Navigating Integration and Alienation in Migration: A Reading of Leila Aboulela’s “The Museum” (1999)

Nasser, Shaden Adel

doi:10.21608/misj.2021.72973.1020

Navigating Integration and Alienation in Migration: A Reading of Leila Aboulela’s “The Museum” (1999)

Document Type : Original Article

Author

Shaden Adel Nasser

Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Women Ain Shams University

10.21608/misj.2021.72973.1020

Abstract

When migrants move from their homeland to a new country, they carry their memories, beliefs, traditions, feelings of belonging with them. Arab Anglophone literature is a genre that deals with the distresses and difficulties of the Arab and African migrants, including cross-cultural conflicts and western perceptions and misconceptions of their identity, which lead to feelings of dislocation, alienation, and depression. The works of the Sudanese feminist and Scottish migrant, Leila Aboulela (1964- ), is part of the growing corpus of Anglophone Arab fiction. Most of her works explore the complex cultural perceptions between east and west in migration. In this discussion, I elect to interrogate Aboulela’s, winning prize short story, “The Museum” (1999), where the Sudanese female protagonist, in Aberdeen, is torn between her expectations of integrating and improving her life and her feelings of isolation and strangeness in the host country. Thus, through a psychosocial analytic approach, the paper engages the concepts “identity”, “acculturation”, and “integration” to use these as tools to examine the east-west encounter in a migration experience. In so doing, the study elucidates the following issues: to what extent does Shadia, as a migrant, strive to adjust to the new culture in the receiving country? And how the hostility and misconception of the west to her African identity negatively affect her psychological well-being?

Keywords

References

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