015.06.009. Chakravorty, M. (2012). Brick Lane blockades: The bioculturalism of migrant domesticity. Modern Fiction Studies, 58(3), 503–528. http://www.jstor.org/ stable/26292918. Accessed 18 Nov 2018. Chakraborty, M. (2014). Adaptation and the shifting allegiances of the Indian diaspora: Jhumpa Lahiri’s and Mira Nair’s ‘The Namesakes’. Literature/Film Quarterly, 42(4), 609–621. http://www.jstor.org/stable/437 98999. Accessed 18 Nov 2018. Chamberlain, M., & Leydesdorff, S. (2004). Transnational families: Memories and narratives. Global Networks, 4(3), 227–241. https://doi.org/10.1111/j. 1471-0374.2004.00090.x. Christou, A. (2011). Narrating lives in (e)motion: Embodiment, belongingness and displacement in diasporic spaces of home and return. Emotion, Space and Society, 4, 249–257. https://doi.org/10.1016/jemospa.2011.06.007. Chung, A. Y. (2016). Saving face: The emotional costs of the Asian immigrant family myth. Rutgers University Press. Cohen, R. (2008). Global diasporas: An introduction. Routledge. Conlon, D. (2011). Waiting: Feminist perspectives on the spacings/timings of migrant (im)mobility. Gender, Place, and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, 18(3), 353–360. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2011. 566320. Conradson, D., & McKay, D. (2007). Translocal subjectivities: Mobility, connection, emotion. Mobilities, 2(2), 167–174. https://doi.org/10.1080/174501 007013811524. Cormack, A. (2006). Migration and the politics of narrative form: Realism and the postcolonial subject in Brick Lane. Contemporary Literature, 47 (4), 695– 721. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4489184. Accessed 18 Nov 2018. Crawshaw, R., & Fowler, C. (2008). Articulation, imagined space and virtual mobility in literary narratives of migration. Mobilities, 3(3), 455–469. https:// doi.org/10.1080/17450100802376795. Dawson, A. (2009). The people you don’t see: Representing informal labour in fortress Europe. A Review of International English Literature, 40(1), 125– 141.

4

CULTURAL AND EMOTIONAL MOBILITIES: MONICA ALI’S …

139

Duff, K. (2014). Contemporary British literature and urban space: After Thatcher. Palgrave Macmillan. Elliott, A., & Urry, J. (2010). Mobile lives. Routledge. Faist, T. (2013). The mobility turn: A new paradigm for the social sciences? Ethnic and Racial Studies, 36(11), 1637–1646. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 01419870.2013.812229. Field, R. E. (2004). Writing the second generation: Negotiating cultural borderlands in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake. South Asian Review, 25(2), 165–177. https://doi.org/10.1080/02759527.2004. 11932352. Friedman, N. (2008). From hybrids to tourists: Children of immigrants in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 50(1), 111–128. https://doi.org/10.3200/crit.50.1.111-128. Gedalof, I. (2009). Birth, belonging and migrant mothers: Narratives of reproduction in feminist migration studies. Feminist Review, 93, 81–100. http:// www.jstor.org/stable/40664055. Accessed 12 June 2014. Glick Schiller, N., Basch, L., & Blanc-Szanton, C. (1992). Transnationalism: A new analytic framework for understanding migration. Annals of the New York Academy of Science, 645(1), 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-6632. 1992.tb33484.x. Greiner, C., & Sakdapolrak, P. (2013). Translocality: Concepts, applications, and emerging research perspectives. Geography Compass, 7 (5), 373–384. https:// doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12048. Gunning, D. (2010). Race and antiracism in Black British and British Asian literature. Liverpool University Press. Gunning, D. (2012). Ethnicity, authenticity and empathy in the realist novel and its alternatives. Contemporary Literature, 53(4), 779–813. http://www.jstor. org/stable/41819536. Accessed 18 Nov 2018. Hiddleston, J. (2005). Shapes and shadows: (Un)veiling the immigrant in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 40(1), 57–72. https://doi.org/10.1177/0021989405050665. Hyoung Song, M. (2007). The children of 1965: Allegory, postmodernism and Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake. Twentieth Century Literature, 53(3), 345– 370. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20479817. Accessed 18 Nov 2018. Jamieson, L. (1999). Intimacy transformed? A critical look at the ‘pure relationship’. Sociology, 33(3), 477–494. http://www.jstor.org/stable/42857958. Accessed 18 Nov 2018. Joshi, R. (2004). Nations and alienations: Diaspora in recent Indian fiction. India International Centre Quarterly, 31(1), 83–93. http://www.jstor.org/stable/ 23005914. Accessed 18 Nov 2018.

140

L. TAYEB

King, R., & Christou, A. (2011). Of counter-diaspora and reverse transnationalism: Return mobilities to and from the ancestral homeland. Mobilities, 6(4), 451–466. https://doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2011.603941. Kobayashi, A., Preston, V., & Murnaghan, A. (2011). Place, affect, and transnationalism through the voices of Hong King immigrants to Canada. Social and Cultural Geography, 12(8), 871–888. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365. 2011.624191. Kofman, E. (1999). Female ‘birds of passage’ a decade later: Gender and immigration in the European Union. The International Migration Review, 33(2), 269–299. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2547698. Accessed 11 Dec 2018. Kureishi, H. (1990). The Buddha of Suburbia. Faber & Faber. Lagji, A. (2019). Waiting in motion: mapping postcolonial fiction, postcolonial mobilities, and migration through Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West. Mobilities, 14(2), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2018.1533684. Lahiri, J. (2003). The Namesake. Fourth Estate. Levitt, P., & Glick Schiller, N. (2004). Conceptualizing simultaneity: A transnational social field perspective on society. International Migration Review, (38)3, 1002–1039. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27645424. Accessed 14 June 2014. Levitt, P., & Jaworsky, B. N. (2007). Transnational migration studies: Past developments and future trends. Annual Review of Sociology, 33, 129–156. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.soc.33.040406.131816. Levitt, P., Lucken, K., & Barnett, M. (2011). Beyond home and return: Negotiating religious identity across time and space through the prism of the American experience. Mobilities, 6(4), 467–482. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 17450101.2011.603942. Mannur, A. (2010). Culinary fictions: Food in South Asian diasporic culture. Temple University Press. Marx, J. (2006). The feminization of globalization. Cultural Critique, 63, 1–32. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4489245. Accessed 18 Nov 2018. Mavrommatis, G. (2015). South Asian tales: Ethnic entrepreneurs and narratives of spatialized transnational identities emerging in an East London (UK) inner-city area. Diaspora Studies, 8(2), 89–103. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 09739572.2015.1029710. Merriman, P., & Pearce, L. (2017). Mobility and the humanities. Mobilities, 12(4), 493–508. https://doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2017.1330853. Murray, L. & Vincent, S. (2014). Constructing the mobile city: Gendered mobilities in London fiction. In L. Murray & S. Upstone (Eds.), Researching and representing mobilities: Transdisciplinary encounters (pp. 56–77). Palgrave Macmillan.

4

CULTURAL AND EMOTIONAL MOBILITIES: MONICA ALI’S …

141

Mustafa, S. (2009). Defending the faith: Islam in post-9/11 anglophone fiction. Religion and Literature, 41(2), 281–88. http://www.jstor.org/stable/256 76913. Accessed 18 Nov 2018. Perfect, M. (2008). The multicultural bildungsroman: Stereotypes in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 43(3), 109–120. https://doi.org/10.1177/0021989408095241. Ranasinha, R. (2016). Contemporary diasporic South Asian women’s fiction: Gender, narration and globalisation. Palgrave Macmillan. Ryan, L. (2008). Navigating the emotional terrain of families ‘here’ and ‘there’: Women, migration and the management of emotions. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 29(3), 299–313. https://doi.org/10.1080/07256860802169238. Salazar, N. B. (2010). Towards an anthropology of cultural mobilities. Crossings: Journal of Migration and Culture, 1, 53–68. https://doi.org/10.1386/cjmc. 1.53_1. Schlote, C. (2006). Interpreters of transnationalism: South Asian American women writers. American Studies, 51(3), 387–409. http://www.jstor.org/ stable/41158239. Accessed 18 Nov 2018. Sheller, M., & Urry, J. (2006). The new mobilities paradigm. Environment and Planning A, 38, 207–226. https://doi.org/10.1068/a37268. Skrbiš, Z. (2008). Transnational families: Theorising migration, emotions and belonging. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 29(3), 231–246. https://doi. org/10.1080/07256860802169188. Smith, Z. (2000). White Teeth. Penguin Books. Upstone, S. (2010). British-Asian fiction: Twenty-first century voices. Manchester University Press. Vertovec, S. (2001). Transnationalism and identity. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 27 (4), 573–582. https://doi.org/10.1080/136918301 20090386. Werbner, P. (1997). Introduction: The dialectics of cultural hybridity. In P. Werbner & T. Modood (Eds.), Debating cultural hybridity: Multicultural identities and the politics of anti-racism (pp. 1–26). Zed Books. Ziegler, G. (2007). East of the city: ‘Brick Lane’, capitalism and the global metropolis. Race/Ethnicity: Multidisciplinary Global Contexts, 1(1), 145–167. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25594979. Accessed 18 Nov 2018.

CHAPTER 5

Planetary Mobilities: Khaled Hosseini’s and Nadia Hashimi’s Forced Mobilities and Geographies of Trauma

One of the features of our contemporary world is the proliferation of forced mobilities and the constant increase in the number of war refugees, asylum seekers and stateless people. Having its roots in the early twentieth-century inter-war period, refugeeism and statelessness is in today’s world a major political, ethical and humanitarian issue. From a sociological, new mobilities perspective, the phenomenon of forced mobility calls our attention to differences and hierarchies of trans-border movement and the set of restrictions that can enable the mobility of ones while condemning others to immobility. In this chapter, I approach Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner (2003) and And the Mountains Echoed (2013) and Nadia Hashimi’s When the Moon Is Low (2015) as literary narratives of forced cross-border mobilities that directly impact, or are entangled with kinship and family relations. I also maintain that the multiple personal and family mobilities depicted in the narratives unfold in a differently conceived world space and enact different order relationalities. Reading such mobilities and relationalities as planetary rather than global or transnational, I argue that the novelists seek to overcome global maps and establish a planetary perspective on twenty-first-century connectivities (Moraru, 2015b, pp. 23–24).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Tayeb, Kinship in the Age of Mobility and Technology, Palgrave Studies in Mediating Kinship, Representation, and Difference, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69889-8_5

143

144

L. TAYEB

Entwining the twentieth century history of Afghanistan with the personal lives of central characters, the novels show how a homeland and its children get tragically entangled with the “world”. In The Kite Runner, an ethnically divided and socially unjust Afghanistan is thrown into chaos by the compounded forces of global geopolitical players (the Soviet Union and the United States of America) and its own internal factions: an unjust secular monarchical system and its opposing political forces, and the satanic forces of prejudice, ignorance and religious fanaticism embodied at first by the mullahs and later by the Talibans. A beloved homeland and nation, the space of childhood insouciance and petty squabbles, Afghanistan appears through Amir’s private journey as a (national) location that is deeply intermeshed with the world, culturally as well as politically, now as well as in history. Literary images of Kabul, the country’s modernised urban centre, foreground the huge disparities of class, gender and ethnic status prior to the Russian invasion and the rise of the Talibans to political power. Previously contained and rationalised, the forces of despotism and injustice now rule supreme, which provides the background to the characters’ private journeys across borders in search for lost kin and (Afghan) identity. Kinship imagery in the three novels is built on the figure of the victimised, weak mother/land leaving its vulnerable, orphaned children to roam the world in search of relation and shelter, kinship and identity. In contrast (as is the case of Baba in The Kite Runner) beloved and unduly worshipped father images later reveal a fake righteousness and benevolence which stands for the nation-state’s betrayal of its children. The novels also show the way personal events have a direct relation to large-scale political events, and the way “the intimate” goes in “conjunction [with] … the political”; in other terms, the small-scale level of family and local community is affected by events at the national and global levels, which “bring[s] into being new modes of action” and new forms of human(itarian) interrelating (Carsten, 2007, p. 4). Three scales of kinship dynamics are thus intertwined in the novels: “biogenetic”, national and planetary (inter-human) kinship. While an already conflicted and treacherous notion of “biogenetic” kinship provides the brittle foundation for a utopian national family, an image of the dispersed (“biogenetic” and national) family allows an alternative space to emerge, the “nethospherical” field of human kinship (Moraru, 2015b, pp. 36–37). In what follows, I study Khaled Hosseini’s 2003 debut novel, The Kite Runner, and his more recent And The Mountains Echoed (2013) as literary works that

5

PLANETARY MOBILITIES: KHALED HOSSEINI’S AND NADIA HASHIMI’S …

145

take Afghanistan’s twentieth century traumatic history as a stepping stone towards a “planetarily framed practice of culture” and kinship, and “planetary relationality” as a way to survival and healing (Moraru, 2015b, pp. 8, 23). In Nadia Hashimi’s When the Moon Is Low (2015), the reversed image of a centrifugal search for lost kin (moving externally from national to planetary space) works again to take “biogenetic” kinship from the sphere of national family to that of human family, while examining the twin “life and death [forces of] relation” operating in both (Moraru, 2015b, p. 39). Since kinship relations now crisscross a planetary field, navigation can be used as a metaphor for the authors’ artistic manoeuvres and for virtual vision in the information age: on one hand the artistic need to enfold the “world”, and on the other, the new human consciousness of, and access to the planetary field enabled by the new information technologies, since the mid-1990s internet revolution depicted in the novels creates a new sense of planetary togetherness and enhances human relationality across national boundaries. On the whole, a different mode of relationality is woven by the novels’ aesthetics, which foregrounds the planetary space of human connectedness as opposed to the “megastructure”, the “controlled and controlling system” of “global totality” (Moraru, 2015b, p. 29).

5.1 “Peering” into the Gates of “My Father’s House”: Home, Kinship and Memory in Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner In Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, the entwined themes of memory and kinship cannot be dissociated from the domestic, microcosmic sphere of the house and the macrocosmic sphere of home city and homeland, namely Kabul and Afghanistan. These spaces are also re-imagined and represented from the perspective of the returned Afghan-American who now perceives Afghanistan from the outside and places its history in the larger context of twentieth-century geopolitical history. Hosseini’s The Kite Runner interweaves memory, place and kinship: the microcosmic sphere of the house and personal “biogenetic” kinship allegorise the macrocosmic sphere of homeland and national kinship; the gendered images of maternal homeland and paternal state further set the sphere of kinship, nourishment and life from the masculinised sphere of power, division and death; the story of Amir’s redemptive journey into his own

146

L. TAYEB

traumatic past and uncanny home/land to reclaim his lost kin, Sohrab, correlates the personal space of his father’s house and the collective space of his home city, Kabul, which are not only the repository of memory and safeguard of kinship ties but also spaces of betrayal and loss. Obligation to move from escapist forgetting to memory takes the form of a return journey from California to Afghanistan as well as the projection of two fictional spaces, the speciously idyllic Afghanistan of Amir’s childhood and a present hellish Afghanistan. 5.1.1

Place, Kinship and Memory

Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner was written and published during a period of time when pictures of war-devastated Afghanistan appeared daily on every international news channel. The correspondence between a real national location that inspired worldwide feelings of horror, indignation, pity and humanitarian concern, and the fictional Afghanistan of Hosseini is a foremost question, especially that Afghanistan is for the rest of the world a mere image that is concocted by mass media and world news agencies. Reading The Kite Runner, we are pushed to ask whether Hosseini’s Afghanistan is “real”, or more “real” than other photographic or textual images of Afghanistan transmitted in the world media. As a writer of an early twentieth century highly mediatised place, Khaled Hosseini is certainly driven by the literary motivation to paint an alternative, if not more “real” image of Afghanistan. The question of (fictional) place and how close to “real” place is a central critical issue in The Kite Runner, yet in what follows I will not assess the degree to which Afghanistan is indeed “real” in the novel; such measuring is as much fruitless as futile especially if we agree with Henry Lefebvre’s conception of produced space: Lefebvre considers that “natural” or “physical” space is inaccessible and that space is available to our consciousness only as a social production in which hegemonic representations and personal experiences simultaneously feed and counteract each other. In the sphere of narrative fiction, Bertrand Westphal maintains that fictional places are always “part of” real places insofar as they “reproduce … an experience of the real”, which is never available in any final concrete form but “only exists in the modes of this experience” (Lefebvre, 1991, pp. 30–33; Westphal, 2011, pp. 85–86). Any putatively “real” place is inseparable of timebound and changing individual experiences of that place, and places are therefore constantly (re)produced by a dynamic interplay of hegemonic and underground representations and spatial practices (Lefebvre, p. 33). From such

