World Literature of Internal Exiles: Strangers at Home

This dissertation explores three spaces and times of destruction since World War II: India/Pakistan under Partition, Palestine/Israel post-1948, and Afghanistan under Soviet invasion. These crises are not isolated events but multiple transhistorical products of global politics and war. As an ethical response to the incessant spiral of violence that causes suffering and alienation, this dissertation is not an analysis of world literature texts as “windows to the world” (Damrosch), for such a perspective implies a passive relationship between the reader and the text. I focus on an active dialogue centred on ethics as a praxis, principle, and process. While scholars focus on the macro-geopolitical levels to consider transnational tensions, I call for a new mode of world literature that recognizes how, in their singularities, communal violence, occupation, and invasion are reproductions of the same transhistorical forces: ethnic nationalisms spurred by bio-and necropolitics. Scholarship accounts for those who can/want to leave, I argue that an alternative conceptualization is required for those at home: the internal exile, an individual ostracized in their homeland as a consequence of being marked through race, religion, or politics. The oxymoron of ‘internal exile’ destabilizes the political and semantic meaning of each term, opening a transhistorical space of persecution. This project redeploys Bakhtinian concepts of discursive identities to delineate the chronotope of the internal exile in order to examine the lived experiences of those whose bodies are the effect of power. Through discursive analysis, I trace the chronotope of the internal exile in nine parrhesiastic novels: Two (Gulzar 2017), A Promised Land (Khadija Mastur 2019), Daughters of Partition (Fozia Raja 2020), Mornings in Jenin (Susan Abulhawa 2010), Minor Detail (Adania Shibli 2020), Track Changes (Sayed Kashua 2020), The Pearl That Broke Its Shell (Nadia Hashimi 2015), Earth and Ashes and The Patience Stone (Atiq Rahimi 2002, 2009). I triangulate three forms of destruction in three spaces with three modes of individual and communal response (memory, identity, language) to dismantle a homogeneous understanding of ethnic nationalism. Each text produces the reader in exile to decolonize and alter knowledge of and engagement with internal exiles beyond ethnic-national ties.