Out of Place: Extraterritorial Existence and Autobiography
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Alfred Hornung
Abstract
Edward Said’s Out of Place serves to address the double nature of a person’s extraterritoriality in life and in autobiographical texts whose subjects have migrated from their place of origin in the East to the West and define themselves with reference to American culture and politics. The African-Caribbean writer Michelle Cliff, a naturalized American citizen, uses her first two autobiographical novels, Abeng (1984) and No Telephone to Heaven (1987), to reconnect with her Caribindian past and her native island of Jamaica through stays in the US and England. The Turkish-German writer Feridun Zaimoglu, often labeled the “Malcolm X of German Turks,” creates from his extraterritorial existence a new cultural space in Kanak Sprak (1995) or Kopf und Kragen (2001) whose political platform derives from the situation of American minority groups. Edward Said, in turn, provides in Out of Place (1999) the biographical data behind his theoretical discussions of extraterritoriality and cultural imperialism and reconceptualizes the ‘Orient’ from his position as comparative literary critic in New York. All three writers seem to find a place in the genre of autobiography which they remodel commensurate with their extraterritorial existence.
© 2014 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co.
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelei
- Inhalt
- Editorial
- Irreconcilabilities and Transgressions: Edward W. Said’s Idea of a Wordly Criticism – An Introduction
- The Literary Presence of Atlantic Colonialism as Notation and Counterpoint
- Writing in Place: Edward Said’s Constructions of Exile
- Out of Place: Extraterritorial Existence and Autobiography
- Humanistic Criticism, Prophetic Pragmatism, and the Question of Antifoundationalism – Remarks on Edward Said and Cornel West
- Orientalism, Globalism and the Possibility of Alternative Systems of Representation
- Transnational Cultures and Multiple Modernities: Anthropology’s Encounter with Globalization
- Die Autoren dieses Heftes
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelei
- Inhalt
- Editorial
- Irreconcilabilities and Transgressions: Edward W. Said’s Idea of a Wordly Criticism – An Introduction
- The Literary Presence of Atlantic Colonialism as Notation and Counterpoint
- Writing in Place: Edward Said’s Constructions of Exile
- Out of Place: Extraterritorial Existence and Autobiography
- Humanistic Criticism, Prophetic Pragmatism, and the Question of Antifoundationalism – Remarks on Edward Said and Cornel West
- Orientalism, Globalism and the Possibility of Alternative Systems of Representation
- Transnational Cultures and Multiple Modernities: Anthropology’s Encounter with Globalization
- Die Autoren dieses Heftes