5

PLANETARY MOBILITIES: KHALED HOSSEINI’S AND NADIA HASHIMI’S …

147

perspective, Khaled Hosseini manages to convey an “experience” and a “sense” of Afghanistan at a particular time by suffusing place with kinship and making active remembering the device though which it is to an extent regained. For Amir, the privileged Pashtun child of a rich merchant of Persian tapestries, “the face of Afghanistan is that of a boy with a thin-boned frame, a shaved head and low-set ears, a boy with a Chinese doll face perpetually lit by a harelipped smile” (Hosseini, 2003, p. 24). And if Afghanistan is Hassan and the twelve years of secret brotherhood and unacknowledged friendship Amir spends in the company of Hassan, then Amir appears in the guise of imposter or illegitimate child of Afghanistan. By creating a fictional Afghanistan that is identified through the face of Hassan, Amir’s Hazara servant and illegitimate half-brother and friend, Hosseini symbolically projects Amir’s problematic kinship to Afghanistan through his childhood relationship to Hassan: Amir’s need to prove his Afghan identity contrasts to Hassan’s natural belonging and even quintessential embodiment of Afghanistan, and is symbolically projected in his secret struggle over filiation, Amir’s need to prove that he is his father’s true son. Such struggle ends disastrously in a double personal and political betrayal, and intertwined personal and national catastrophes, Hassan’s betrayal by Amir and Afghanistan’s invasion by Russian forces. Fleeing the country to America amounts to an abdication of political responsibility while psychologically it enables Amir to “bury” the monster of the past, or repress his traumatic guilt through forgetting (Hosseini, 2003, p. 1). Only by exorcising the ghost of the past and facing his guilt can Amir make personal and political amends and redeem himself. In this overall thematic mapping of Hosseini’s novel, how is place remembered and suffused with kinship, and what insights does the adjoining of “real” “biogenetic” and “fictive” national kinship give the reader into the nature of blood ties and ties to place in our contemporary interconnected world? Amir’s childhood memories of Afghanistan are centred on the private sphere of Baba’s house and the public sphere of the northern Kabul neighbourhood in which the house is situated, Wazir Akbar Khan district (Hosseini, 2003, p. 4). In the opening scene of the novel, Rahim Khan’s phone call triggers Amir’s journey into the past, while elements of the American landscape—a willow tree and two kites flying in an early afternoon California sky—transport him to the space of his childhood play with Hassan, the Poplar trees lining the driveway of Baba’s grandiose house (Hosseini, 2003, pp. 2, 3). Though “sacral” in its evocation of

148

L. TAYEB

place and landscape, Amir’s remembering does not appear as “an exercise pleasurable in its own right” but is an imperative remembering, meant to act on the present and effect healing and transformation. For Amir, Kabul is not a simple “lieu de mémoire, a locus of ethnic memory”; it is a betrayed and betraying site of trauma, and the subject of an imperative redemptive remembering (Maier, 1993, pp. 138, 149). What emerges through Amir’s narrative of his childhood times with Hassan is a mixture of Afghanistan as sacred lieu de mémoire and claustrophobic site of personal and collective trauma. As an enlivening lieu de mémoire, Baba’s house is the site of a kinship that is not only naturally given but also created and sustained over the everyday times of Amir’s childhood. It simultaneously nurtures his kinship to Hassan and to Afghanistan. Indeed, attention to the dialectic of space and time in the new kinship studies is part of a general transition from rule to practice and from structure to process (Bourdieu, 1977). For Janet Carsten, relatedness (a term she adopts to overcome the structural constraints of kinship) is “essentially processual”, constructed through “everyday practice” which brings the “house” and “the domestic” to the centre of critical attention (2000, pp. 16, 17, 18). Specific domestic spaces like the hearth and small acts like cooking, feeding (children) and sharing food throw light on the intimate spatio-temporal dynamics of kinship as well as the intangible emotional terrain in which kinship ties take root (Carsten, 1995). In contexts of war, dislocation and dispersal, the house, and other material aspects of the physical environment inhabited by individuals and families, may assume high emotional value and become associated with a sense of self, family and collective (national) identity. In Hosseini’s narrative, however, the house and the wealthy district in which Amir grows up contain Afghanistan and simultaneously project it as an insecure outside space: though they condense Amir’s and Hassan’s childhood companionship, happiness and perfect symbiosis with the landscape, they are immediately indicative of national gender, social and ethnic divisions: But we were kids who had learned to crawl together, and no history, ethnicity, society or religion was going to change that either. I spent most of the first twelve years of my life playing with Hassan. Sometimes, my entire childhood seems like one long lazy summer day with Hassan, chasing each other between tangles of trees in my father’s yard, playing hide-andseek, cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians, insect torture. (Hosseini, 2003, p. 24)

5

PLANETARY MOBILITIES: KHALED HOSSEINI’S AND NADIA HASHIMI’S …

149

A “mini-portrait of the nation” emphasising “the social inequalities between the ruling Pashtuns and the oppressed Hazaras” (Stampfl, 2014, pp. 37, 38), the house simultaneously nurtures kinship ties and hinders, through its own inscriptions of power and hierarchy, egalitarian and emotionally free co-living. Amir’s narrative gradually reveals the house and the district to be sites of the betrayal and subsequent loss of Hassan, foreshadowing the loss and betrayal of Afghanistan. Later, Baba’s house appears as a metaphor of the invaded and dilapidated nation, and “like so much else in Kabul … was the picture of fallen splendor” (Hosseini, 2003, p. 241). Amir’s kinship with Hassan has been created despite social inequalities and is inseparable from Baba’s house. His childhood memories locate happiness in the house and in the spaces of Kabul privatised by him and Hassan and momentarily inhabited by them in isolation from society. One such spaces is the abandoned cemetery and the pomegranate tree near its entrance on which Amir and Hassan carve their names and imaginarily dub themselves “sultans of Kabul” (Hosseini, 2003, p. 26). In Hosseini’s text, the pomegranate tree is an extended symbol given its national, religious and literary overtones. Originating in Afghanistan and Iran, and acquiring a holy aspect from its representation in the Coran, the pomegranate tree has a sacred national and religious aspect. Growing in the entrance of an abandoned cemetery, it is obviously a symbol of life and power. Yet, given its Middle Eastern association with ripe beauty, it is also a potent symbol of the fertility and prosperity of Amir and Hassan’s friendship and comes to stand for Hassan’s unwavering loyalty to Amir. After Amir’s tragic betrayal of Hassan, both fail to renew their friendship when Amir challenges Hassan to a fight in this specific site. Hitting his own forehead with a pomegranate, Hassan re-enacts the traumatic scene of his rape, while his unfaltering self-sacrifice and loyalty can only stand as a painful reminder of Amir’s betrayal and cowardice (Hosseini, 2003, pp. 86–87). In Afghanistan, no space is thus entirely free of society and history, however pristine or secluded it may be. In the same way the sacred pomegranate tree of Amir and Hassan’s pledged friendship and loyalty is the site of Amir’s bragging literary readings for the illiterate, dispossessed and self-submissive Hassan, Baba’s house also sets off the central grand and opulent building from the “modest little mud hut” “on the south end of the garden” where Ali and Hassan lived and where Amir rarely ever stepped (Hosseini, 2003, p. 5). Both private and privatised spaces are marked by the extreme historical injustice that sets Sunni Pashtuns as the

150

L. TAYEB

lords and masters of Shii’ Hazaras, and are therefore miniatures of a preTaliban Afghanistan in which the peaceful amity and tolerance between the two groups is treacherous and “hypocritical” (Stampfl, 2014, p. 38). In this context, the imposing patriarchal figure of Baba is highly significant in that it stands for the regnant political order in pre1973 Afghanistan, more precisely, for a political condescension towards oppressed social groups that is far from being genuinely egalitarian and emancipatory in intent. Amir and Hassan’s fake friendship is, indeed, a generational repetition of Ali and Baba’s relations, Ali being the orphaned child of a Hazara couple carelessly murdered by privileged Pashtun young men, who are sentenced by the same judge who will adopt the couple’s child to a mere one-year army service in Kandahar (Hosseini, 2003, p. 23). Though these events take place in 1933, a time when the monarchy was sturdily in charge of the political affairs of Afghanistan, the repetition of the same scene of murder (of Hassan and his wife and Sohrab’s abduction by the Taliban leader, Assef) under the late twentieth century Taliban rule of terror, is a sinister repetition of injustice. The gap separating a presumably tolerant and rational monarchy from the Taliban unrestrained exercise of sadistic power appears less abysmal from such perspective. For Mark Graham, such continuity between the two political orders is suggested by the “doubling” of Amir and Assef— unveiled by “Amir’s passive complicity” in Hassan’s rape—despite their marked opposition throughout the novel. The redeeming fight with Assef in the novel’s second climactic scene, is of course part of the process of personal and political atonement and healing, and aims to put an end to such doubling, continuity and complicity (Graham, 2010, p. 151). Still, in Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, the problem with Afghanistan that Amir is obliged to “unheroically” face and solve is the problem with three Hazara generations of unacknowledged kinship and brotherhood, Ali, Hassan and Sohrab. 5.1.2

A Secret Half-Brother and the Problem with Afghanistan

As already mentioned, The Kite Runner suffuses place with kinship and makes imperative remembering and physical return the means through which kinship ties are re-connected. In addition, a parallel between “biogenetic” and fictive national kinship is established through the secret brotherhood of Amir and Hassan, or Pashtuns and Hazaras. The overmasculinisation of one group in contrast to the feminisation and victimisation of the other also links the ethnic and the gendered other and

5

PLANETARY MOBILITIES: KHALED HOSSEINI’S AND NADIA HASHIMI’S …

151

indirectly raises the issue of Afghani women in the homosocial world of Amir’s childhood. In other terms, women are not absent or excluded in The Kite Runner, but are present symbolically through the link between women and Hazaras. The un-gendered figure, combining masculinity and femininity and free of the negative attributes of both, is gradually projected through Hassan and the returned Amir of the second part of the narrative. The Kite Runner thus moves away from division towards projecting the possibility of unity of male and female, Pashtun and Hazara, Sunni and Shii’a, and asserting a transcendent Afghan cultural identity through the image of flying kites. Early in The Kite Runner, Amir refers to the known and socially acknowledged “biological” kinship between him and Hassan, feeding from the same breast of a blue-eyed Hazara woman and having in that way a strong maternal link in addition to the secret paternal blood link. Though breastfeeding is perceived in the new kinship studies as part of the small everyday acts of feeding and caring liable to create kinship over time (Carsten, 1995), it is indeed in Muslim cultures a key biological transferable substance akin to blood, liable to establish an immediate “biological” kinship which links feeding “mother” and fed child and sets the basis for incest taboo and socially recognisable brotherhood. A “biogenetic” maternal kinship based on feeding from the same breast is thus established between Amir and Hassan at the same time as it maternally links Amir to the blue-eyed Hazara woman. At this stage, Amir’s and Hassan’s kinship is based on the informal, life-giving qualities of (maternal) milk and is to be contrasted to the formal, divisive and oppressive aspects of the (paternal) blood tie that secretly connects them. The unacknowledged blood tie between Amir and Hassan as well as between Pashtun father and Hazara child serves as a metonymy of the divided and deceitful nation which pledges kinship of one superior group as it de-legitimises the other. A Tanja Stampfl argues, Amir’s discovery of his secret blood tie to Hassan “exposes the general hypocritical nature of the supposed harmony in Baba’s house” as well as the false peace and security of the national community (p. 38). As we mentioned earlier, a certain complicity and similarity rather than opposition between Amir and Assef indicates the sinister link between a presumably humane nationalistic monarchy (represented by Baba) and the fascist ethno-nationalist aspirations of Assef later fulfilled under Taliban rule. Drawing his vision to a panic-stricken Amir and Hassan, Assef merely puts in words what is unsaid in the national politics of the time: “Afghanistan is the land of Pashtuns. It always has

152

L. TAYEB

been, always will be. We are the true Afghans, the pure Afghans, not this Flat-Nose here. His people pollute our homeland, our watan. They dirty our blood” (Hosseini, 2003, p. 38). Through their fascist overtones, Assef’s words inadvertently refer to the secret rivalry and jealousy between Amir and Hassan: by sharing his filial link to Baba, Hassan pollutes Amir’s blood and steals his paternal heritage and national identity. As already suggested, The Kite Runner overlaps gender and ethnicity through the feminisation of Hazaras. Ali is represented as a “gentle” man unable to check kids’ mischief and resigned to his wife’s infidelities, opprobrium and disdainful attitude towards him (Hosseini, 2003, pp. 4, 8–10). A stark opposition between him and Baba, “a force of nature, a towering Pashtun specimen” and a legendary man who “wrestled a black bear in Baluchistan with his bare hands”, is established early in the narrative and appears to naturally set off the ruling heroic and masculine Pashtuns from the subjugated, meek and rather feminine Hazaras (Hosseini, 2003, p. 12). Though neat and clear-cut, such opposition is however messed up in the mixed blood second generation of Amir and Hassan: one the one hand, the father–son conflict and tense relationship stems from the fact that Amir has inherited nothing of Baba’s strength, courage and daredevil nature, and appears “unnaturally” feminine in his attitudes, tastes and propensities. On the other, Hassan shows personality traits which remind the reader of Baba’s unfaltering courage, resolve and honour despite his low social position and vulnerability to abasement and degradation. A messing up of the rule of nature makes it that the illegitimate Hazara child rather than the noble blood Pashtun inherits his father’s masculinity, and that Amir grows up to struggle with a sense of his own shameful weakness and illegitimacy exacerbated by Baba’s preference for Hassan. Indeed, Hosseini uses the image of the changeling, the baby secretly and treacherously swapped at birth, to cast Amir’s problem as a problem of kinship and (national) identity. In an overheard conversation between Baba and Rahim Khan, the changeling image suggested by Baba’s words sets off the secret rivalry between Amir and Hassan: “If I hadn’t seen the doctor pull him out of my wife with my own eyes, I’d never believe he’s my son” (Hosseini, 2003, p. 22). Amir’s secret jealousy and rivalry with Hassan allegorises the national Pashtun rivalry with Hazaras over Afghani belonging and identity, and such conflict takes the form of a struggle over masculinity or masculine (national) inheritance.

5

PLANETARY MOBILITIES: KHALED HOSSEINI’S AND NADIA HASHIMI’S …

153

In his quest to prove his Afghani identity and gain legitimacy, Amir, however, learns of the sinister play of power in the struggle between femininity and masculinity, and moves from adulatory pride in Baba’s name and inheritance towards awareness of his moral shortcomings and the oppressive (rather than honourable) character of his masculine authority. Disappointed by his father’s disdain for his literary talent, the child Amir already harbours unspeakable frustration and hatred: “Most days I worshipped Baba with an intensity approaching the religious. But right then I wished I could open my veins and drain his cursed blood from my body” (Hosseini, 2003, p. 30). Inheriting his sensitivity and literary talents from his princess mother and teacher of Farsi poetry, Sofia Akrami, Amir is burdened since early childhood with the obligation of manliness and his father’s hypocritical pride in the feminine delicateness and talents of his wife and fake protectiveness for women: “marrying a poet was one thing, but fathering a son who preferred burying his face in poetry books to hunting … Well, that wasn’t how Baba had envisioned it, I suppose” (Hosseini, 2003, p. 19). His reticence over “loose” women’s tarnished honour, like Sanaubar’s or Soraya’s, Amir’s future wife, and his valiant defense of a married female refugee on the way to Jalalabad and out of Afghanistan, stems from a rather masculine condescension and manly code of honour, and does not bespeak a genuine concern to change society’s disparaging views of women or to free them of a stifling Afghan patriarchal system. Ultimately, Amir discovers that Baba was simply one of the men who took advantage of Sanaubar’s profligacy shortly after the death of his wife thus secretly fathering an illegitimate child, Hassan, and betraying his old loyal friend Ali. Baba’s manliness and dauntless character lays the basis for an unspoken father–son conflict in the novel, clearly suggested by the established parallel between the novel and the story “Rostam and Sohrab” in Ferdowsi’s tenth-century Persian epic, Shahnamah. The story of a father who inadvertently and tragically kills his secret son in battle, “Rostam and Sohrab” refers to Baba’s filicidal tendencies as well as his and Amir’s betrayal of Hassan (Hosseini, 2003, pp. 27–28). As Rachel Blumenthal and Mark Graham have argued in their readings of Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, the novel’s mythic and literary parallels are Islamic and Afghani which shows a privileging of Afghani cultural resources over secular American or western ones; “the mythic father-and-son conflict of Rostam and Sohrab”, as well as the real story of Hossein’s betrayal in Karbala (and the basis of Shii’a Islam), are clear “references to Afghan culture” and

154

L. TAYEB

constitute “the narrative heart of The Kite Runner” (Blumenthal, 2012, p. 262; Graham, 2010, p. 163). Indeed, going beyond its reference to Baba’s tragic failure to recognise Amir’s worthy character and talents, “Rostam and Sohrab” connotes the tragic outcomes of secret kinship and the sinister nature of familial and national betrayal. In other words, Baba’s unconscious desire to “murder” a feeble son, and his betrayal of Hassan by denying him fatherhood and patriliny, prepares the psychological ground for Amir’s betrayal of his secret half-brother, a miniature repetition of Pashtuns’ betrayal of Hazaras at a macro national level. The problem with Afghanistan is that of a male chauvinist Pashtun nationalism and its exclusion and betrayal of the unrecognised internal female and Hazara (Shi’a) son and brother. 5.1.3

Running Kites Aground: A Feel of Planetary Space and Human Kinship

If The Kite Runner is about Amir’s valuable kinship to Hassan, a secret half-brother, and Afghanistan, “the soil of [his] ancestors” (Hosseini, 2003, p. 222), then why introduce a diasporic, American and external perspective into its local times and spaces, and why establish a unifying view of East and West, Afghanistan and America, through such a potent symbol of Afghani national culture as kite flying? If Hosseini’s aim is to present a “morsel” and “brushstroke” of Afghanistan to the world, then what scale of vision does The Kite Runner contain within its “small” narrative world, and how does it project a late twentieth century epoch and world aesthetically as well as ethically (Hosseini, 2003, p. 113)? Indeed, The Kite Runner is not narrowly focused on “biogenetic” and national kinship, and as a planetary novel places Afghanistan in the world. Aesthetically, Afghanistan appears through a circular narrative form as a “small” space encapsulated by the two scenes of kites flying in a California sky at the beginning and the end of the narrative. The flying kites project the elevated global standpoint with its “perspectival loftiness” and “ambition to corral the infinite into various distant readings, measurements, and conjectures” (Moraru, 2015a, p. 222). Hosseini further combines kite flying and kite running, the sky view and the intimate feel of planetary space, as a way to build the double global and planetary perspectives of the novel: in the dialectic of Afghanistan and the world, two competing perspectives on space are built, the global totalising and hegemonic perspective and a planetary perspective abolishing

