Writing Displacement ― Home and Identity in Contemporary Post-colonial English Fiction

Using the Palestinian exilic displacements as a critical tool and compass to find intersecting points of reference with the Caribbean, Indian, African, Chinese, and Pakistani dispersions, Writing Displacement studies the metamorphosis of the politics of home and identity amongst different migrant nationals subsequent to the end of WWII and into the start of the new millennium. This book troubles the ideas of citizenship and national belonging and celebrates the freedom to be 'out of place' which opens doors for and promotes rediscovery of materials that have been repressed or 'pushed aside' in cultural translation. Displacement falls somewhere between nationalism and nomadology, challenging racism and mental ghettoisation; writing displacement opens doors for critical and aesthetic distance and for balancing the central authority between past and present, tradition and modernity. From Sam Selvon to Salman Rushdie and Monica Ali, Edward Said to Homi Bhabha and Stuart Hall, Writing Displacement reroutes filiation to affiliation.

Akram Al Deek is Assistant Professor of English Literature at the Middle East University in Amman, Jordan. He is a Palestinian writer, essayist, researcher, and lecturer in post-colonial studies, world literatures, and cultural and literary theory. Subsequent to exile, he was born in Jordan, German by nationality, and spent his entire twenties in England where he worked as an interpreter, translator, school teacher, and academic lecturer.