Politics and Poetics of Belonging

Product Description


The contributions gathered in this volume bear witness to the fact that belonging is a multi-faceted concept that necessitates different and shifting idioms of expression. It continually requires reconsideration and redefinition of our affiliations in response to the rapid social, cultural, and political changes of our world. The literary paradigms, linguistic practices, and cultural formations of belonging testify to the impossibility of confining it to conventional and established structures of knowledge. The different reflections on belonging introduced in this book are instrumental in reassessing and remodelling the general assumptions that have informed its definition and representation. The current global reality and the self-other encounter make inevitable the continuous search for new forms of belonging that are in tune with ones evolving and changing sense of self. Theoretically informed by and substantially grounded in lively and heated debates on cultural identity and belonging, this book proposes new critical directions in understanding national and transnational belonging.


About the Author


Mounir Guirat is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Sfax, Tunisia, where he mainly lectures on British literature, postcolonial literature, and critical theory. He is the editor of Excess(es) (2016), co-editor of Silence (2009) and Deviation(s) (2014) and author of Being and Becoming in Contemporary Diasporic Fiction: Bharati Mukherjees Jasmine and Monica Alis Brick Lane (2012). He is also the author of Roots and Routes in Myra Syals Life Isnt All Ha Ha Hee Hee in Shaping Indian Diaspora: Literary Representations and Bollywood Consumption away from the Desi (2015).