5

PLANETARY MOBILITIES: KHALED HOSSEINI’S AND NADIA HASHIMI’S …

155

borders and personal/political misunderstanding and leaning towards human interrelating. Through the image of kite running and the intimate feel of otherness it connotes, Hosseini shuns the macro perspective, takes the “less travelled” “back road” of small things and opens a “portal to the infinitesimal” (Moraru, 2015a, pp. 221, 222). Here, Christian Moraru contrasts two forms of spatialisation in our contemporary era: the elevated “globalist” vision with a “macro agenda” seeking to encompass the infinite, and “assimilate the far-flung and its others into the selfsameness makeup of the world’s political and cultural centers”, and “the back road”, “marked with the planet’s lush and variegated ontosemiotics – with meaningful life”; planetary art and criticism takes the latter road and embarks on a journey that “pulls the world together and draws out spatially and intellectually the planet’s togetherness by zooming in on the different, the off-the-beaten path, and the small” (2015a, pp. 220–222). At the beginning, Afghanistan is linked up to the world while the world is contained in the infinitesimal space of Afghanistan. The local spaces and times of Amir’s childhood in Kabul are geopolitically connected to the world through the varied references to a regional Iranian domination and a global spread of American products and culture. Afghanistan appears as a “hierarchically interconnected” locality rather than a “naturally disconnected” national space and community, since according to Gupta and Ferguson’s “articulation model”, “the identity of a place emerges by the intersection of its specific involvement in a system of hierarchically organized spaces with its cultural construction as a community or locality” (Gupta & Ferguson, 1992, p. 8). The Afghanistan of Baba’s youth and Amir and Hassan’s childhood lives in the shadow of Iran’s geopolitical power, advanced modernity and high culture while at the same time consuming American cultural products in the form of Baba’s Ford Mustang and 70s popular western movies dubbed in Farsi and eagerly watched by Amir and Hassan in the Cinema Park. Amir’s eastern literary references and history books are exclusively Iranian, while Hassan’s perception of Iran as some kind of sanctuary links Afghani Hazaras to Shii’a Iran in an obvious cross-national way. The fact that the child Amir thinks that John Wayne is Iranian further attests to a mixture of a regional Iranian dominance with a global US dominance in 1970s Afghanistan (Hosseini, 2003, pp. 18–19, 25). In addition, the novel internationalises one symbol of Afghani national culture, kite flying, which appears as a local cultural practice and an international game that spells the link between varied national communities.

156

L. TAYEB

Not only do kites appear in a western California sky at the beginning and the end of the novel to revive the characters’ memories (Amir’s and Sohrab’s) of their homelands. A Hindi kid who has recently moved to Amir and Hassan’s neighbourhood shortly before the kite-fighting tournament of the winter of 1975 explains to them the different rules of the game in India thus showing its widespread practice across South Asian countries. However, the game rules that the Hindi kid mentions distort kite fighting for Amir and Hassan, and the Afghani way of doing it highlights a major cultural trait: “that Afghans are an independent people. Afghans cherish custom but abhor rules” (Hosseini, 2003, p. 48). Kite fighting is, indeed, a national symbol, and the basis of a specifically national character, but flying kites, which appear in both eastern and western skies, provide the reader with an elevated sweeping view of the world in which the narrative microscopic image of Afghanistan is situated. It acts in that sense as a symbol of the late twentieth-century global connectedness and refers to the “clusters of interaction” which go into the definition of the Afghani place and community (Gupta & Ferguson, p. 8). Kite flying is indicative of the global connectedness responsible for the end of Afghanistan’s idyllic age and its disfigurement by a concatenation of external and internal invaders. While it is true that microcosmically, kite flying enables an “exhilarating” though “ephemeral” “transcendence” of Amir and Hassan’s “class” differences” (Graham, 2010, p. 151), and bridges the gulf between the east and the west at the macro level, its disastrous and sinister issue for the underprivileged Hazara servant creates a disturbing parallel between national and international violence and injustice as the violated body of Hassan inevitably projects the image of the invaded and bleeding country. By making the violated body of the dispossessed an image of the country’s pain at the hands of a morally defective Pashtun elite and a blind global war, Hosseini dumps the emancipatory potential of kite flying on the “rubble pile” of local and global politics (Hosseini, 2003, p. 70). In the novel’s symbolic map, Hassan’s kite running is contrasted to Amir’s kite flying and appears to offer an alternative planetary vision and connectedness. Hassan, the quintessential Afghan, is also the adroit kite runner, who can sense, from a deep connectedness and strong intimacy with the land, where a kite is liable to land: for Amir, “Hassan was by far the greatest kite runner I’d ever seen. It was downright eerie the way he always got to the spot the kite would land before the kite did, as if he had

5

PLANETARY MOBILITIES: KHALED HOSSEINI’S AND NADIA HASHIMI’S …

157

some sort of inner compass” (Hosseini, 2003, p. 49). In a way, the seriousness of national politics is suggested by the proxy war of kite fighting in the sky conducted by the likes of Amir, the privileged and the mighty. Against this stands kite running, the carnivalesque and popular part of the fight, the “fierce chase” in which “hordes of kite runners swarmed the streets, shoved past each other like those people from Spain I’d read about once, the ones who ran from the bulls” (Hosseini, 2003, p. 49). As a kite runner gifted with an intimate knowledge of the earth and having a feel for the place where a falling kite is liable to end its aerial journey and kiss the face of the earth, Hassan stands for the excluded planetary other in a world captivated by the flying kites of global war and finance; his intimate connectedness to the land and spontaneous kinship to Amir lay the foundation of an alternative human relatedness to the planet and in planetary space transcending class, ethnic, gender and national boundaries. It is significant in this respect that Amir’s return journey in search for Hassan’s orphaned and lost son, Sohrab, takes the ground route and gives a stronger feel of the land. Travelling through “foreign” and “uncanny” Afghani country, Amir feels a “kinship … with the old land” despite the fact that he has been away “long enough to forget and be forgotten” (Hosseini, 2003, p. 222). In one sense, Amir forces himself into becoming what Spivak has called a “planetary creature” (2003, p. 73) whose now “unheimlich” home is the real Afghanistan of hunger stricken kids unable to be moved by an American digital wristwatch (Hosseini, 2003, p. 220). Amir’s new “kinship” with his homeland throws into stark relief his dominating childhood relatedness to Hassan and Kabul: “After all these years, I was home again standing on the soil of my ancestors. … under the bony glow of a half-moon, I sensed Afghanistan humming under my feet” (Hosseini, 2003, p. 222). Amir’s newfound intimacy with the Afghani soil as well as his later physical fight with Assef appear as his only way towards redemption and the reclamation of a true Afghani identity. The scene of the fight and the bodily damages it causes suggest that a true Afghani identity can only be gained as an ingrained and visible scar on individual bodies (Hosseini, 2003, pp. 264–268). As Stampfl argues, the “damaged or defective body” is a shared character trait in the novel, and one can only gain national identity by “join[ing] in the pain of the country” (Stampfl, p. 42). In embracing his homeland and taking up the challenge of a physical fight that is most probably fateful for him, Amir foregoes his privilege, purges himself of his (individual and collective) sins and earns his Afghan identity.

158

L. TAYEB

The secret blood relationship of Amir and Hassan and now Pashtun uncle and Hazara nephew, serves as foundation for a created rather than inherited familial/national kinship. Since the blood tie serves as an index of the varied social, ethnic and gender injustices of the Afghan order, its stronger adjunct, a spontaneous kinship rooted in place and reinforced over time, stands as the remedy to national ills. The problem of “blood” is transposed in the second part of the novel from Hassan to Sohrab, who embodies the conflated gendered and ethnic other of the nation, as well as the orphaned kin to be saved and reclaimed by Amir in atonement for past personal/national sins. Bound to unbury the past and go on an unheroic journey to save Sohrab, Amir manages to heal himself by expunging his noble and privileged inheritance: a problematic Pashtun chauvinism. His relation to Sohrab now blurs the boundaries between inherited “biogenetic” tie and “made” adoptive relationship: unlike Hassan, whose filiation has been socially unacknowledged yet affectively maintained by Baba, Sohrab joins Amir’s family as nephew and adopted son: the biogenetic tie linking Sohrab and Amir is now fully acknowledged in the Afghan community of Fremont in open rejection of previous hierarchies and divisions, yet at the end of the novel, a more genuine and rather created kinship is about to take root between Amir, Sohrab and Soraya, the reconstituted and healing family of Hosseini’s novel. Amir’s and Soraya’s prior decision not to adopt a child as a solution to their unexplained infertility seems to confirm the primacy and narrowness of blood ties in familial and national kinship. General Taheri’s emphatic expression, “blood is a powerful thing”, further acts as statement of the ethnic nationalist exclusivism that underpins Afghan politics since its early twentieth century history (Hosseini, 2003, p. 172). Yet The Kite Runner rethinks instead of rejects the blood tie: neither sanctified nor entirely transcended, the inherited ‘blood’ tie is de-masculinised, de-hegemonised and appended to a notion of inter-human kinship. Through Sohrab, Amir reclaims a “biogenetic” kinship that is freed of the hegemonic and chauvinist overtones of the blood tie, and a human kinship that is based on a fundamental opposition to the “everpresent potential for violence” embodied by Assef (Eshelman, 2015, p. 92). Instead of being exclusive, biogenetic kinship is now rethought and appended to a vital human connectedness. Human connection inheres in such acts as Farid’s driving of Amir through a war-ravaged Afghanistan, or Wahid’s hospitable and unprejudiced reception of Amir,

5

PLANETARY MOBILITIES: KHALED HOSSEINI’S AND NADIA HASHIMI’S …

159

and is vital for biogenetically related individuals and families (Hosseini, 2003, pp. 220–223). In sum, The Kite Runner gestures towards the un-ethnic, un-gendered other and underscores the value of inter-human kinship. As a planetary narrative, it sidesteps the grand scheme and big things through an aesthetic concern with the intimate and the small and an ethical emphasis on planetary relationality.

5.2 Released into the “World”: “Biogenetic”/Human Kinship and Abandonment in Khaled Hosseini’s And the Mountains Echoed If The Kite Runner delineates a specific location and traces the twentieth century history of a nation, Afghanistan, through one individual’s private journey into sin and redemption, Hosseini’s third novel, And the Mountains Echoed (2013), refuses to hem narrative action within single or dual national locations and outspreads into myriad sites and life trajectories, which gives the reader a new sense of being in the world. That the novel’s spatial dimension is no longer the self-contained or otherwise interconnected national locale is readily indicated by the novel’s disconnected, yet parallel worlds and individual life histories. Though starting in Afghanistan and revolving around Abdullah and Pari’s story of separation and reunion set in the historical context of the country’s tragic destruction by a succession of geopolitical conflicts, the action overflows into nearby cross-border locations and unfurls into American and European settings, attesting to the unprecedented relationality of human life in our contemporary world. In this sense, Hosseini’s And the Mountains Echoed attests to the paradigmatic shift from methodological nationalism to planetarity in twenty-first century Art and literature. According to Amy Elias and Christian Moraru, the planetary paradigm encompasses aesthetic endeavours which aim to mend a conceptually sterile global paradigm and engage alternatively with “the cultural, political and ethical implications of world interconnectivity” (pp. xvi, xx). It theoretically conceives the planet contra globe “as a living organism, a shared ecology, and an incrementally integrated system” and critically responds to the gradual setup in last three decades of a “geocultural arena of aesthetic production”, and an “axial” planetary dimension “in which writers and artists perceive themselves, their histories and their aesthetic practices” (Elias & Moraru, pp. xii, xxv).

160

L. TAYEB

Indeed, Hosseini’s And the Mountains Echoed can be approached as a planetary novel which displays its author’s artistic endeavor to set character and action in such a sprawling spatial dimension as the planet and ethically project planetary connectivity as a remedy against personal and political violence. Hosseini takes the traditionally rooted notion and value of “biogenetic” kinship and examines its tragic hacking down (Saboor’s chopping of the oak tree, the token of rootedness and intergenerational bonding) or plucking out (Pari’s plucked feathers set afloat in space) in the context of individual or collective dispersal and deracination. He traces the international paths of individuals released from, or shorn of kinship ties floating away from firm origins into shaky planetary space. While he does not reject “biogenetic” kinship as either fiction or burden, Hosseini blurs the lines between the sacralised, biologised and apparently unseverable blood tie of Abdullah and Pari holding the multiple story threads together, and a series of constructed, adoptive, time-based and intuitive kinship relations of the kind that might unite a Bosnian nurse, Amra Ademovic, and Roshi, an Afghan child survivor of a family massacre. In such manner, Hosseini does not dismiss “biogenetic” kinship as an outdated form of relation in a late twentieth century fast globalising world, but posits the intuitive, empathetic, adoptive, human(itarian) and therefore planetary kinship as a necessary leverage against violence and the loss of (“biogenetic”) kinship and rootedness. This part investigates the planetary aesthetics and ethics of Hosseini’s novel using a set of concepts drawn from Raoul Eshelman’s theory of planetary performatism, and Christian Moraru’s geomethodology (see Eshelman, 2015; Moraru, 2015a, 2015b). In conjunction with the thematics of “biogenetic”/planetary kinship, it further studies the link between planetary relationality and the growing digitisation of communication in the twenty-first century global network society (Castells, 2009, 2010). 5.2.1

From Place to Planet: Space and Time in the Planetary Narrative

In And the Mountains Echoed, Hosseini carefully plots an extensive and extended story that transgresses the conventional unity of action in narrative as well as the traditional particularism of social and historical context to accommodate the universal and planetary dimension. Divided into nine chapters with variable settings and time spans, the novel takes a rhizomic

5

PLANETARY MOBILITIES: KHALED HOSSEINI’S AND NADIA HASHIMI’S …

161

structure whereby the stem story of a brother and sister’s tragic separation in mid-twentieth century Kabul sends shoots across planetary space thus randomly multiplying places and storylines. What links the varied narrative shoots to the stem story are human nodes, i.e. characters and their crossing pathways; in addition, the individual and unrelated actions of those human actors lead to both integration and parallelism, so that an overall sense of narrative coherence combines with the disunity and independence of some if not all the story chunks. To avoid the hierarchical logic implied in such terms as main plot and subplot, I propose to use the classificatory terms, close and distant stories, opting for their kinship, and definitely not geographical, significance. Apart from Saboor’s timeless, universal tale in the first chapter, which sets the story/journey into the world on, and thematically prefaces the stem story of parent–child separation, the five shoots of close stories move centrifugally from Shadbagh/Kabul in Afghanistan to the world, and revolve around members of Saboor’s family, namely Abdullah (Chapter two), Parwana (Chapter three), Nabi (Chapter four); Pari (Chapter six), and Pari Jr. (Chapter nine). The three shoots of distant stories seem to move centripetally from the world into Afghanistan along the trajectories of returned Afghan-Americans, Idris and Timur (Chapter five), volunteering members of international aid agencies like Markos Varvaris (Chapter eight), and chameleonic war criminals turned mafioso narcotraffickers as Adel’s father, Baba Jan (Chapter seven). The term “distant” suggests the absence of the “biogenetic” kinship of family yet is also used with a wink at the non-genealogical forms of human interrelating bringing individuals worldwide into either constructive and benevolent or destructive forms of connectivity. It is also worth noting that the “distant” stories may themselves touch or overlap peripherally (Idris and Timur attend a party organised by Markos Varvaris during their trip to Afghanistan; Markos Varvaris locates the mansion, or narco palace, the birthplace of Pari and Abdullah as well as the place where Iqbal, their half-brother, is said to have disappeared), but they are all connected to the “close” stories formally (at the level of the storyline) as well as thematically, a question we shall take at length in the next part. Overall, both the “close” and “distant” stories have to do with human proximity (in terms of experience) and connection (“biogenetic” or otherwise) despite distance; both also extend into planetary space giving the reader a feel of the human-ecological commonality of planet and of planetary relationality.

