The Agony of nowhere and dischronotopicality in Joan Riley’s "the unbelonging"
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Date
2023
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University of Oum El Bouaghi
Abstract
Black female immigrantsfrom the Windrush Generation suffered from numerous forms of racism, discrimination, and abuse in Britain. They are oppressed based on their race and gender. Joan Riley's writing explores how this double-layered oppression has generated feelings of alienation, unbelonging, and self-denigration in the context of displacement and diaspora. Home and identity are problematized via the metaphorical lens of "nowhere". This study examines how the process of finding a homely space in the borderline, where belonging is frozen in a specific time and place, is complex. It explores how Riley's The Unbelonging creates a space of navigation that reconstitutes narratives of displacement, placelessness, and (un)belonging for diasporic Afro-Caribbean female subjectivity. The study borrows theoretical insights from diaspora studies, black cultural studies, and Peeren's Dischronotopicality. It reveals how Riley criticizes both British society and her own Jamaican belonging, which foregrounds the motif of the borderline and its state of ambivalence. The novel shows how the protagonist Hyacinth came across a very complex process of self-identification. It starts with idealizing Jamaica as a symbol of absent motherhood, yet by the end of the novel, she manifests a feeling of disappointment and grief and eventually realizes the impossibility to belong to a fixed national space. The borderline is regarded as a transnational location for diasporic subjects.
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Keywords
Unbelonging; Joan Riley; Dischronotopicality; Borderline