UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations
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UCLA UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Other Cities: Novels of Immigration in London and Paris Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8p5986ht Author Anam, Nasia Publication Date 2016 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Other Cities: Novels of Immigration in London and Paris A dissertation in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature by Nasia Anam 2016 © Copyright by Nasia Anam 2016 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Other Cities: Novels of Immigration in London and Paris by Nasia Anam Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature University of California, Los Angeles, 2016 Professor Aamir R. Mufti, Co-Chair Professor Ali Behdad, Co-Chair Other Cities: Novels of Immigration in London and Paris compares the formal differences of 20th and 21st century British South Asian novels and French North African novels that depict the lives and spaces of urban immigrant communities while attending to historical contingency, legal archives, and public debates. This dissertation argues that novels of immigration bridge a transition from the categorical binaries of (post)coloniality to the multitudes of globalization. Fluctuations in legal and public discourse surrounding immigration profoundly affect the lived spaces of immigrant populations, and the literary rendering of these communities and neighborhoods reveals the volatile and productive forms of identity, solidarity, and radicalness that arise in the immigrant enclave. I examine not only the encounter between Europeans and postcolonial immigrants in the enclave, but also different kinds of immigrant figures—the ii intellectual and the laborer, the urban and the rural, the Caribbean and the South Asian, the Antillean and the North African, the Muslim and the Hindu. The confrontation between different categories of immigrants plays out not only in the content of novels of immigration, but also on the level of form. My research investigates the relationship between vacillations in the status of immigrants in 20th century Britain and France and shifts in novelistic style across eight novels. I analyze the depiction of South Asians in London in novels by Amitav Ghosh, Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, and Monica Ali, which are placed in comparison with French novels depicting North Africans in Paris by Rachid Boudjedra, Driss Chraïbi, Leïla Sebbar, and Leïla Marouane. By transposing, and thereby complicating, the postcolonial problematics of hybridity, hegemony, and subalternity onto the contemporary European metropole, my dissertation challenges the geographic divide between center and periphery in conceptions of global culture—from theories of economic world systems to recent discussions of world literature. Other Cities posits the novel of immigration as the most symptomatic literary category through which to read the contemporary anxieties endemic to postcoloniality and globalization. iii The dissertation of Nasia Anam is approved. Lia N. Brozgal Elizabeth DeLoughrey Aamir R. Mufti, Committee Co-Chair Ali Behdad, Committee Co-Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2016 iv For Amma, who guides me still. v Table of Contents Acknowledgments vii Curriculum Vita xi Introduction 1 Chapter 1 56 Illegible Paris: Illiteracy and Alienation in Les boucs and Topographie idéale pour une aggression caractérisée Chapter 2 114 “You Know Nothing about London”: Encounters on the East End in The Shadow Lines and The Satanic Verses Chapter 3 175 Parisian Re-orientalism: Encountering the Oriental Self in Shérazade and La vie sexuelle d’un islamist à Paris Chapter 4 227 The Council Flat and the Globe: Multiculturalism and Settling in White Teeth and Brick Lane Conclusion From the "Novel of Immigration" to the "Migrant Dystopia" 286 vi Acknowledgments There is that old chestnut that circulates among academics, often uttered with an exasperated eyeroll or a dismissive handwave, that all research is “me-search.” I cannot say with any degree of confidence that I have avoided the cliché—I have many dogs in this fight, if one’s dissertation can suitably be called a dogfight. “How did we get here?” is a question I often found myself asking as a child whose life in an antisceptic Midwestern suburb was punctuated with annual trips to the sweltering, chaotic din of Dhaka. As the daughter of Bangladeshi immigrants and as someone who came into adulthood at the very moment this country began its everlasting War on Terror, my own experiences very much informed the direction of my scholarly work. But there was one moment in my research, sometime around 2012, which made truly clear to me the stakes of my project. Sitting the Humanties Reading Room of the British Library, I began perusing a recently published sociological study of the Bangladeshi diaspora (Nazli Kibria’s Muslims in Motion). As I flipped through