162

L. TAYEB

In terms of space, Afghanistan is neither origin nor central location in the novel’s world geography, but a local site that gradually loses its midtwentieth century pristine isolation, is tossed by the violent waves of late twentieth-century geopolitical conflicts and gets literally invaded by the “world” in an early twenty-first century geopolitical environment gripped by the US-led global war on terror. Divided into an indigent backwater, Shadbagh, and a vibrant urban centre, Kabul, the Afghan land slips from national setting to one point (ethnic, cultural, linguistic particularity), among myriad other points in planetary space. Its singularity and possible centrality is, in other terms, drowned by the multitude of other local and singular sites in which action in the “close” or “distant” stories is set. One cannot say that Hosseini de-centralises Afghanistan in And the Mountains Echoed; what the author technically devises as a way to figure the planet is “microscopically” place Afghanistan beside other South Asian, European and American sites of travel and residence thus forcing on us a vision of planetary coexistence (Moraru, 2015b, p. 212). Since the question of scale and vision is paramount in planetary aesthetics, Christian Moraru points out the equal importance of “the infinite and the infinitesimal”, “the macro and micro”, while at the same time calling our attention to the aesthetic challenge and ethical value of the “microscopic” (2015b, pp. 212–213). For Moraru, the critic’s task is to discern “the macro’s murmur in the vernacular of the micro, in the tiny, the local, and the humble”, while to read geomethodologically “with the planet” is to read “against [its] reductive totality [and] … ominous oneness, to read the planet with and ultimately for the myriad of places, archives, and artefacts of which its fragile, pluricentric, and makeshift whole consists” (2015b, p. 213). In other terms, the planetary aesthetic and geomethodological reading must steer clear of both totalising and fragmentation: contain and decry the planetary in the local, and present the small and multitudinous in such a way that it builds up and projects the whole and one. In its representation of Shadbagh, Kabul, Paris, California and the Greek island of Tinos, in addition to the myriad other places of temporary refuge and travel, Hosseini’s narrative manages to bring the macro and micro to the state of complementarity suggested in Moraru’s geomethodology. Despite the fact that the narrative relates a set of spatially isolated stories, with characters engrossed in their small worlds and having no consciousness of what is going on simultaneously in other small worlds, the local places appear preternaturally interrelated: despite the fact that a globalising world is being interconnected by geopolitical, global

5

PLANETARY MOBILITIES: KHALED HOSSEINI’S AND NADIA HASHIMI’S …

163

economic and technological forces, what relates Paris, California, Athens and Tinos to Kabul and Shadbagh are the personal stories and private life journeys of tiny individuals who, in making isolated and personal decisions, may considerably affect the lives of other individuals far off. It is no surprise then that in this planetary picture, a Greek plastic surgeon, Markos Varvaris—a man who escapes his mother/land and roams the world, with in his knapsack the talisman photo of his tragically disfigured childhood friend Thalia, in search for personal worth and mission as well as a more merciful world and existence—shall play the intermediary between Pari and her lost kin in Afghanistan and California. Alternately, a privileged Afghan-American doctor, Idris Bashiri, fails to turn his passive compassionate feelings for Roshi, the victim of a horrid family murder in Kabul, into active humanitarian action on her behalf by labouring to make her benefit from advanced medical treatment in California. The fact that his emotionally fake and shamelessly opportunist cousin Timur later takes care of Roshi underscores the value of active engagement in the planetary networks of care. In the same way spatial unity is disrupted in the attempt to break with the literary national paradigm and project the multitudinous planetary space, chronology in And the Mountains Echoed is equally jumbled, though linearity and order are not rejected but meant to be reconstructed in the active process of reading. As Raoul Eshelman argues with reference to the treatment of time in episode films like Iñárritu’s Babel (2006), time is not “radically diffuse[d]” but “reorder[ed] in such a way that linearity, although radically interrupted and scrambled, can be reconstructed after the fact”; in such movies or fictional works where a performatist planetary relationality is artistically created by a higher authorial brush, “emphasis lies on presenting time in discrete, temporarily disconnected chunks that are experienced all the more intensely because they at first appear to have no connection to a greater telos or to the other narrative segments to which they are juxtaposed” (Eshelman, 2015, pp. 94, 95). In light of Eshelman’s performatist aesthetics, the eight “close” and “distant” stories making up Hosseini’s narrative appear as “time chunks” with “formally discrete” beginnings and ends, though an overall temporal order emerges as we go from one chunk to another. What distinguishes Hosseini’s novel from episodic movies such as Babel, however, is that the timelines of the different “story chunks” range from near century long accounts of personal lives and historical developments to relatively short episodes and specific private events in

164

L. TAYEB

a character’s life. Long-term chunks include Nabi’s letter to Markos Varvaris in Chapter four, Pari’s life in Paris from childhood to old age in Chapter six, Markos Varvaris’s life story from childhood in the Greek island of Tinos to his volunteering work in Kabul in the early 2000s and Pari Jr.’s life in California from early childhood to her reunion with her aunt-sister in winter 2010. Short-term chunks are the episodes which relate Saboor’s tale-telling in Chapter one, the day before his journey to Kabul to sell his daughter to the Wahdatis, Abdullah’s loss of his little sister in Chapter two, Parwana’s sacrifice of her sister Masooma for her own happiness in Chapter three, Idris’s pusillanimous retreat from humanitarian work in Chapter five and Adel’s maturing discovery of his father’s true identity as an ex-war criminal and tyrannous narco-trafficker in Chapter seven. Hence, the thematic division of the stories into “close” and “distant” stories combines with—but in no way corresponds to—the time-based division into long-term and short-term stories. If such is Hosseini’s manipulation and presentation of time in And the Mountains Echoed, then how does this aesthetic reordering serve planetary relationality and multiplicity? One can argue that Hosseini is not simply bent on aesthetically figuring world connectivity in the present, but takes up the additional challenge of projecting in narrative form a “worlding world” along globalisation’s hegemonic geopolitical and technocratic agendas, while at the same time presenting planetarism as “a counter imagination” and “[alternative] worlding narrative” (Moraru, 2015a, pp. 15, 25). Indeed, the shift from globalism to planetarism for Moraru is not about human interrelating as such, but alternative interrelating or “rethink[ing] being-in-relation beyond the nationalist, imperialist, and, of late, globalist nexus, beyond the relational logos that, for such a long time, has underlain the main form of linking up here and there, self and other, ours and theirs” (2015a, p. 51). Hints at a fast globalising world abound in Hosseini’s novel, yet they remain intermittent and largely off-stage. For instance, in the sixth chapter devoted to Pari’s life in Paris over the last three decades of the twentieth century, the year 1989, which signals the fall of the Berlin Wall and the beginning of a post-Cold War global era, ironically marks the beginning of a thriving academic career and settled family life for Pari. As the memory of Afghanistan recedes in her mind and questions about her identity become less urgent, Afghanistan takes centre stage in world politics and a new era characterised by global mass communication begins. News about

5

PLANETARY MOBILITIES: KHALED HOSSEINI’S AND NADIA HASHIMI’S …

165

“the West arming the Mujahideen” appear daily in written and audiovisual mass media while political discussions about what “will happen to Afghanistan when the Soviets leave” draw attention during university events and dinner parties (Hosseini, 2013, pp. 259, 260). Afghanistan’s late twentieth century history illustrates the way international politics contribute to global “worlding”, the coming together and interlocked fates of an international community of nation-states. In Chapter eight, the radical transformation of Markos Varvaris’s home island, Tinos, from an idyllic, untouched, pastoral, farming island in the 1960s and 70s to a thriving tourist destination in the grips of a greedy global tourist industry at the turn of the century shows corporate capitalism’s foray into the world’s nooks and crannies and its affecting, if not downright destruction, of local lifestyles all over the world. In email exchanges between Markos and Thalia, an image of Tinos’s transformation into a lucrative tourist destination emerges in the virtual space now linking them: She has been emailing me for years, chronicling for me these changes that are reshaping Tinos. The beachside hotels with satellite dishes and dial-up access, the night-clubs and bars and taverns, the restaurants and shops that cater to tourists, the cabs, the buses, the crowds, the foreign women who lie topless at the beaches. The farmers ride pick-up trucks now instead of donkeys – at least the farmers who stayed. (Hosseini, 2013, p. 381)

As he leaves home for the “world” and devotes himself to humanitarian work in the planetary space epitomised by the Afghan destination, Markos ironically receives news of his native island’s “invasion” by the “world”. Since the global “worlding” of the world is in Thalia’s words “inevitable” (Hosseini, 2013, p. 381), then what remains to be done is put such processes to the service of a “non-totalist, non-homogenizing, and anti-hegemonic” human relationality (Elias & Moraru, p. xxiii). As he presents, in both long-term and short-term stories, the intensifying levels of world connectivity throughout the second half of the twentieth century across different locations and geographical regions, Hosseini throws into stark relief the planetary panorama of human relation against which the story of Abdullah’s and Pari’s separation and reunion unfolds. In the panoramic view enabled by the disconnected, yet ultimately cohering, stories, what comes to the fore are the penitent and self-redeeming acts of a dying step-uncle, Nabi, hosting an international aid agency in the house he has wrongly inherited and scribbling a letter to his step-niece informing

166

L. TAYEB

her of the absurd, evil and self-interested machinery behind her separation from her blood and origins and her lifelong exile in France. Duly placing the letter in the hands of its old and frail addressee after Nabi’s death, Markos Varvaris manages to connect Pari to her now Alzheimer’sstricken brother and her niece, and “turn out good” in the eyes of the mother he has chosen to abandon (Hosseini, 2013, p. 392). Markos’s selfdevotion to humanitarian action, like Amra Ademovic’s adoptive motherly care for Roshi, stands for the kind of “ethical solicitation” characterising contemporary “images and accounts of war suffering” and “ethical responsiveness” engendering the planetary inter-human processes liable to counteract the global forces of violence (Butler, 2012, pp. 135, 142). 5.2.2

Archetypologies and Aesthetic Frames: Kinship, Abandonment and Ethical Responsibility

Khaled Hosseini presents his novel as a non-linear narrative where six ultimately cohering “close” stories, and three “distant” stories marginally crossing paths (Chapter five), or actively interfering with them (Chapters seven and eight), are aligned in such a way that they form “archetypologies” defined by Raoul Eshelman as “authorially framed, aesthetically sublimated chunks of reality that are particular and local and yet also seem to have a primordial, archetypal core”; in placing them above “empirical typologies” and below “universal archetypes”, Eshelman aims at loosening the deadening grip of discourse on the post-structuralist notion of the human, while refusing to equate the human with the archetypal model and primordial image (2015, p. 96). To move away from an equally sterile archetypal criticism, Eshelman associates what he perceives as a “bio-social” human with “mimesis and intuition”, which refer to those aspects of human interaction that precede the purely discursive/cultural and intellectual: mimesis refers to the primordial human tendency to act through the copying or imitation of others, while intuition suggests that we are not solely guided by our intellect and discursive reason in our exchange with others (Eshelman, pp. 90–91). Thus, in Eshelman’s “performatist episteme … the human is conditioned not by the belatedness and particularity of discourse, but by the originary experience of mimesis and intuition prior to discourse”, while the mimetic “transfer of value” between humans beyond language and discourse is the central concern of art and criticism (pp. 91, 92). Further, Eshelman’s (planetary) performatism involves a re-conceiving of the problem of violence, which cuts

5

PLANETARY MOBILITIES: KHALED HOSSEINI’S AND NADIA HASHIMI’S …

167

with both the way it is overlooked and sidestepped in post-structuralism and the way it is too simply resolved in Enlightenment humanism; the alternative performatist view posits “the impossible need to transcend” violence—the idea that violence must be transcended albeit always incompletely since it is “an originary, insoluble aspect of human existence”—as healing and constructive mechanism in art and theory (p. 92). Indeed, Hosseini’s total disinterest in the discursive traffic between human beings in the novel is clearly indicated by his privileging of the emotional, intuitive level of inter-human interaction coupled with the “mountains’ echo”, which stands for the not too silent presence of another planetary non-human life that is as fundamental. In the context of planetary relationality and performativity, both emotion and intuition as non linguistic forms of consciousness and intercourse, and the link between man and a natural environment, have the potential to de-centre language, culture and translation, ideology and monologue/dialogue, in short, the social and discursive. Such is the overall effect of a planetary narrative like Hosseini’s And the Mountains Echoed, announced since the beginning by the novel’s epigraph from the poetry of the thirteenth-century Persian poet Jelaluddin Rumi, “Out Beyond ideas / of wrongdoing and rightdoing, /there is a field. / I’ll meet you there” (Hosseini, 2013). What begins with an invitation to leave behind or transcend “ideas” as a sterile stratum of human interaction unfolds in narrative form as a planetary “field” where only “intuition” of the good and just can guide human beings in their quest to relate to the other. To read Khaled Hosseini’s nine narrative segments in And the Mountains Echoed as archetypologies, despite the fact that most of them appear as pieces in the puzzle of Abdullah’s and Pari’s story of separation and reunion, allows us to see how they build up a different order beyond the logic of causality or succession of events. Such necessarily “artificial”, author-contrived order is what Eshelman regards as a distinctive and “dominant technique” of performatism, “double framing”, which “operates by taking some particular element in a work – usually an odd or unbelievable scene, situation, or detail, sometimes also an odd bio-social disposition – and confirming its mimetic or intuitive logic on the level of the work as a whole” (2015, pp. 92, 93). The “frame” or “category” is imposed by the author, now fully acknowledged as “a specifically human point of origin” and is meant to establish “unity of experience” at the level of the entire work and allow us to see the way culturally dissimilar individuals and collectivities interact mimetically and intuitively “beneath

168

L. TAYEB

the threshold of discourse” (Eshelman, pp. 95, 96). In Hosseini’s novel, the “frames” of kinship and abandonment recur in the nine segments of the story while what we have classified as the three “distant” stories aesthetically “frame” or “categorise” the three major forms of mimetic intercourse between humans: a neutral, potentially violent or abusive, inaction or foregoing of responsibility suggested by Idris Bashiri’s story, the destructive exchange of war, dispossession and tyranny epitomised by Baba Jan, and the reconstructive and healing action or assumption of responsibility on a planetary scale taken by Markos Varvaris. Thus, kinship and its antithesis, abandonment, recur in the nine archetypologies as mimetic and intuitive categories, while a parallel frame is built around the forces which either set individuals apart or invigorate planetary connectivity and (human) kinship: in this context, Hosseini refuses to rationalise violence in its individual and collective forms and treat it as an empirical or ideological problem; he rather treats violence as an inevitable mimetic component of the human, and focuses instead on the counteracting force of responsibility examining the shaky ethical choices around it, namely dangerous inaction, escape/ism and the foregoing of responsibility, or human empathy and the assumption of responsibility at the personal and collective levels. “Biogenetic”/Adoptive Kinship vs. Abandonment In the relationship between Abdullah and his little sister, Pari, a significant amalgam of “biogenetic” and adoptive kinship serves to enlarge the meaning of kinship in the novel and move beyond its restrictive meaning of shared genetic family or “thick” blood ties; Abdullah is both elder brother and adoptive father for Pari after the loss of their genetic mother at Pari’s birth. In addition, their strong affective bond is born intuitively of the circumstances of their motherless childhood and Abdullah’s nursing of his baby sister, and is reinforced by the token of their mutual love and affection, a tea-box full of multi-colored feathers so much craved by Pari and lovingly collected by Abdullah. “Biogenetic” and adoptive kinships are also conflated in the story of Markos Varvaris since Mamá appears as both genetic mother to Markos and adoptive mother to Thalia, and seems to entertain, out of a strong sense of parental duty, the same affective bonds and sense of responsibility towards both of them. The “biogenetic” brother and sister, Abdullah and Pari, whose bond is sealed at the moment of birth, have their adoptive counterpart in Markos and

5

PLANETARY MOBILITIES: KHALED HOSSEINI’S AND NADIA HASHIMI’S …

169

Thalia whose kinship is triggered by Thalia’s manufacturing of a homemade camera for the future globe trotter and photographer, Markos, and continues to develop ever after. Apart from this glaring parallel, adoptive kinship relations, born of an intuitive inclination to stand by lonesome and abandoned individuals and a sense of moral responsibility, link the various story segments in a highly significant way: despite his accidental discovery of Suleiman Wahdati’s homosexual desire for him, Nabi takes care of his now paraplegic boss for near half a century after the departure of Nila Wahdati for Paris. The fact that the couple forms a family is suggested by Nabi’s decision to relinquish marriage and family and take satisfaction in the parental act of care (Hosseini, 2013, p. 137). In Idris and Timur’s story (Chapter five), another adoptive relation comes to the fore as Amra Ademovic, a Bosnian nurse working for an international aid organisation, is particularly moved by Roshi’s tragedy, an Afghan child who, in the middle of all the bombing and killing hitting an early twentyfirst century Afghanistan, has all the members of her family senselessly murdered by an envious and gluttonous uncle and is herself severely disfigured at the skull level. Alma’s special care for Roshi develops into an adoptive motherly care as she manages, with Timur’s help, to make her benefit from advanced plastic surgery in the United States. Dedicating her book six years later to her “mother Amra”, Roshi clearly acknowledges their adoptive kinship woven of the threads of suffering, empathy and care (Hosseini, 2013, p. 195). Notwithstanding the intuitive threads of human suffering, empathy and care, both “biogenetic” and adoptive kinship are represented as shaky emotional and social grounds as genetic and adoptive relatives may display a treacherous tendency to abandon their kin. Indeed, in the context of planetarisation, Hosseini presents kinship as a vulnerable bond liable to be broken by either personal acts or collective forces. Thus, rootedness and family unity, strongly evoked by the “giant oak tree” in Saboor’s compound in Shadbagh (Hosseini, 2013, p. 31), are both sine qua non conditions, as illustrated by the tragic story of Pari’s deracination and Abdullah’s lifelong loss, and extremely vulnerable to the mimetic and intuitive human inclination towards selfish abandonment, as well as the national and global forces of betrayal and dispersal. Alternately, even adoptive kinship ties are liable to failure and treacherous abrogation. Not only is Pari adopted out of the purely selfish motivations of Nabi and Nila Wahdati. The circumstances of her upbringing in Paris show her adoptive mother Nila Wahdati as an unscrupulous woman: after leaving her sick

