Beyond Liverpool, 1957: Travel, diaspora, and migration in Jamal Mahjoub’s The Drift Latitudes  

Oleh:

Nyman, Jopi

Jenis: Article from Article
Dalam koleksi: The Journal of Commonwealth Literature vol. 46 no. 3 (Sep. 2011), page 493-511.
Topik: diaspora; Jamal Mahjoub; migration; music; The Drift Latitudes
Fulltext: Beyond Liverpool, 1957- Travel.pdf (190.39KB)

Isi artikel

This essay discusses the novel The Drift Latitudes (2006) by the Anglo-Sudanese author Jamal Mahjoub. By telling the stories of the German refugee Ernst Frager and his two British families, I argue that Mahjoub’s novel utilizes the tropes of transnational travel and migration to present a critique of discourses of purity and nationalism. Through its uncovering of silenced family narratives, the novel hybridizes British and European identities and underlines the need to remember the stories of ordinary people omitted from official histories. As the novel’s supposedly British families appear to possess transnational links with Sudan, Germany, and the Caribbean, the novel reconstructs European identity as transnational and in need of historical reassessment. As a further contribution to the importance of hybrid identity, the story of black cultural identity and its construction in post-Second World War Liverpool is told in tandem with the importance of black music as a means of constructing black diasporic identity.

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