the book, I noticed that one the case studies was on the Bangladeshi community of Chicago and its suburbs. Specifically, the study focused on an organization called the “Bangladeshi Association of Greater Chicagoland,” or the BAGC. This was, in fact, the very cultural organization for which my father served as president for many years in the 1990s. In that moment I struggled to work through all of the fortuitous turns and twists in my life that had brought me, for all intents and purposes, to conduct funded research on my very own father in the British Library. This somewhat bizarre episode illustrates to me the ways my studies as a graduate student have not only helped me understand the historical catastrophes and contingencies that propel groups people to migrate across the globe; they have helped me understand the history of my own family. The work I have done for my dissertation is thus very close to my heart. I would like to thank the many sources of research support I received at UCLA in the service of completing my dissertation including: the Department of Comparative Literature, the Graduate Research Mentorship Fellowship, the vii Center for European and Eurasian Studies, the International Institute, and the Mellon Pre-Dissertaton Fellowship. Thank you to Angela Deaver Campbell and the Scholarship Resource Center for supporting me through my final year at UCLA. I am so grateful for the inimitable professors and mentors I have had to privilege to work with at UCLA in my home department, Comparative Literature, as well as English and French. I cannot think of another institutuion or department where I could have pursued and completed this particular project with such a degree of depth and rigor. I would firstly like to thank the members of my dissertation committee. The work I have done with Aamir Mufti—as his student, his T.A., and his mentee—has been invaluable to me through the years. I am immensely inspired and motivated by his cutting-edge research, his demand for excellence, and his belief that the scholar of literature has a hand in changing the world. Ali Behdad has been in incredibly generous and steadfast guide throughout my graduate career, helping me become a more refined and savvy academic as I have advanced. His canny approach to scholarship has been a great influence in my own work. Liz DeLoughrey has helped me untangle some of the most difficult intellectual knots I have ever encountered. She has always encouraged me to think expansively and creatively, and keep sight of the delight and wonder that can and should be a part of academic work. Lia Brozgal has been a constant source of fortitude, bon courage, and much-needed reality checks. I would not have pursued the French half of my dissertation with such gusto if not for her encouragement and truly giving approach to mentorship. I am also incredibly grateful to the professors at UCLA who played important roles at earlier stages in my dissertation work or at earlier stages in my graduate career. The work I did with Jenny Sharpe, Françoise Lionnet, Michelle Clayton, Vinay Lal, Eleanor Kaufman, and Efrain Kristal continues to inform the ways I approach my current research. Before coming to UCLA I had the opportunity to work with some wonderful professors in the Department of English at University of Michigan, incuding Jennifer Wenzel and the late, irreplaceable Patricia Yaeger. I will always be indebted to my dear undergraduate professors at the University of Chicago who showed me how to live the life of the mind, especially David Levin, Malynne Sternstein, and the late, magnificent Miriam Hansen. viii People often say that being an academic is one of the most isolating career choices one could possibly make. I have found this to be far from my own experience. My colleagues at UCLA are not only brilliant and inspiring interlocutors, they are some of the most interesting, hilarious, and kind people I have ever had the privilege to call my friends. Thank you Alexei Nowak, Nic Testerman, Dana Linda, Zen Dochterman, Michelle Lee, Carolina Beltran and Duncan Yoon for being there in ways I didn’t even know I needed. Thank you to Ruth Jones for sympathy and feedback. Thank you to Sarah-Neel Smith for steadying me when life became pure chaos. Thank you to Shir Alon and Fatima Burney being as dependable and dear to me as family. Thank you to Jeremy Schmidt for reorientalizing friendship. Thank you to Yuting Huang for catalyzing nearly every important breakthrough I have had in the past eight years, and in advance, for someday forming a school of thought with me. Outside of UCLA, I want to thank Anna Wainwright and Saul Zaritt—old and beloved friends who knew me in my quirkiest UChicago incarnation and now continue to offer me kindness, intelligence, and life coaching as cherished colleagues. My wonderful friends Brittani Sonnenberg, Neela Banerjee, and Tanzila Ahmed have all kept me awake and aware of literature’s beauty and power, and given me the courage to believe in myself as a writer.