170

L. TAYEB

and dependent husband behind and engaging in a series of futile love affairs, she commits suicide in 1974 and abandons the daughter she has whimsically adopted. Indeed, Hosseini frames abandonment as a mimetic and intuitive category that leads at the private and individual/family level to the loss of kinship ties, and at the collective, planetary level, to the loss of the particular small-scale community and the larger planetary human community which takes shape in the spaces of travel and mobility. In the sibling trio, Nabi, Parwana, and Masooma, personal betrayal and abandonment dominate Nabi’s relations to his sisters (choosing escape to Kabul over self-devotion to his invalid sister) and Parwana’s relation to Masooma (at first provoking the accident which leads to her permanent paralysis and later sacrificing her for the sake of marrying the newly widowed Saboor, and beginning a new life without the burden of a socially cumbersome disabled sister). Likewise, in Markos Varvaris’s story, Thalia’s selfish and irresponsible mother, Madaline, deliberately rids herself of the daughter she has carelessly destroyed. Not only is the tragic dog accident the result of Madaline’s severe maternal negligence; her secret manoeuvering to leave Thalia to the permanent care of Markos’s mother bespeaks a mortifying lack of care and affection for others. Reading her obituary in a newspaper more than thirty years later, Markos is finally able to see Madaline as a “cartographer, sitting down, calmly drawing the map of her future and neatly excluding her burdensome daughter from its borders” (Hosseini, 2013, p. 375). Abandonment recurrently leads to the break-up of kinship and human relations: Abdullah’s and Pari’s separation is ultimately caused by Saboor’s acquiescence and complicity in Nabi’s passion-driven manoeuvering to alleviate Nila’s suffering by offering her the child she is denied by her hollow, wombless body. The tragic dimensions of such abandonment are twice in the novel indicated by human absence and a sense of being lost in godforsaken space: during the journey from Shadbagh to Kabul, Abdullah and Pari are momentarily though later actually betrayed and forsaken by their father: Abdullah awoke later and found father gone. He sat up in a fright…. Panic began to mushroom deep in his chest. He sat perfectly still, his body erect and tense, and listened for a long time. He heard nothing. They were alone, he and Pari, the dark closing in around them. They had been abandoned. Father had abandoned them. Abdullah felt the true vastness of the desert, and the world, for the first time. How easily a person could

5

PLANETARY MOBILITIES: KHALED HOSSEINI’S AND NADIA HASHIMI’S …

171

lose his way in it. No one to help, no one to show the way. (Hosseini, 2013, pp. 36–37)

In the story of Masooma and Parwana, a similar scene of abandonment in godforsaken space is painted when Parwana leaves her sister to die with the mountains as sole witness and their sinister echo as nature’s sole stirring to her betrayal: “At last, she makes her choice. She turns around, drops her head, and walks toward a horizon she cannot see. After that she does not look back anymore…. She keeps walking, the darkness around her like a mother’s womb and when it lifts … it feels like being born again” (Hosseini, 2013, p. 81). Less severe acts of betrayal and abandonment show in Markos’s decision to go and live as far away from his mother as possible, which leads them to squander their lives in painful absence, loneliness and loss. Escapism vs. Empathy and Ethical Responsibility Markos Varvaris’s decision to travel around the world before settling to a medical career in Athens and later engaging in humanitarian action in Afghanistan is born of a desire to escape his mother and Thalia’s suffering. However, leaving Tinos and abandoning his mother and adoptive sister, Markos makes atonement for his personal escapism through humanitarian and other-directed action. Not only is he madly attached to Thalia’s photo, choosing to make a three-hour trek back to where he lost it during a journey in Chile (Hosseini, 2013, p. 357); he also lets himself be guided by a huge moral responsibility for people like the Indian boy, Manaar, and the countless victims of violence, whom nature and society have blindly betrayed and abandoned. Indeed, Hosseini presents empathy as a precondition for ethical responsibility and a planetary other-directedness represented by characters like Markos Varvaris and Amra Ademovic. Wholly intuitive, and randomly linking ethnically and culturally dissimilar individuals, empathy has the potential to relate human beings and counteract violence. Like abandonment (though standing as its constructive counterpart) empathy and ethical responsibility are constructed as a frame which establishes unity of human experience in the multiple story segments; this is what Butler conceives as the point of life’s “vulnerability” and “grievability”, a point at which life becomes consequently “recognized as human” (Butler, 2012, pp. 147–148; Wilson, 2017, p. 4). Mamá’s, and later Markos’s empathy with Thalia leads to their assumption

172

L. TAYEB

of responsibility and an inclination towards relation rather than rejection and abandonment. Conversely, Idris Bashiri initially weaves a paternal relationship with Roshi indicating a deep empathy with her suffering, but once in the United States, he lets his feelings dissipate and a dangerous apathy take hold of him and steal him of humane sensitivity to others’ pain and responsibility for them. It is worth noting that Idris Bashiri also stands for the privileged Afghan-American whose personal betrayal of Roshi projects the collective betrayal of Afghanistan. While he avoids any reference to the wars and geopolitical conflicts which destroyed Afghanistan, Khaled Hosseini makes the narrative of a sequestered boy, Adel, innocently and naively worshipping his father’s benevolent social action in New Shadbagh, an oblique reference to the all-pervasive and unavoidable “potential for violence”. The son of an ex-Mujahid who has played the sycophant with the new political power and established himself as a wealthy landlord on Saboor’s ancestral land, Adel unknowingly befriends Gholam, Saboor’s grandson and the son of Iqbal, Pari and Abdullah’s half-brother. Iqbal is a returned refugee who seeks to reclaim his property, but faces the destructive forces of power, influence and corruption in post-war Afghanistan. The story ends with the murder of Iqbal and casts a dark shadow over the still-bleeding country. In line with performatist planetarism however, violence can only be incompletely transcended which appears in Adel’s compassionate character and conscience-stricken awakening to his father’s true legacy. Violence’s “impossible transcendence” appears in a future other-directed adult Adel as well as the myriad small acts of penitence (Nabi), care and ethical responsibility (Markos, Amra, Mamá, Thalia, Pari Jr.) undertaken by the characters (Eshelman, 2015, p. 92). 5.2.3

Escape or Re-connection in the Digital Age?

Published a decade after The Kite Runner, Hosseini’s And the Mountains Echoed sporadically depicts changes in the nature and modes of interrelating as result of the late twentieth century rise of computer technologies, digitisation of communication and formation of a “global network society”. Such society is today potentially global since the “digital networks” around which it is organised “transcend territorial and institutional boundaries” (Castells, 2009, p. 24). Despite the fact that globalisation is predominantly seen in terms of the increasing socioeconomic, cultural, political as well as ecological interconnection of

5

PLANETARY MOBILITIES: KHALED HOSSEINI’S AND NADIA HASHIMI’S …

173

national societies, such “worlding” of the world could not have been possible without “the global networking capacity provided by digital communication technologies and information systems, including computerised, long-haul, fast, transportation networks” (Castells, pp. 24–25). Castells even resolves the tension between the short term and longue durée readings of globalisation by arguing that what we see as the current accelerated phase of globalisation is distinguished from its earlier processes and forms by such computer technology-based “global networking” (p. 25). From such perspective, Khaled Hosseini depicts the early twenty-first century world in which some of the “close” and “distant” stories drift as a world in which quick digital communication sometimes replaces direct human intercourse and either reinforces or breaks kinship ties. And the Mountains Echoed links a pre-technological Shadbagh community in midtwentieth century Afghanistan to an early twenty-first century world in which a lost brother and sister could, with the help of the worldwide web, be easily located in California and Paris. The new digital communication technologies directly affect slackened or broken kinship ties by enabling a new form of emotionally sustaining though virtual, disembodied and sometimes one-way connection to take place. In the story of Markos Varvaris (Chapter eight), both the growth of Markos into a globe trotter then expatriate doctor, and the gradual transformation of Tinos from a farming island into a tourist destination prized by the global tourist industry, take place in the context of global technological change. Hosseini manages to convey the spirit of the times in a pre-digital revolution Tinos by describing the extremely peaceful and secluded life of Tinos’ inhabitants during Markos and Thalia’s childhood. Later both the island and its inhabitants are obliged to adapt to the entrepreneurial orientation of the digital age. In particular, Tinos’s transformation into a modernised tourist destination marketed by global travel websites attests to the shrinking digital divide between it and the “world” and concomitant market opportunities. Similarly, Thalia’s underexploited scientific genius benefits from the new digital technologies as she turns from handywoman to self-taught IT support engineer: Thalia doesn’t run a business in the real sense. Before the digital age, she was essentially a handywoman. She went to people’s homes and soldered power transistors in their TVs, replaced signal capacitors in old tubemodel radios. She was called in to fix faulty refrigerator thermostats, seal leaky plumbing…. These days, she is like a freelance one-woman IT

174

L. TAYEB

department. Everything she knows is self-taught. She charges nominal fees to troubleshoot people’s PCs, change IP settings, fix their applicationfile freeze-ups, their slow-downs, their upgrade and boot-up failures. (Hosseini, 2013, p. 382)

Along with geopolitics, global capitalism and mobility, technology plays a central role in interconnecting places and people: despite their rejection of travel and self-imposed exile from the “world”, Thalia and Mamá as well as their once pristine island, Tinos, are now exposed to the “world”. Indeed, characters in an early twenty-first-century environment exchange emails and, thanks to the worldwide web, manage to relate across distance, locate missing individuals and unearth their personal contacts. Apart from the technologically enabled reunion of Pari with her brother and niece in California, Markos Varvaris’s emotionally complex relation to his mother and their shaky journey into understanding is also markedly affected by the new digital technologies. Markos’s escapist choice of travelling as far away as possible from his upright mother and Thalia’s unjust suffering and his avoiding of any form of connection between them is thwarted by information’s ubiquity and accessibility in the digital age: returning home after many years of travel, Markos Soon realises that the “gaping hole in the middle” of Odie’s and Thalia’s life left by his absence has been filled by articles and news of his activities available on the web, and that his now old and frail mother has turned into a “cyberspace stalker” who “checks on [him] everyday” (Hosseini, 2013, p. 388). Markos’s feelings of guilt and moral inaptitude generated by his mother’s extreme rectitude and lack of emotional expressiveness are ultimately alleviated when he discovers her secret pride in his career and achievements. A certain measure of understanding and emotionally sustaining relation is reached at the end thanks to the webs of connection woven through virtual digital space. In contrast to Odie’s emotional replenishment and pride through the net, Idris Bashiri lets his empathetic and tender emotions towards Roshi dissipate as soon as their relation takes the disembodied form provided by emails. After a few emails exchanged with Amra and Roshi and a half-hearted attempt to get the financial aid needed for Roshi’s treatment in the United States, Idris is struck by the “infinite, insurmountable … distance” now separating them and decides to ignore subsequent emails (Hosseini, 2013, p. 194). As it mitigates absence and the lack of embodied relation, digital technology is inconsequential without the human affective and ethical

5

PLANETARY MOBILITIES: KHALED HOSSEINI’S AND NADIA HASHIMI’S …

175

engagement promoting planetary relationality. In a boundless planetary space and a desperately interconnected planetary community, both “biogenetic” and human relations depend to a great extent on the information and communication opportunities made available by digital networking. Hosseini’s concern in And the Mountains Echoed is that dearth of emotional and ethical engagement on the part of individuals and collective groups can foster abandonment, disconnection and loss despite the huge potential for connection and proximity in the information age.

5.3 In Search of a Mother/Land: Afghanistan’s “Lost” Children in Nadia Hashimi’s When the Moon Is Low Nadia Hashimi’s When the Moon Is Low (2015) associates a single, private family’s deracination and dispersal with forced exile from a safe, kinship-securing domestic house/nation and degradation to a dangerous and de-humanising state of homelessness in international space. It uses orphanhood, a painful motherless (and fatherless) state, as a metaphor for the late twentieth-century loss of Afghanistan and the international community’s merciless treatment of such nationless groups as Afghan refugees. Indeed, “precarity” and reduction to zo¯e, “the bare life”, or to a “necropolitical” state of “social or civil death”, are some of the ways in which the embodied experience of the refugee has been envisioned by some contemporary thinkers on forced migration and refugees (Butler, 2012; Agamben, 1998; Mbembe, 2003, O’Neill et al., 2019, p. 132; Koegler, 2017, p. 7). Such an exceptional experience has also been related to a contemporary crisis of the nation-state condensed in the stateless, non-citizen condition of the refugee (Jalal, 2014, p. 318). The refugee is a symptom of the nation-state’s crisis of “sovereignty” in addition to a new post-postcolonial condition of marginality, subalternity and “invisibility” (Agamben, 1995, p. 114; Sandten, 2017; Lakraa, 2017). What he/she calls for are counter-hegemonic artistic and ethicopolitical ways of voicing and humanising the refugee (O’Neill et al., p. 134; Koegler, pp. 9–10; Sandten, 2017, p. 13). In what follows, I study kinship metaphors in Nadia Hashimi’s novel, When the Moon Is Low, and the author’s direct engagement with the problem of (Afghan) refugees in a late twentieth-century post-Cold War world in which now families and not just single erring individuals are put to the harsh test

176

L. TAYEB

of illegal border crossing. I examine literary techniques through which Hashimi represents planetary mobility and manages to show the refugee as “not just an outcome of distant wars” but “the manifestation of the true nature of humanity” (Jalal, p. 325). 5.3.1

The Orphaned Children of Afghanistan

In When the Moon Is Low, the metaphorical kinship of the national homeland and community is again made the basis of a narrative that tracks down the trajectory of a single Afghan refugee family across parts of Asia and Europe, until it reaches England, its final destination. The central character’s state of orphanhood followed by widowhood projects the collective loss of the protectiveness and security of home/land: for Fereiba, “Afghanistan is a land of widows and widowers, orphans and the missing”, and the private loss of her mother at the moment of her birth prefigures the loss of “a place to call home” (Hashimi, pp. 3, 221). Kinship metaphors are therefore the thread that stitches together Fereiba’s story: motherhood that is both biological and metaphorical, the “normal family” notion put to the test of homelessness, illegal status and heart-breaking separation (Hashimi, p. 221), and collective/personal or genetic inheritance. As Fereiba says after she becomes separated from her son in Athens: “my children inherited from me the misfortune of a missing childhood, as if the time they spent in my womb stained them with a naseeb of hardship” (Hashimi, p. 222). A parallel between the daughter of Afghanistan, Fereiba, losing her biological and metaphorical mother, and Saleem, the fatherless son losing what weak, beleaguered and fugitive mother he has left, and having to face a pitiless international community on his own, suggests that Afghanistan’s tragic twentieth century history consists of a sinister inheritance and dark repetition and that the only “way out” are the transnational routes of care and human/e action. Like house/nation metaphors in Hosseini’s The Kite Runner and And the Mountains Echoed, the lush, Edenic and haven-like orchard in Hashimi’s novel serves as a metaphor for the brittle, easily conquerable and ravaged national homeland whose loss and destruction turns Afghans into a collectivity of the orphaned and homeless. At some stage in her journey, Fereiba compares the strong, metallic foundations of the western world to Afghanistan’s crumbly world: “from our homes to our families, Afghanistan is made of clay and dust, so impermanent it can be sneezed

5

PLANETARY MOBILITIES: KHALED HOSSEINI’S AND NADIA HASHIMI’S …

177

away. And it has been over and over again”; thinking back upon her father’s orchard, which used to be her childhood refuge from a motherless house/state, she can only see it as a “browned … grove of organic rubble” (p. 279). In the early map of Fereiba’s private world, the division between the house and the orchard metaphorically projects the opposition in national thought between the paternal State and the maternal Nation; hence, the house, a sphere of governance and social laws, appears as the locus of (social) discrimination, female oppression and a general state of injustice that is condoned and thus perpetuated by the paternalistic, Statelike father. In contrast, the orchard, a swathing and nurturing sphere where a lost maternal protectiveness and affection are looked or made up for, clearly stands for the nation with its connotations of territorial homeland and national family collectivity. The problem of the nation is, in other terms, the problem of a defective mother who in dying forsakes her children and a defective State/father who leaves his orphaned daughter to the sly machinery of an unjust social order personified by the step-mother KokoGul. The second house occupied by Fereiba, the cocoon family home she later makes as a wife and mother has a different meaning in the context of historical and political change. Here, the physical house, miniaturised by the living room handwoven carpet, is the “locus” of husband–wife and parent–child kinship, or a “domestic space” where “kinship is made … through the intimate sharing of space, food and nurturance” (Carsten, 2004, p. 35). Carsten’s emphasis on the making of kinship ties is of course meant to call our attention to elements of time and space, aside from the given facts of nature, going into the strengthening of intra-familial kinship relations as well as strong affective relations liable to link people to a house/nation. Before leaving Afghanistan with her children, Fereiba takes a mental picture of the house and domestic objects she is obliged to leave behind: I looked at my pots and pans, blackened with fire. The handwoven carpet in the living room had watched us grow from bride and groom to a full family, and then bore witness to the night we were undone. Tears of joy, tears of heartbreak had melted into its pattern. I left it all, the pieces of our broken life, for Raisa. I knew our home would not remain vacant long. Once Mahmoud’s cousins learned of our escape, one of them was sure to claim it. (Hashimi, p. 117)

178

L. TAYEB

The coming in of strangers after the family’s departure is a blatant image of a desecrated family intimacy that projects at the macro level the desecrating of a national homeland. Moreover, it links the house to historical processes since domestic kinship is again strongly connected to the external world. Whereas in Fereiba’s childhood, the divisions and hierarchies of the house stand for the regnant sociopolitical order, her adult conjugal house shows the vulnerability of houses to external political processes; thus, “far from constituting a kind of safe haven isolated from the world … the house and domestic families are directly impinged upon by the forces of the state” (Carsten, 2004, p. 50). 5.3.2

