The Examination of Stuart Hall’s Postcolonial Perspective on Displacement and Identity Discontinuity in Fadia Faqir’s The Cry of the Dove (2007).

Abstract

Displacement is a key concept in postcolonial Diaspora literature that interprets the transition from the motherland, native culture, traditions, and native language to a different setting. Such geographical, cultural and psychological transitions result in an identity crisis, fragmentation and discontinuity.  The objective of this study is to investigate, in Fadia Faqir's The Cry of the Dove, the process of identity development amid displacement of a female Arab Muslim in a postcolonial setting. Using Stuart Hall's theory of Cultural Identity and Diaspora, this article applies a postmodern reading on the novel to discern how displacement affects the identity of the main protagonist Salma. Hence, Salma experiences a series of encounters following her transition from her original space to a new one that results in an identity crisis characterised by fragmentation, sense of alienation and uncertainty. In a postmodernist Stuart Hallian sense, Fadia Faqir’s female protagonist suffers from an existentialist, discontinuous identity characterized by skepticism, uncertainty, fragmentation and paradox, following a journey of physical and psychological displacement.