Session 2: Otherness
3rd Global Conference
Tuesday 10th November – Thursday 12th November 2009
Salzburg, Austria
Immigration and Liminality in Rawi Hage’s Cockroach
Jesse Hutchison
Brock University, Canada
The official policy of Canadian multiculturalism would have it that immigrants might “fully participate in Canadian society” while still being able “to identify with the cultural heritage of their choice”. Yet Arnold Itwaru, in his text, The Invention of Canada argues that Canadian immigration narratives work to undermine the official doctrine by exposing the very paradox of such a program and, consequently, de-stabilize the Canadian desire for a unified multicultural nation. Rawi Hage’s novel, Cockroach allows us to examine how the contemporary immigrant experience in practice reveals the flaws inherent in the ideals of Canadian multiculturalism. The book shows us that in order for the nameless narrator to “fully participate in Canadian society”, which here means (among other things) to get a job and consequently survive, he must first begin a process of self-erasure, eliminating the parts of his heritage that exist outside of social and cultural acceptability. The narrator is, in fact, unable to blend the two possibilities suggested in Canada’s multiculturalism policy and instead wavers between two seemingly bleak positions throughout the novel – the conforming exotic immigrant or the non-conformist cockroach. The narrator desires to fit into normal, legitimate, acceptable society because his very survival depends on it, but in order to do so he must transform into someone that he’s not. I argue, however, that the novel does offer the concept of the liminal space between human and cockroach as a space of possibility for the immigrant. A recent convention of contemporary Canadian literature is to position characters (often nameless) within a liminal space that is specifically a generative space and Hage’s similar positioning of his own narrator here is crucial in my discussion.
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Refusing to be the Other: Interculturality as ‘Belgitude’ in German-Speaking Minority Literature in Belgium
Arvi Sepp
University of Antwerp, The Netherlands
In the postnational constellation of Europe, a vigorous resurgence of minority and regional culture can be observed. This is also the case for the German minorities in Belgium and Italy. Through a close reading of selected literary texts from German-speaking minority authors in East Belgium (Freddy Derwahl and Leo Wintgens), I will discuss the status of the literary representation of minority culture as a space (be it geographic, cultural, linguistic, political, social, ethnic, institutional, ideological, or aesthetic) in which global and local forces interact. The border regions and enclaves these German-language authors write from play an important role in their conception of Europe as a multicentered space of democratic values. In this paper, I will investigate how aesthetic forms and cultural expressions engage with and shape the ongoing redefinition of collective identity represented in German-Belgian minority literature. National imagemes of Germany and Belgium offer an insight into the self understanding and social consciousness of the German-speaking minority and the historicity of their literary texts. By focusing on the hyphen in ‘German-Belgian’, I challenge the discourse that locates minority literatures as marginal, or ‘Other’ in relation to their home countries, in relation to one another, or in relation to German literary culture. Created by a perceived center, and imposed upon a perceived margin, the term ‘Other’ is, I argue, a space that lacks the potential for conversation or for finding common ground. The interculturality and multilinguality in German-speaking minority literature are no sign of marginality, they are, on the contrary, the main characteric of ‘belgitude’, of an uneasy Belgian identity. In this way, I want to reflect on the concept of transcultural dialogue/interaction in literary texts and address lacunae in the field of imagology, the study of the formation of images, national awareness and stereotypes.
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