Saleem’s Sinister Inheritance: Sinking to the Underground

Hashimi’s When the Moon Is Low presents the traumatic repetition and sinister reproduction of orphanhood and hardship as the tragedy of one individual and larger nation. By losing her son in Athens, Fereiba repeats her own trauma, the loss of her mother at the moment of her birth making her vulnerable to the evil eye and ill intent that, in Afghan culture, only mothers can ward off their offspring. Though she does her best to spare her children the misfortune and trauma of a missed, motherless childhood, she ends up handing her legacy to her children, particularly to her son, Saleem. The repetition of her trauma comes down on her with full force when she is separated from her son in Athens: “I am the mother I swore I would never be” and “will always be the mother who left a son behind. It is the hell I live in now and will live in forever” (Hashimi, pp. 248, 249). However, beyond its appearance as a Freudian repetition compulsion, Fereiba’s inability to provide motherly protection to her child stands in the kinship idiom of the novel as a sinister personal and national inheritance. And such inheritance inevitably leads Saleem to sink to the underground world of the orphaned refugees bereft of family, relation and home/land which he previously glimpsed from the outside. Hence, Fereiba’s unsure and fainthearted crossing of borders and her ominous feelings that with each border she leaves behind she is “leading [her] children into an unknown world, and [that] whatever happen[s] … to them [is her] responsibility” metaphorically projects Afghanistan’s tragedy in the kinship image of failed motherhood and aborted childhood (Hashimi, p. 128). In this respect, Nadia Hashimi’s representation of planetary space is different from Khaled Hosseini’s fictional rendering of world connectivity

5

PLANETARY MOBILITIES: KHALED HOSSEINI’S AND NADIA HASHIMI’S …

179

in And the Mountains Echoed. There is no use of time and story chunks and a uni-dimensional linearity orders Hashimi’s narrative into a logical sequence of events whose telos is reaching a particular destination in the global world and a compensatory state of family union and homefulness in the land of refuge. In other terms, space is divided geopolitically along nation-state lines setting discrete national points of escape and refuge (Afghanistan and England) from the intervening Asian and European nation-states, namely Iran, Turkey, Greece, Italy and France. The specific national territories crossed by the characters are placed within an actual international scene with successive countries fitting within the current political and cultural world map. For instance, when the Waziris finally cross over from Turkey to Greece, the image of a sympathetic Europe welcoming refugees is contrasted to a set of Asian countries, Pakistan, Iran and India, which have “grown increasingly fatigued by the burden of Afghan refugees” (Hashimi, p. 176). When confronted to the particular circumstances of refugee life in Europe, the Waziris struggle with a high cost of living, local populations with which they cannot easily “blend” (Hashimi, p. 127), and stronger police vigilance over borders and in metropolitan centres. In addition, differences setting one European country from another in terms of internal policy on the global refugee crisis soon take a toll on the Waziris: the fact that Fereiba is separated from her son in Athens, where Saleem is captured, subjected to a humiliating process of inspection, and sent back to Turkey as an illegal immigrant, places Greece in stark contrast to Germany as a country with merciless legal provisions on the point of refugees. The world the characters travel through is in sum a strictly divided world with the nation-state as constricting unit and national borders as physical barriers holding refugees from the possibility of a normal (family) life. Focused on the highly perilous cross-border journey of a refugee and asylum seeking family, the novel shows the global power “inequalities” affecting mobility and paints some of the “differential barriers to movement” in our contemporary world (Faist, 2013, p. 1637; Glick Schiller & Salazar, 2012, p. 5); it also projects the refugee’s quandary in terms of tragic oscillation between forced and “arrested mobilities” (Mavrommatis, 2018, p. 1). In the novel, the camp projects the absurd condition of the refugee as a highly “precarious” state of “arrested” mobility (Butler, 2012; Mavrommatis, 2018). The underground world of refugee camps and illegal status appears as a space outside the sphere of national jurisdiction and normal urban dwelling yet hemmed and contained by them. As a “forsaken corner

180

L. TAYEB

of a city, bordered by buildings and within meters of normalcy”, Attiki square lies on the margins of Athens physically as well as figuratively. In contrast, the refugee camp in Patras is situated on the borders of a nation and is “a transit point” to other European countries; developing into a shantytown, it appears as a space outside the logic of city planning, an urban “blemish”, “a place where vagrants huddled in desperate filth”, and a quandary for national city planners torn between “raz[ing] it to the ground or mak[ing] it better because it was inevitable” (Hashimi, p. 302). The three refugee camps represented in the novel, Attiki Square, Patras and the Jungle in the French city of Calais, are spaces that substantiate national borders; they appear as “spaces of confinement” that “arrest” the mobility of refugees and place them within highly visible spheres of national surveillance (Lakraa, 2017, p. 3; Mavrommatis, p. 1). As “spaces of waiting”, they also attest to “the imbrications of mobility, immobility, and waiting in new constellations of power and crisis” (Lagji, 2019, p. 5). In recent studies of refugeeism and the experience of the camp, however, the emphasis shifts from oppressive surveillance and immobility towards the forms of “politicized and politicizing practice” and “individual and collective agency” through which refugees resist national “practices of containment” (Koegler, 2017, p. 2; Rotter, 2016, pp. 87, 97). The camps Saleem is obliged to stop by appear as places where either lawlessness or an internal code of conduct and honour reign apart from the official realm of (national) law. Saleem is molested by Saboor on Attiki square and has to flee the camp for Patras after blindly stubbing him in self-defense (Hashimi, p. 300). In Patras and the Jungle, refugees lead a makeshift social life in harmony with their cultural codes and habits, devise ways of “temporary integration” or resistive “counter-techniques of invisibility” and trace the underground route in which they can slip through the (next) border (Mavrommatis, p. 1; Lakraa, p. 5). In sum, the camp substantiates the (national) force of “necropower” and immobility, yet camp life also bears witness to the refugee’s resistive strategies of in/visibility, creative waiting and (planetary) mobility (Mbembe, 2003, p. 39). Outside the refugee camp, Saleem moves into “the shadowy world of smuggling”, a shifty underground world “without laws or codes or safety nets” where lone individuals can sneak into vans or over trucks and get successfully transported across national borders or lose hold and get killed under truck tires, as is the case of countless refugees like Naeem (Hashimi, p. 308). Though part of the lucky few who make it across dangerous transit points, Saleem is propelled into the Rome underground world

5

PLANETARY MOBILITIES: KHALED HOSSEINI’S AND NADIA HASHIMI’S …

181

of pimps and smugglers and has his train journey from Rome to Paris enabled by a smuggler who uses refugees as drug mules in exchange for counterfeit passports and smooth transit (Hashimi, pp. 347–354). Following Saleem’s journey across a perilous underground route of clandestine travel, Hashimi gives the reader a keen feel of the embodied and affective experiences of Saleem. One can argue that the novel builds up a “kin-aesthetic” representation of Saleem’s journey, capturing minute embodied sensations and affects experienced by Saleem every step of the way (Merriman & Pearce, 2017, pp. 496–497). What comes to the foreground is not just the narrative account of Saleem’s underground adventure but also the physical pain of his unfed, unwashed and cramped body, and his feelings of fear and humiliation, loss and despair, hope and courage. Hashimi’s narrative kin-aesthetics of refugee im/mobility of course aim to impart the intimate experience of forced mobility to the reader, explore an alternative planetary sphere of embodied mobility and interrelating, and provide an insight into mechanisms of control and resistance making mobility and immobility rather blurry and interpenetrating processes. 5.3.3

The Human/e Points of Transit: Refugees Between the Impersonal and the Human

Indeed, one can argue that Nadia Hashimi’s novel, When the Moon Is Low, depicts the planetary non-national space of human relation and mobility as an alternative perspective on the global, geopolitical map of nationstates and borders and the underground world of clandestine mobility counteracting them. In this context, Laurie Edson defines the theoretical “mov[ing] away from thinking along ‘global’ lines” towards “speak[ing] in terms of the planet – the place or space of exchanges and sharing that we all inhabit” as an intellectual orientation “toward conceptualizing a more just and ethical world” (2015, p. 107). In the same vein, Robert T. Tally considers fantasy and otherworldliness—the relatively recent technologically enabled external or satellite view of the planet—as “a discursive modality … marked by its fundamental attention to otherness or otherworldliness” and leading artists “to visualise our world in novel ways, and to imagine different approaches to representing and otherwise engaging the world-system” (2015, p. 195). For Neil Turnbull, satellite technology’s revealing of the earth as a simultaneously “cultural, political and ecological – and perhaps, in some yet-to-be-defined way, spiritual”

182

L. TAYEB

planetary space leads to foregrounding representation and vision in our relations to it: from “something which lies ‘beneath our feet’”, it turns into “something lying ‘in front of our eyes’ and as such it ceases to be an ontological basis of ‘firm-footedness’ but is revealed as a set of visible patterns, flows and interconnections [emphasis added]”. Consequently, the planetary perspective deterritorialises the earth and forges “a new political imaginary outside the ideological strictures of the modern nation-state” figuring a rather “dynamic and open earth that is an expansive plane that brings all elements with a single plane of composition [and] … stands for the idea of a way of ‘dwelling’ without territory; an idea of global being for a new planetary Mitsein” (Turnbull, 2006, pp. 133–134, 136–137). One powerful symbol of planetary Mitsein and eco-cultural interconnection in Hashimi’s When the Moon Is Low is water. From the guardian angel promising to bring roshanee or light to Fereiba’s path at the beginning of the novel to the recurrent association of roshanee with water throughout the Waziris’ journey culminating in Fereiba’s dream of a Saleem swimming his way through to her immediately before the family’s foreshadowed reunion, water imagery serves to turn a dangerous international route into an eco-human planetary totality: in her dream, Fereiba sees Saleem swimming across a brilliant blue ocean with ripples that sparkled under a warm sun…. There was water all around him, and he glided through, swimming in smooth, strong strokes as if he’d been raised by the ocean. From afar, I could see his mischievous grin, the proud triumph of a boy who’d found his own way home. (Hashimi, p. 375)

Seen outside human geography, water is, in this passage and the rest of the novel, a natural element that arches over national divisions and boundaries and underscores the myriad and multi-directional flows of the earth. As Neil Turnbull explains using Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical idiom, the earth turns into a “fluidity” and “a destratified plane upon which all minds and bodies can be situated” instead of a fixed territorial expanse (2006, p. 135). Throughout the novel, water is an eco-cultural element linking the Afghan cultural singularity—“water is roshanee” (Hashimi, p. 175)—to the universal natural element—water—and serves as the material/spiritual medium of the family’s transit across borders. Hence, the water that Mahmood Waziri, a civil engineer in Kabul, provides for his countrymen seems to cast a guardian light on his family’s escape

5

PLANETARY MOBILITIES: KHALED HOSSEINI’S AND NADIA HASHIMI’S …

183

journey from Kabul to London, throughout which every contact with water heralds the bright prospects of safe and fortunate transit: water, in the form of a “microshower of cool droplets” on the cheeks of Fereiba and her children crossing over from the Turkish Izmir to the Greek island of Chios and from there on to Athens, or in the form of a heavy rain in an Athenian playground, a hot steamy shower in Roksana’s flat, or the English channel that shall finally be crossed by Saleem (Hashimi, pp. 175, 206, 292, 379–380), enables the reader an alternative planetary view of the earth, not as the global inter-continental panorama of nationstates and borders, but as an ecological field “indexing … the world as a relational domain” (Elias & Moraru, 2015, p. xxiii). While water as eco-cultural element plays a central role in figuring an alternative planetary and relational domain in which the characters’ movement is unshackled, the planetary also refers to a human relational domain that transcends national and cultural barriers. In this respect, international immigration laws and entry restrictions stand in stark opposition to the human cogs that enable the Waziris to move on from one journey leg to another. In Tayyebat, the Iranian border town in which they first land, “sympathetic Iranians” like the woman running the apartment building where Fereiba and her three children spend their first night as refugees, stand for the human willingness, apart from national policy, to “open … doors and accept hordes of Afghans as refugees” (Hashimi, pp. 126– 127). Setting “this strange woman” against the “shifty” Afghan smugglers who regularly plan illicit cross-border journeys for fleeing Afghan individuals and families against huge sums of money, Fereiba senses an intuitive human sympathy in the former and associates mobility enabling smugglers with the cold impersonal machinery policing borders and embodied by the men in uniforms, the representatives of (inter)national laws and order (Hashimi, p. 127). A particularly significant human cog in Fereiba’s journey is the Turkish couple, Hakan and Hayal Yilmaz, who host the Waziris during their stay in the Turkish farming town of Intikal and who appear to Fereiba as “the kind of people who saw an Afghan mother traveling with three children and could guess the story behind” (Hashimi, p. 130). Here, the human connection and interaction established between the old Turkish couple and the migrant Afghan family operates in an “intuitive” mode “beneath the threshold of discourse” (Eshelman, 2015, p. 96), since the human “story behind” Fereiba precedes and abrogates any cultural or political barriers against understanding. Once again, the mimetic and intuitive level, regarded in Eshelman’s performatist

184

L. TAYEB

planetarity as a primary basis of human interaction and communication, underpins the direct human/e traffic between individuals prior to linguistic and cultural understanding and the language of international law and order. From a performatist planetary perspective, Saleem’s lonesome illicit journey across national borders brings to the fore three major separate yet parallel and corresponding human players: set in three different national locations yet interconnected through their direct impact on Saleem, Ekin, Roksana and Mimi take parallel mimetic and intuitive actions in Hashimi’s novel; they fall in with the notion of the “opaque subject” that Raoul Eshelman defines as a constitutive feature of artistic performatism aiming to re-inscribe the human with its corollaries of meaning, truth and value against the barren post-structuralist notion of the human as an always already occluded effect of discourse (Eshelman, 2008, p. xii; Eshelman, 2015, p. 92). In Hashimi’s novel, three geographically separate teenage girls, the Turkish Ekin, the half-Greek Roksana and the Albanian Mimi, are interconnected in the planetary field vulnerably and fugitively crossed by Saleem. Each of these three girls plays an indispensable part in Saleem’s perilous movement across borders: stealthily handing Saleem a huge sum of money stolen from her stingy landowning father, Ekin is in part driven by adolescent passion and gratitude for the brief stolen moments of flirtatious company she spends with a diffident and reluctant Saleem. Her intuitive humane act stems from a mixture of passionate and compassionate feelings, and invites the reader to reconsider the previous image she projects of a flippant and irresponsible girl. In contrast to Ekin, Roksana is the model righteous and responsible girl wise beyond her years; engaged in the volunteering work of an international aid organisation, which provides the minimum humanitarian service of distributing daily meals to the Afghan refugees huddled in Attiki Square in Athens, Roksana takes a particular liking to Saleem and labours through varied means to help him and his family. After helping Fereiba and her two children to board the train to Italy, Roksana provides indispensable moral and material support to Saleem during his stay in Athens, and finally hands him the valuable address of his aunt which shall finally lead him to reunite with his mother and family in London. In contrast to both Ekin and Roksana, the Albanian prostitute, Mimi, is part of the precarious, lawless underground world in which Southern European migrants in the metropolitan city of Rome get entangled. No socially better than Saleem, or even worse given her condition as a social outcast bereft of

5

PLANETARY MOBILITIES: KHALED HOSSEINI’S AND NADIA HASHIMI’S …

185

family and friends, Mimi nevertheless leads Saleem to the smuggler who enables his transit to France in exchange for a contraband service. The invaluable help provided by Mimi is this time repaid by Saleem, since he offers to free Mimi of her pimp and enables her to escape, with a few hundreds of Euros in her pocket, his violent enslaving hold. In each story, the bio-social human disposition towards love, understanding and help is mimetically reproduced and confirmed. Ekin’s act of help is motivated by both a primal sexual desire and an affectionate inclination towards love and companionship, despite the cultural predisposing of girls, in both Afghanistan and Turkey, towards modesty and (sexual) restraint. Roksana’s compassionate a-sexual treatment apparently stems from a vague sense of national kinship with Saleem (Roksana’s father turns out to be an Afghan immigrant in Greece). Her behaviour, like that of Ekin, runs counter cultural expectations around European femininity and is this time requited by a mixture of sexual desire and deep affection on the part of Saleem. The one-sided sexual or otherwise affective love relation that links both Ekin and Roksana to Saleem turns into a deep empathetic connection linking the socially fallen and outcast woman, Mimi, and the vagrant half-boy, half-man refugee, Saleem. Listening to her story, Saleem at first feels a strange indignation against Mimi “for telling him things so horrible that his own troubles paled”; he also briefly considers his own cultural view of her circumstances coming to the now pointless conclusion that “in Afghanistan, she would have been put out of her misery long ago for the dishonor she had brought upon her family” (Hashimi, pp. 330, 331). Instead of relying on cultural assumptions, the two characters are instinctively drawn by the mutual empathetic feelings they hold to each other. The fact that their empathy culminates in a sexual embrace (Hashimi, p. 343) reproduces the bio-social mixture of physical desire and spiritual love that links the three girls in their culturally and nationally distant exchanges with Saleem. In short, an intuitive disposition towards human sym/empathy, desire or love, and extra-linguistic, extra-cultural understanding counteracts the cold, impersonal forces of inter/national laws and turns a striated global space into a fluid planetary field for the Waziri family. Nadia Hashimi’s narrative is driven by the literary need to humanise and “provide a vehicle for the marginalised voice” of the refugee by painting him/her as an individual with whom the reader can identify or empathise (Sandten, 2017, p. 3); at the same time, it foregrounds the human/e connectivity that leads the Waziris to vanquish the cold,

186

L. TAYEB

inhuman and impersonal forces blocking their passage towards safety and kinship embodied in the craven family reunion at the end: “[o]ne day, we will not look over our shoulders in fear or sleep on borrowed land with one eye open or shudder at the sight of a uniform. One day we will have a place to call home” (Hashimi, p. 128). Leading Saleem to discover Attiki Square for the first time, Jamal painfully reveals to him “the secret world of people who did not exist. They were neither immigrant, nor refugee. They were undocumented and untraceable, shadows that disappeared in the sun” (Hashimi, p. 190). In the arena of geopolitical discord and global economic competition, the refugee turns into a nameless entity and falls prey to all kinds of unsympathetic and dehumanising treatment. Worried that Roksana might see him as a “refugee case”, rather than “a friend”, Saleem fails to decipher her relation to him and tell the fellow-feeling attitude from the impersonal and mechanical work of humanitarian aid; in line with the novel’s confirmation of a planetary human connectivity, she later calmly reassures him: “‘I don’t see a refugee when I look at you. I see someone who should be in my class, sharing books and playing sports. I see you’”. (Hashimi, pp. 275, 296). And Nadia Hashimi’s novel is certainly written with this planetary human/e intention to see and aesthetically show the refugee. To conclude, the dualism of home and diaspora smacking of midtwentieth century colonial hierarchies and power relations gives way, in Hosseini’s and Hashimi’s novels, to a new sense of relatedness of individuals and nations to the world, variably constructed as an international or global sphere of nation-states and cultural pluralities, and a planetary sphere of human life and other-than-human ecology. The novelists artistically endeavour to move beyond the fixed geopolitical maps of the world in order to access the planetary sphere of inter-human relationality. By presenting narrative worlds in which the vagrant refugee and floating individual take centre stage, they “[turn] the condition of the refugee – who represents today the vanguard of humanity – upside down”: from exceptional state, refugeeism distils the new condition of the human in the twenty-first century (Jalal, 2014, p. 323). As Judith Butler perceptively argued, a new consciousness of (human and non-human) life as vulnerable, precarious, codependent and in vital need of preservation by ethical and political means is the hallmark of early twenty-first-century philosophical and social thought. Through such awareness of “vulnerability” as a fundamental condition of life, a new posthuman conception of the world

5

PLANETARY MOBILITIES: KHALED HOSSEINI’S AND NADIA HASHIMI’S …

187

can emerge through abandoning the cosmic “world” as a divided, hierarchised and appropriated sphere and embracing the planetary earth as a continuous sphere of sharing, “cohabitation” and interrelating (Butler, 2012).

