Session 12: Home and Homelessness

Session 12: Home and Homelessness
Chair: Heidi Louise Cooper

Representing the Human Clone: The Homeless Stranger in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go
Ginger C. Wang
Department of Foreign Languages and Applied Linguistics, National Taipei University, Taiwan

How can strangers find and found home in a world where everything related to the glorious past is melting and anything referred to as the promising new in the making? When Julia Kristeva’s concept that “we are strangers to ourselves” has been extensively discussed and reached a certain degree of consensus in the examination of diasporic identity formation, does home partake of any relevance or significance in the identification of self and other? How can the strangers build up home in a world where their sense of belonging is shattering and their sense of recognition is no less than an illusion? For those whose definition of home is estranged by new socio-political norms, home is located at an enigmatic place and going home an arduous task because home is always already remembered, not recognized. The displaced people, therefore, become what Sara Ahmed calls the “fetishized strangers” who are made to believe that their home is not here. They are always already projected politically and culturally onto the notion that they are, as Pico Iyer puts it, “impermanent residents of nowhere,” whose home is designated in an imagined community of elsewhere. Although their claims of territorial propriety and cultural centrality are considered preposterous, I argue, there are still some possibilities for the strangers to move beyond the concept of coming from nowhere and belonging to elsewhere to forge an accommodation in which they find themselves relocated, and then reconcile with their situation of now-here. All depends on how they recount the anxiety-felt memories of a distorted past while facing their present experiences of being outcast as the stranger strangers.
The argument presented in the above aims to contribute to the depiction of “homeless strangers,” a term I venture to describe a group of socio-political drifters wavering in shifting linkages and interconnections created by the emergent forms of the displaced people at a particular historical conjuncture. We can find felicitous figures of the homeless strangers in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005), an initiation story laying bare the subject of the human clones’ sense of homelessness.
The principal argument of my paper, therefore, will center on the investigation of the human clones’ becoming strangers in a particular historical moment Ishiguro intervenes on the one hand. On the other hand, I would like to explore the possibilities of the stranger strangers’ be-coming home, the being-at-home and coming-back-home, in a world where their use value is turning sour and their existence a disease that needs to be cured. By so doing, I wish to shed light on the intricate configuration of the homeless strangers’ unhomely home and propose an expedient strategy for their recognition of the estranged present without any distorted recollection of the traumatic past.

Being an Immigrant in One’s Homeland: Narratives of Immigration in Contemporary Israeli Literature
Adia Mendelson-Maoz
Department of Literature Language and Arts, The Open University of Israel, Raanana, Israel

The narrative of immigration of Jews to the Land of Israel is a constitutive narrative in Israeli nationality. The Zionist enterprise, striving to build a heaven for the Jews in the Land of Israel, forms a utopian view on immigration and assimilation. Rather than using the word ‘immigration’, it used the Hebrew word ‘Aliya’, which means rise or advancement; the ‘Aliya’ narrative portrays Jews who come to Israel following a deep ideological urge and are looking forward  to go on a major self improvement process that will transform their identity and create a feeling of belonging to their old new historical homeland.
In reality, however, the immigration process was often the opposite of the optimistic ‘Aliya’ story. Most waves of immigration began as direct response to currents of anti-Semitism at the origin country, and most immigrants, once in Israel, were repressed and excluded. In fact, as Ronit Matalon, a major Hebrew women author born to a family of Egyptian-Jews immigrants, claims, the word ‘Aliya’ is inherently brutal – it exemplifies the denial of the state of immigration and the demand for radical cultural transformation
Until the last decades Modern Hebrew literature has had a significant role in the consolidation of the Zionist enterprise and the formation of a new national Jewish identity in The Land of Israel, and thus used to tell ‘Aliya’ stories about successful immigration and assimilation. Contemporary Israeli literature, however, writes the repressed story of immigration. Amos Oz, a prominent Israeli author, gave in his book A Tale of Love and Darkness (2003) a new perspective on migration; his narrative points to a basic trauma, which exist in the heart of Israeli culture. In this work I examine and present the two narratives – the ‘Aliya’ narrative and the immigration narrative – as they are reflected in Israeli literary texts and thus provide a new perspective on the immigration debate within Israeli society.

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New Media and the Contemporary Mainland Chinese Diasporas
Wei Ruan
Department of English, University of Shenzhen, People’s Republic of China

Chinese Diaspora has had a history of more than a thousand years, but something new has emerged since the early 1980s when China opened up after shutting its door for decades: Contemporary Mainland-Chinese Diasporas (CMCD). From that time on, mainland Chinese, mostly professionals, have been emigrating to Western countries on a relatively large scale and a large number of mainland-Chinese communities have appeared in the West. Almost simultaneously with this development, the world has experienced an unprecedented media revolution. As a result, the CMCD in the West have assumed characteristics that are basically not found in the traditional Chinese diasporas such as the indentured–laborers’ communities and Chinatowns in North America, Latin America, Europe, Australia, etc, and the large Chinese communities in Southeast Asia that have arisen out of a long tradition of trade and poverty-driven emigration. It will be maintained that the characteristics of the CMCD in the West include a conscious political commitment to their home country, a strong awareness of their Chinese ethnic background that results from their up-bringing in the modern nation-state of People’s Republic of China, and a largely liberalized outlook on ‘Chinese cultural identity’ or ‘Chineseness’, as well as the fact itself that they are mostly professionals. These characteristics will be examined in relation to the role New Media have played in forming and defining the CMCD, with special attention paid to how New Media have helped strengthen the political and cultural commitment of the mainland Chinese diasporas to their home country. The complex relationships between them and their home country on the one hand and between them and their adopted countries on the other will be discussed. It will also be argued that, with the service rendered by Websites, Email, TV, CD, VCD, DVD and cheap phone calls, the first-generation CMCD easily remain mainland-Chinese culturally, although the issue of ‘cultural identity’ is at the same time acutely on the agenda due to a now overwhelming Western environment, yet the second-generation is having serious identity problems arising out of that inevitable conflict between a overwhelming Western environment and education and their undeniably Chinese background and physique. Close attention will be paid to the ways the CMCD responded to such events as the Tian-An Men Square incident in 1989 and the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Yugoslavia in 1999. In conclusion, this paper will argue that in this era of rapid globalization, the CMCD are playing and will continue to play a positive role as a cultural, economic and technological bridge between the West and China