References Agamben, G. (1995). We refugees. Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures, 49(2), 114–119. https://doi.org/10.1080/00397709.1995.107 33798. Agamben, G. (1998). Homo Sacer: Sovereign power and bare life (D. HellerRoazen, Trans.). Stanford University Press. Original Edition: Agamben, G. (1995). Homo Sacer. Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita. Giulio Einaudi Editore. Blumenthal, R. (2012). Looking for home in the Islamic diaspora of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Azar Nafisi, and Khaled Hosseini. Arab Studies Quarterly, 34(4), 250– 264. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41858711. Accessed 18 Nov 2018. Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a theory of practice (R. Nice, Trans.). Cambridge University Press. Original Edition: Bourdieu, P. (1972). Esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique, précédé de trois études d’éthnologie kabyle. Librairie Droz. Butler, J. (2012). Precarious life, vulnerability and the ethics of cohabitation. The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 26(2), 134–151. http://www.jstor.org/sta ble/10.5325/jspecphil.26.2.0134. Accessed 6 Nov 2015. Carsten, J. (1995). The substance of kinship and the heat of the hearth: Feeding, personhood and relatedness among Malays in Pulau Langkawi. American Ethnologist, 22(2), 223–241. http://www.jstor.org/stable/646700. Accessed 9 Dec 2018. Carsten, J. (2000). Introduction: Cultures of relatedness. In J. Carsten (Ed.), Cultures of relatedness: New approaches to the study of kinship (pp. 1–36). Cambridge University Press. Carsten, J. (2004). After kinship. Cambridge University Press. Carsten, J. (2007). Introduction: Ghosts of memory. In J. Carsten (Ed.), Ghosts of memory: Essays on remembrance and relatedness (pp. 1–35). Blackwell. Castells, M. (2009). Communication power. Oxford University Press. Castells, M. (2010). The rise of the network society (2nd ed.). Blackwell. Edson, L. (2015). Planetarity, performativity, relationality: Claire Denis’s Chocolat and cinematic ethics. In A. J. Elias & C. Moraru (Eds.), The planetary turn: Relationality and geoaesthetics in the twenty-first century (pp. 107–124). Northwestern University Press. Elias, A. J., & Moraru, C. (2015). Introduction: The planetary condition. In A. J. Elias & C. Moraru (Eds.), The planetary turn: Relationality and geoaesthetics in the twenty-first century (pp. xi–xxxvii). Northwestern University Press.

188

L. TAYEB

Eshelman, R. (2008). Performatism, or the end of postmodernism. The Davies Group Publishers. Eshelman, R. (2015). Archetypologies of the human: Planetary performatism, cinematic relationality and Iñárritu’s Babel. In A. J. Elias & C. Moraru (Eds.), The planetary turn: Relationality and geoaesthetics in the twenty-first century (pp. 89–105). Northwestern University Press. Faist, T. (2013). The mobility turn: A new paradigm for the social sciences? Ethnic and Racial Studies, 36(11), 1637–1646. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 01419870.2013.812229. Glick Schiller, N., & Salazar, N. B. (2012). Regimes of mobility across the globe. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 1369183X.2013.723253. Graham, M. (2010). A way to feel good again: The Kite Runner. In M. Graham, Afghanistan in the cinema (pp. 146–164). University of Illinois Press. http:// www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/j.ctt1xckvr.12. Accessed 27 Feb 2018. Gupta, A., & Ferguson, J. (1992). Beyond ‘culture’: Space, identity and the politics of difference. Cultural Anthropology, 7 (1), 6–23. http://www.jstor. org/stable/656518. Accessed 25 Sept 2013. Hashimi, N. (2015). When the Moon Is Low. William Morrow. Hosseini, K. (2003). The Kite Runner. Bloomsbury. Hosseini, K. (2013). And the Mountains Echoed. Bloomsbury. Jalal, T. (2014). Re-imagining the refugee. Crossings: Journal of Migration and Culture, 5(2&3), 317–326. https://doi.org/10.1386/cjmc.5.2-3.317_1. Koegler, C. (2017). Precarious urbanity: ‘The Jungle’ (Calais) and the politics of performing the urban. Postcolonial Text, 12(3&4), 1–15. Lagji, A. (2019). Waiting in motion: Mapping postcolonial fiction, postcolonial mobilities, and migration through Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West. Mobilities, 14(2), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2018.1533684. Lakraa, H. (2017). Im/mobility, power, and in/visible refugees. Postcolonial Text, 12(3&4), 1–17. Lefebvre, H. (1991). The production of space (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). Blackwell. Original Edition: Lefebvre, H. (1974, 1984). Production de l’espace. Editions Anthropos. Maier, C. S. (1993). A surfeit of memory? Reflections on history, melancholy and denial. History and Memory, 5(2), 136–152. http://www.jstor.org/sta ble/25618655. Accessed 22 May 2012. Mavrommatis, G. (2018). Grasping the meaning of integration in an era of (forced) mobility: Ethnographic insights from an informal refugee camp. Mobilities, 13(6), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2018. 1500098. Mbembe, A. (2003). Necropolitics (L. Meintjes, Trans.). Public Culture, 15(1), 11–40.

5

PLANETARY MOBILITIES: KHALED HOSSEINI’S AND NADIA HASHIMI’S …

189

Merriman, P., & Pearce, L. (2017). Mobility and the humanities. Mobilities, 12(4), 493–508. https://doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2017.1330853. Moraru, C. (2015a). Decompressing culture: Three steps toward a geomethodology. In A. J. Elias & C. Moraru (Eds.), The planetary turn: Relationality and geoaesthetics in the twenty-first century (pp. 211–244). Northwestern University Press. Moraru, C. (2015b). Reading for the planet: Towards a geomethodology. University of Michigan Press. O’Neill, M., Erel, U., Kaptani, E., & Reynolds, T. (2019). Borders, risk and belonging: Challenges for arts-based research in understanding the lives of women asylum seekers and migrants ‘at the borders of humanity’. Crossings: Journal of Migration and Culture, 10(1), 129–147. https://doi.org/ 10.1386/cjmc.10.1.129_1. Rotter, R. (2016). Waiting in the asylum determination process: Just an empty interlude? Time and Society, 25(1), 80–101. https://doi.org/10.1177/096 1463X15613654. Sandten, C. (2017). Representations of poverty and precariousness in contemporary refugee narratives. Postcolonial Text, 12(3&4), 1–15. Spivak, G. C. (2003). Death of a discipline. Columbia University Press. Stampfl, T. (2014). Capturing a nation: The elusiveness of cultural identity in Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner. In G. Pultar (Ed.), Imagined identities: Identity formation in the age of globalization (pp. 33–48). Syracuse University Press. Tally Jr., R. T. (2015). Beyond the flaming walls of the world: Fantasy, alterity and the postnational constellation. In A. J. Elias & C. Moraru (Eds.), The planetary turn: Relationality and geoaesthetics in the twenty-first century (pp. 193–210). Northwestern University Press. Turnbull, N. (2006). The ontological consequences of Copernicus: Global being in the planetary world. Theory, Culture & Society, 23(1), 125–139. https:// doi.org/10.1177/0263276406063232. Westphal, B. (2011). Geocriticism: Real and fictional spaces (R. T. Tally Jr., Trans.). Palgrave Macmillan. Original Edition: Westphal, B. (2007). La géocritique: Réel, fiction, espace. Les Éditions de Minuit. Wilson, J. (2017). Novels of flight and arrival: Abu Bakr Khaal, African Titanics (2014 [2008]) and Sunjeev Sahota, The Year of the Runaways (2015). Postcolonial Text, 12(3&4), 1–14.

CHAPTER 6

Conclusion: Towards a Planetary Field of Relation and Cohabitation

The new tendency in current social research to carefully establish mobility as a “new norm” and to break with the sedentarist paradigm in social thinking has certainly affected the way the family is thought and theorised (Faist, 2013, pp. 1643–1644; Sheller & Urry, 2006, p. 209). One immediate effect has been a break with the “individualisation thesis” and “dispersal theory” regarding mobility and the family, movement and relatedness as two irreconcilable opposites. Geographical mobility is not seen as a factor of deracination and dispersal but as constitutive of a dynamic set of embodied and emotional relations embedding individuals within families and larger groups (Holdsworth, 2013, pp. 7–8; Smart, 2011). Departing from the idea that the family does not disintegrate but is transformed through mobility, this book has been an attempt, in the context of a mobility turn in the social sciences, to come to terms with the nature of some twentieth and twenty-first-century mobilities and their impacts on the family and kinship relations. Based on literary accounts of family mobilities, I studied what I identified as three types of migrant mobilities in the global age, postcolonial migrations, emotional and cultural mobilities in the context of the late twentieth century immigrant diaspora, and forced mobilities in contexts of war and political upheaval. This book has grappled with one central question: how can we disentangle the complex bundle of relations embedding individuals within © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Tayeb, Kinship in the Age of Mobility and Technology, Palgrave Studies in Mediating Kinship, Representation, and Difference, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69889-8_6

191

192

L. TAYEB

families, networks and communities and how can we trace such relations within social fields that are no longer contained by genealogy, place and localised community. Through recent anthropological and sociological insights which developed as responses to the global reach that mobilities and technologies have taken, I presented a set of theoretical reflections on “biogenetic” kinship and territorial and community ties in our contemporary world. While blood has been decentered in kinship anthropology as a result of the de-stabilising of the old nature/culture dichotomy, both territory and community have fallen prey to scientific imprecision, incoherence and deadlock as a result of the theoretical undoing of the traditional continuum, place, culture and community. Taking into account the anthropological loss of certainty around the sacred, biologised notion of blood, its new tendency to dereify culture and community and a new sociological conception of “mobile forms of belonging”, I approached the transnational family as a process and (cultural) practice of interrelating in motion, a conflicted psychological, emotional and cultural terrain, and a locus where relationships are in constant (re)construction and flow (Fallov et al., 2013). The fictional texts discussed in this book show varied scenarios of transnational travel and transnational family life. They are literary attempts to address the effects on families and communities of global changes triggered in large part by mobility and technology. This makes the book a text-based account of social worlds which abandons an easy distinction between empirical reality and representation. If we depart from a performative view of “reality” as the dynamic interplay of representation and a material process of enaction, we are bound to remove the real from its association with a pure realm that precedes representation (Murray & Upstone, 2014). Further, the texts I have studied are believed to contribute to social research a particular insight and knowledge that the empirical focus on the actual and the concrete is unable to yield: both the longue durée view enabled by narrative accounts and the “ghostly matter” composed of emotions, memories and hauntings and captured by fiction are able to bridge the past and the present and the micro and macro spheres while also granting access to the infinitisemally small worlds of personal experience, private feelings and intimate relations (Gordon, 2008; Aguiar et al., 2019). From such perspective, the seven family sagas related in the novels of Hanif Kureishi, Zadie Smith, Monica Ali, Jhumpa Lahiri, Khaled Hosseini and Nadia Hashimi cover a wide range of issues in relation to migrant

6

CONCLUSION: TOWARDS A PLANETARY FIELD …

193

family mobilities in our contemporary world. If some of the stories show the onerous weight and deceiving aspect of ties of family and kinship in a globalising world, all of them present kinship as a value counteracting globalisation’s deterritorialising operations and the family as an emotional refuge where vital kinship and relatedness are sought. Hanif Kureishi’ The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000) present second generation immigrants who have conflictual relations to both homelands and host national societies: they have to journey through webs of relation before they can establish some stable form of family and collective existence, or recognise the value of kinship. Conversely, in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003) and Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake (2003), the British and Eastern American contexts of immigration and the shifting of attention from the dualism of home and host culture to the rampant globalisation of labour, economy and culture, presents us with a different set of issues in relation to migrant South Asian wives and mothers. Both texts aim at de-stabilising the notion of a passive female migration and upset the traditional association in migration studies of wives with biological and cultural reproduction as opposed to the un/skilled labour migration of husbands. Both trace the movements of their female protagonists towards forms of agency within a reconstructed domestic sphere and diasporic community. Khaled Hosseini and Nadia Hashimi take a different perspective on migrant family mobilities through a focus on the geopolitical conflicts that changed the course of Afghanistan’s twentieth century history and engendered the flight and dispersal of thousands of Afghan people all over the world. Their novels are narrative accounts of personal memories and life stories of flight, deracination, separation and dispersal driven by the artistic need to paint a planetary picture of kinship relations in such extreme situations as war, political violence and the personal threat of death. Hosseini de-links violence from its old political form (by refraining from its association with an imperial centre or a recognisable internal political faction), frees kinship from the constraints of rootedness and place-boundedness and considers the possibilities of reconstructing biogenetic kinship ties as well as an emerging notion of human kinship in an open planetary field. In Hosseini’s novels, The Kite Runner (2003), and And the Mountains Echoed (2013), Afghanistan is not painted from the inside as a self-sufficient national location but is microscopically viewed as a politically and culturally interrelated place in global geography. The old colonial rhetoric of victimhood, blame and retribution

194

L. TAYEB

disappears as the forces of injustice are either associated with an impersonal geopolitical machinery (the Soviet forces invading the country), or a universal “mimetic” inclination towards lethal interrelating (embodied by Amir’s alter ego, Assef in The Kite Runner and Adel’s father in And the Mountains Echoed). Hosseini’s texts inscribe a “mimetic” and “intuitive” relationality that “has both a violent and a reconciliatory potential”, and where the “impossible need to transcend” violence is the sole remedy to it: violence needs to be confronted rather than dodged by taking refuge in the endless ironical play of discourse, or illusively resolved through ineffectual social covenants and contracts (Eshelman, 2015, pp. 90, 92). That is why a weakling and diffident Amir can only redeem himself through a violent physical fight against its most horrid embodiment, the demonic, sadistic and bloodthirsty Assef (Hosseini, 2003, pp. 265–266). Assef’s maternal biological link to Germany and his adulation of Hitler establishes a direct link between twentieth century totalitarian political philosophy (based on the fundamental rejection of relatedness across difference) and the “ever-present potential for violence” in world politics (Eshelman, p. 92). Embodying both the universal human and particular political inclination to violence, Assef represents the dark side of global relationality that Hosseini’s novel aims to transcend. The reunion of Amir with what relates him to his unacknowledged half-brother Hassan, namely Hassan’s orphaned child Sohrab, is ultimately enabled by Sohrab’s movement to live with his half-uncle Amir and his wife Soraya in California. The fact that they form a reconstructed and slowly healing family and that such process is taking place in America and not Afghanistan suggests that (national) origins are no longer fundamental to the preservation of kinship ties. Sohrab’s first smile at the sight of a flying kite in a California sky, after months of traumatic retreat from the world, not only signals the prospects of rebirth and healing; his vision of “home” in an alien place and environment suggests a new way of relating to particular national locations (California and the United States in this instance) as de-nationalised patches of an “otherworldly” earth. Aesthetically, The Kite Runner thus makes a radical ethical move from the “mimetic maps” of the past to the new “literary cartography of the postnational world-system” (Tally Jr., 2015, p. 194). Like Sohrab’s auspicious smile under a California sky, Pari’s reunion with her aunt’s family in France in And the Mountains Echoed (2013) foregrounds the planetary rather than national field of relation. Not only

6

CONCLUSION: TOWARDS A PLANETARY FIELD …

195

are the old Pari and the young Pari genetically unrelated to both France and California, one growing up French as a result of her secret adoption by the half-French, half-Afghan Nila Wahdati, the other growing up as a hyphenated American in the California-based community of Afghan exrefugees and immigrants; their reunion away from Afghanistan enabled by the Greek plastic surgeon working for a humanitarian aid organisation in Kabul, Markos Varvaris, radically decouples place and kinship, at the same time as it divests places of their national significance and projects on them, to use Robert T. Tally Jr.’s terms again, a “fantastic”, “otherworldly” aura (2015, p. 194). In Avignon, Pari sits on a Park bench overlooking the Pont d’Avignon and listens to the city’s marvellously clear and “documented” history told by her aunt. The place’s preserved history contrasts with the characters’ lost history and memory and their deracination and dispersal: As she translates the words, I marvel at the city across the river. Having recently discovered my own history, I am awestruck to find myself in a place so chockfull of it, all of it documented, preserved. It’s miraculous. Everything about this city is. I feel wonder at the clarity of the air, at the wind swooping down on the river, making the water slap against the stony banks, at how full and rich the light is and how it seems to shine from every direction. (Hosseini, 2013, p. 452)

What makes Avignon a miraculous city in the eyes of Pari is not simply its long preserved history but her own ability to re-connect with her aunt/sister in it. Throughout Hosseini’s And the Mountains Echoed, the geographical particularity and historical specificity of all places becomes irrelevant to the human endeavour to (re-)establish kinship, which is like Thalia’s vagrant photo or Pari’s light, floating feathers, a thing/memory to be guarded and carried along rather than roots to be struck down. In an even more harrowing image of the deracinated kinship of transnational families in Nadia Hashimi’s When the Moon Is Low (2015), a weary, weather-beaten Saleem dangerously crosses the tunnel linking Calais to the English town Dover, in company of a fellow-refugee, Ajmal; in his pocket Saleem carefully guards his mother’s gold bangles, which he has previously sold in Athens immediately before he is captured by the police and separated from the rest of his family:

196

L. TAYEB

Saleem touched his pocket and felt for the pouch. He thought of his return to the pawnshop in Athens and the surprised look on the store owner’s face when Saleem reached into his pocket and handed over money he could scarcely afford to pay. Madar-jan, I am just a few kilometres away. I will be by your side and show Padar-jan that I can be the man my family needs me to be … The man I want to be. I will not stop until I see these bangles back on your wrist, Madar-jan. (Hashimi, p. 380)

Like the wristwatch Saleem retrieves from his father’s personal belongings, Fereiba’s gold bangles, “the gentle touch of a mother”, appear as a sacred kinship-preserving object in the circumstances of personal and collective loss and deracination (Hashimi, pp. 113, 212). The sole link to the mother she has never known, as well as the motherland she has lost, Fereiba’s guardedly transported gold bangles not only project the dispersed family’s reunion at the end, but also embody a personal and collective memory it has managed to preserve beyond homelands and places of origin, despite dispersal. Since today’s family relations stretch over geographical fields that can encompass the planet, I used literary accounts as a way to explore and figure forth a new planetary field of kinship relations. The new planetary paradigm in Arts and literature poses the Other-oriented concept of the planet, figuring world connectivity as an eco-human continuum, against the concept of the globe geared to power (in its new financial form) and the erasure of difference; it endorses planetary relationality against social-political, discursive-ideological and linguistic-cultural barriers. While globalisation processes operate in a priorly divided, international sphere of relation and tend to differentiate and hierarchise mobilities, planetarisation connects the world by representing the earth as a sphere of flows and multiplicities (Turnbull, 2006). The planetary paradigm marks a new aesthetic, cultural and ethico-political orientation towards an engagement with world connectivity that aims at addressing the forms of potentially violent disconnection and discord attendant upon cultural and economic globalisation. In other terms, the new paradigm leads us back to the question of identity and difference, but this time ontologically figures them through coexistence and the sharing of a totality, the earth or planet. It emerges out of an urgent need to devise a new politics of difference and break with hegemonic and divisive notions

6

CONCLUSION: TOWARDS A PLANETARY FIELD …

197

of world connectivity. Venn Couze poses the new “politics of difference” against “the politics of identity”, which now dangerously “plays in the hands of ethnic essentialisms and the politics of communalism”; he defines it as a new form of interrelating that engages with difference without either abolishing belonging or adhering to a totalitarian and exclusionary form of identity politics; a “politics of the commons” is such a new form of engaging with difference which neither abolishes difference nor identity and belonging (Couze, 2014, pp. 38, 40). For Tariq Jazeel, a specifically “geographical tension … sits in the very belly of cosmopolitanism” and prevents it from providing the adequate spatial idiom for world plurality. The “geographical imaginations” upon which cosmopolitanism as the modality of plurality and co-living rests “necessarily bear the burden of European thought and history – the (self-denying) centre – that will continue to measure, recognize and arbitrate on difference through the very categorizations it has conjured into existence”. It is by abandoning such “no geographically innocent signifier[s]” as “cosmos” and “globe”, by “unlearning cosmopolitanism”, that more egalitarian modes of living together can be conceived (Jazeel, 2011, pp. 78, 85, 89). Again, projecting the planetary future depends on spatially conceiving a common world and ethico-political parameters of co-living in which interrelating pluralities neither abolish their selfsameness, nor elaborate hegemonic programmes around an exclusive singularity. Couze’s “politics of the commons” and Jazeel’s “planetary futures” vaguely project a coming form of world plurality by “unlearning” an old, potentially divisive and inegalitarian political vocabulary. Judith Butler digs deep into the notion of a shared humanity and bases her ethico-political engagement with difference on “precarity” and “vulnerability” and her account of planetary relationality on “cohabitation”. Since heightened precarity is what characterises human life in an interconnected and inter-dependent world, the category of the human has become associated with a fundamental vulnerability rooted in our basic existence as bodily beings and stemming from our basic dependence on others. Drawing upon insights of both Emmanuel Levinas and Hannah Arendt, Butler makes “an existential claim” out of the state of human vulnerability and precarity, a claim that everyone is precarious, and this follows from our social existence as bodily beings who depend upon one another for shelter and sustenance and who, therefore, are at risk of statelessness, homelessness, and destitution

198

L. TAYEB

under unjust and unequal political conditions…. In this sense, precarity is indissociable from that dimension of politics that addresses the organization and protection of bodily needs. Precarity exposes our sociality, the fragile and necessary dimensions of our interdependency. (Butler, 2012, p. 148)

Butler bases the values of cohabitation and ethical responsiveness on the recognition of, and political engagement to reduce precarity. The coming planetary community can move from the realm of theory to that of political praxis by extending ethical responsiveness beyond the national to the global dimension, setting up cohabitation as a fundamental political principle and ethical value (we do not only share a world but also a fundamental vulnerability that makes us dependent on each other), and labouring by ethico-political means to base the principle of cohabitation on the “goal” of “equality and minimized precarity” (Butler, p. 150). Recent philosophical and theoretical engagement with world connectivity and human relation seem to gesture towards an alternative planetary consciousness and ethics of cohabitation as possible political grounds for ethical engagement against the forces of exclusion, violence or subjugation in our contemporary world. The literary texts discussed in this book grapple with such forces, project the planetary future through the specific struggles of private individuals and families, and variably inscribe the ethical value of relation and cohabitation. Mobile families may be put to the test of precarity and (emotional) vulnerability in a field that can no longer be claimed as origin or ancestral homeland. Their “distant suffering” makes what Butler poses as the new kind of “ethical solicitation” that characterises the age of mobility and technology, an “ethical solicitation” and a “form of address” that springs from a place outside the sphere of the self: that of the planet and the planetary other (Butler, 2012, pp. 135– 136). Such is the field that the literary texts project in imaginative and artistic ways: a planetary field in which life is fundamentally precarious and grievable and can only be preserved by setting up cohabitation as a supranational ethico-political goal.

6

CONCLUSION: TOWARDS A PLANETARY FIELD …

199

References Aguiar, M., Mathieson, C., & Pearce, L. (Eds.). (2019). Mobilities, literature, culture. Palgrave Macmillan. Ali, M. (2003). Brick Lane. Black Swan. Butler, J. (2012). Precarious life, vulnerability and the ethics of cohabitation. The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 26(2), 134–151. http://www.jstor.org/sta ble/10.5325/jspecphil.26.2.0134. Accessed 6 Nov 2015. Couze, V. (2014). ‘Race’ and the disorders of identity: Rethinking difference, the relation to the other and a politics of the commons. Subjectivity, 7 (1), 37–55. https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2013.17. Eshelman, R. (2015). Archetypologies of the human: Planetary performatism, cinematic relationality and Iñárritu’s Babel. In A. J. Elias & C. Moraru (Eds.), The planetary turn: Relationality and geoaesthetics in the twenty-first century (pp. 89–105). Northwestern University Press. Faist, T. (2013). The mobility turn: A new paradigm for the social sciences? Ethnic and Racial Studies, 36(11), 1637–1646. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 01419870.2013.812229. Fallov, M. A., Jørgensen, A., & Knudsen, L. B. (2013). Mobile forms of belonging. Mobilities, 8(4), 467–486. https://doi.org/10.1080/17450101. 2013.769722. Gordon, A. F. (2008). Ghostly matters: Haunting and the sociological imagination. University of Minnesota Press. Hashimi, N. (2015). When the Moon Is Low. William Morrow. Holdsworth, C. (2013). Family and intimate mobilities. Palgrave Macmillan. Hosseini, K. (2003). The Kite Runner. Bloomsbury. Hosseini, K. (2013). And the Mountains Echoed. Bloomsbury. Jazeel, T. (2011). Spatializing difference beyond cosmopolitanism: Rethinking planetary futures. Theory, Culture and Society, 28(5), 75–97. https://doi.org/ 10.1117/0263276411410447. Kureishi, H. (1990). The Buddha of Suburbia. Faber & Faber. Lahiri, J. (2003). The Namesake. Fourth Estate. Murray, L., & Upstone, S. (Eds.), (2014). Mobilising representations: Dialogues, embodiment and power. In L. Murray & S. Upstone, (Eds.), Researching and representing mobilities: Transdisciplinary encounters (pp. 1–20). Palgrave Macmillan. Sheller, M., & Urry, J. (2006). The new mobilities paradigm. Environment and Planning A, 38, 207–226. https://doi.org/10.1068/a37268. Smart, C. (2011). Relationality and socio-cultural theories of family life. In R. Jallinoja & E. Widmer (Eds.), Families and kinship in contemporary Europe: Rules and practices of relatedness (pp. 13–28). Palgrave Macmillan. Smith, Z. (2000). White Teeth. Penguin Books.

200

L. TAYEB

Tally, R. T., Jr. (2015). Beyond the flaming walls of the world: Fantasy, alterity and the postnational constellation. In A. J. Elias & C. Moraru (Eds.), The planetary turn: Relationality and geoaesthetics in the twenty-first century (pp. 193–210). Northwestern University Press. Turnbull, N. (2006). The ontological consequences of Copernicus: Global being in the planetary world. Theory, Culture and Society, 23(1), 125–139. https:// doi.org/10.1177/0263276406063232.

Index

A Adorno, T., 73 Agamben, G., 175 Ali, M., 98, 100–114, 116–119, 137, 149, 150, 152, 153, 192 Brick Lane, 3, 24, 98, 101–105, 109, 112, 114, 115, 120, 125, 135, 136, 193 Anderson, B., 38, 47 Appadurai, A., 2, 9, 21, 34, 40, 41, 51 Arranged marriage, 24, 66, 75, 76, 101, 102, 105, 107, 108, 111, 120, 129–131

B Barth, F., 48 Baumann, G., 50, 51 Bauman, Z., 34, 41, 134, 135 Bhabha, H., 21 Biotechnology, 5, 6, 23, 33, 34, 36–38, 79–81, 89, 90

Border crossing, 37, 90, 176, 178 Bourdieu, P., 45, 148 Braidotti, R., 4, 5, 18, 46 Butler, J., 46, 166, 171, 179, 186 cohabitation, 55, 187, 197, 198 precarity, 55, 175, 197, 198 C Carsten, J., 6–8, 11, 36, 64, 144, 151, 177, 178 relatedness, 2, 7, 13, 22, 25, 34, 85, 101, 132, 148, 157, 186, 191, 193, 194 Castells, M., 41, 42, 51, 160, 172, 173 Certeau, Michel de, 16, 67, 68, 75 urban practices, 68 Clifford, J., 14–16, 34, 39, 41 Communication technologies, 53, 62, 73, 135, 173 information and communication technologies (ICTs), 3, 5, 9, 23, 42, 43, 46

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Tayeb, Kinship in the Age of Mobility and Technology, Palgrave Studies in Mediating Kinship, Representation, and Difference, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69889-8

201

202

INDEX

D Deleuze, G., 182 Deterritorialisation, 9, 12, 39, 53, 54, 93, 99 Diaspora, 3, 19, 24, 25, 42, 86, 98–101, 119, 120, 123, 125, 126, 131, 132, 135, 136, 186, 191 diasporic community, 42, 98–101, 104, 113, 125, 127, 129, 134, 136, 193

E Emotion, 17, 24, 98, 101, 119–122, 127, 136, 137, 167, 174, 192 Ethnicity, 47, 48, 50, 84, 92, 102, 127, 148, 152 ethnic community, 34, 50, 51, 104 ethnification, 42, 47

F Family family practices, 12, 61, 62, 64, 67, 69 nuclear family, 7, 64, 65, 69, 70, 120 transnational family, 1–3, 5, 13, 17, 24, 34, 35, 38, 53, 61, 81, 92, 119, 124, 136, 137, 192, 195

G Geertz, C., 14, 15 Gellner, E., 38, 47 Geomethodology, 22, 160, 162 Gilroy, P., 89 Globalisation, 2, 21, 22, 39, 42, 54, 78, 81, 97, 100, 115, 117, 136, 164, 172, 173, 193, 196 global age, 3, 7, 51, 98, 191 Globalisation studies, 2, 12

Global literature, 4, 19 globalisation of literature, 19

H Hall, S., 21, 47, 49, 50, 83, 84, 92 Hannerz, U., 34, 40, 47, 80 Haraway, D., 37, 38, 63, 80, 90, 91 Hashimi, N., 176–186, 192, 193, 196 When the Moon is Low, 3, 25, 143, 145, 175, 176, 178, 181, 182, 195 Horkheimer, M., 73 Hosseini, K., 147–150, 152, 153, 155–157, 160, 162–166, 168–174, 186, 192–194 And the Mountains Echoed, 3, 25, 143, 144, 159, 160, 162–164, 167, 172, 173, 175, 176, 179, 193–195 The Kite Runner, 3, 25, 143–146, 150–154, 158, 159, 172, 176, 193, 194 Hybridity (cultural), 3, 126

I Immigration, 34, 64, 77, 81, 82, 86, 100, 102, 104, 106, 109, 119, 120, 134, 183, 193 Intimacy, 121, 156, 157, 178

K Kinship ‘biogenetic’ kinship, 6, 33, 144, 145, 147, 150, 151, 154, 158, 160, 161, 168, 169, 192, 193 blood, 6, 13, 33–36, 38, 63, 70, 72, 88, 147, 151, 158, 160, 166, 168, 192 new Kinship studies, 4, 7, 148, 151 Kureishi, H., 24, 62–76, 93

INDEX

The Buddha of Suburbia, 3, 24, 61–64, 67, 76, 91, 97, 193

L Lahiri, J., 100, 101, 119, 121–126, 128–137, 192 The Namesake, 3, 24, 25, 98, 101, 119, 120, 122, 123, 125, 127, 128, 132, 135, 136, 193 Lefebvre, H., 19, 68, 146

M Mbembe, A. necropolitics, 175 necropower, 180 McLuhan, M., 74 Migration, 2–6, 9, 10, 12, 17, 18, 23, 24, 35, 43, 44, 47, 52–54, 61, 63, 77, 82, 97, 98, 100–102, 109, 111, 116, 119, 121, 124, 175 female migration, 193 labour migration, 1, 3, 97, 193 Migration studies, 1, 5, 8, 25, 42, 98, 119, 120, 193 Mobility cultural mobility, 18, 24, 98, 99, 126, 127, 136, 191 emotional mobility, 2, 18, 24, 56, 99, 120, 124, 127, 136, 191 forced mobilities, 3, 56, 143, 179, 181, 191 immobility, 2, 12, 62, 66, 98, 101, 105, 109, 110, 143, 180, 181

N Nationalism, 8, 20, 43, 54, 63, 72, 154, 159 national community, 47, 49, 51, 72, 80, 83, 99, 103, 151, 155

203

national society, 2, 10, 34, 39, 42, 44, 49, 52, 78 Network society, 41, 42, 51, 160, 172 New Mobilities Paradigm, 2, 4, 5, 11, 53 Nomadic/nomadism, 1, 4, 5, 11, 53, 62, 64, 67, 68, 70, 93, 99

P Performatism, 22, 167, 184 planetary performatism, 160, 166 Performativity, 46, 167 Planetarity, 19, 22, 23, 25, 159, 184 Postcolonial literature, 19, 20 Postcolonial migration, 191 Posthumanism, 4 posthuman subject, 46 Postmodernism, 22

R Refugee, 3, 25, 40, 41, 44, 143, 153, 172, 175, 176, 178–181, 183–186, 195

S Said, E., 21 Schneider, D., 6, 35–37 Smith, A.D., 2, 38, 39 Smith, Z., 35, 61–63, 77–93, 97, 192 White Teeth, 3, 24, 35, 61–63, 77–79, 82, 83, 90, 97, 193 Spivak, G.C., 157 Strathern, M., 7, 34–38, 80, 89, 91

T Taylor, C., 84 Translocality, 10, 44 translocalism, 10

204

INDEX

Transnationalism, 2, 9, 10, 12, 20, 42–44, 98, 99, 135 transnational identities, 8–10, 19, 100 transnational migration studies, 4, 11, 12 transnational social field, 8, 10, 25, 42–44, 98, 100, 126 Transportation technology, 5, 23

V Virilio, P., 8, 9

W Wallerstein, I., 2, 79 Westphal, B., 146 World literature, 20 Weltliteratur, 20, 21