Volume 8, Issue 2 - Special Issue: Peripheral narratives, minority identities / Guest Editors: Sjoerd-Jeroen Moenandar and Alberto Godioli

This article explores the positioning of the immigrant self in the story-world by elaborating on the unsettling experience of migration and analyzing the discursive (re)construction of identity in the novel Marx et la poupée [ Marx and the Doll ] by Franco-Iranian writer Maryam Madjidi. In order to reconstruct her dissolved self, the protagonist and narrator tells her story of pain and suffering caused by alienation and the struggle between two conflicting identities, the Persian and the French. Through the act of storytelling, this article argues, immigrant suffering is translated into narrative. The theoretical framework explores translation as a narrative tool and also reflects on how the act of storytelling grants the immigrant subject agency and invites readers to engage with their painful experience. The first part of the analysis examines the protagonist’s suffering by focusing on her refusal to eat and loss of language. The second part analyses how she recreates her painful experiences by inventing tales and presenting events and memories in a dreamlike fashion, while also critically addressing her encounters with the new culture. The stories allow for a reflection on and a possible reconciliation of the two conflicting identities and invite the readers to become aware of the complexity of the immigrant’s suffering.

The most widely circulated breast cancer narratives today have the structure of a Bildungsroman. They market personal growth, overcoming, and self-improvement, and reflect a strikingly neoliberal stance, even towards a potentially fatal illness as breast cancer. This is not the case with Miriam Engelberg’s graphic novel Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person: A Memoir in Comics (2006), which resists this dominant tendency. Engelberg’s book, does manifest some of the typical Bildungsroman traits (e. g. introspective hero, need for belonging). Mostly, however, it is torn between opposing tendencies: Engelberg oscillates between vulnerability and detachment, irony and expectation, the urge to withdraw from a frightening situation and the desire to speak up against all the injustice and bad practices she witnesses. Engelberg never gives in to “the pressure to become someone different – someone nobler and more courageous than (she) was” (Engelberg 2006: xiii), but mocks and denounces all oppressive cultural attitudes. Instead of becoming “deeper” and more spiritual, in the socially prescribed ways, she chooses “the path of shallowness” (xiii), and remains a witty and critical outsider. These attributes, together with the episodic fragmentation of Engelberg’s book, bring it closer to a picaresque, the protagonist of which, like her, occupies a marginal position, moves from situation to situation, and makes the reader aware of the social norms while she simultaneously challenges and destabilizes them (Moenandar 2017: 5). The goal of my article is to examine Engelberg’s memoir as a minoritarian, hybrid form of writing between Bildungsroman and picaresque, pointing to alternatives to the dominant stories of overcoming and neoliberal survivorship.

Subjected to what has been called a ‘global mobility regime’, refugees will often find that their destination countries have a limited number of pre-cut identities ready for them and allow them little leeway beyond these. In this paper, we will discuss representations of refugees in European popular culture following the so-called 2015 Syrian refugee crisis. We will analyse the narratives in these representations, and how these negotiate both what refugees are and should be, as well as what Europe, and more specifically the EU, is and should be. Through pathos, humour and shock, these works – two pop songs, a concert film, a comic and a cartoon – do not only convey narratives about the plight of refugees, but also work through how Europe experienced the 2015 crisis, and the ensuing, often conflicting, attitudes towards irregular migration that were expressed in European public discourse. We will discuss how this experience can be conceptualised as a ‘boundary experience’ that creates a before and after, as well as the possibility of new forms of identity – a possibility that may be ultimately rejected. As they take up the topic of irregular migration, we find producers of popular culture looking for words, sounds and images to express and address these attitudes, and to remember – or forget – the 2015 refugee crisis.

During the global Covid-19 pandemic, the practice of extensively washing one’s hands with soap and water became ubiquitous worldwide. In this contribution, I look at how cultural references to soap have been productive in producing social identities in South Africa. By utilizing Nira Yuval-Davis’s (2006) distinction between belonging and the politics of belonging, I trace how stories and narratives featuring soap that circulate in the South African cultural archive refer to specific cultural templates or social imaginaries. These stories and narratives perform different functions: they signify categories of social belonging, enable social subjects to identify with specific subject locations, and are utilized to both confirm and patrol the borders of these categories of belonging in acts that may be described as the “politics of belonging.”

Negative attitudes towards minority languages in educational settings can have far-reaching consequences for pupils’ academic achievement and well-being, yet they prevail in most education systems. The current study adds to research on language attitudes in education by analysing the narrative negotiation of the value of Frisian, a minority language from the northern Netherlands. For this analysis, a number of narratives on experiences with Frisian in a variety of learning environments will be discussed. These narratives come from interviews (n=8) that were selected from a larger corpus of semi-structured interviews on multilingualism in education with pre-service teachers from the northern Netherlands. Our analysis shows that in these narratives, Frisian is continuously cast as having to be neutralised, as it threatens classroom order, academic success, and the quality of teaching. Even in narratives that instead propose Frisian as something positive, the language needs to be somehow managed, often by ascribing it to a marginalised space, thus reifying implicit or explicit language hierarchies, as well as the supposedly peripheral, rural, and outdated character of this language. This study paves the way for future research on the regulating effects of dominant narratives for the value of minority languages in actual learning environments.

This article is based on the premise that poems are primarily read for their meaning, understood as what the text signifies in its semantic dimension and communicates to the reader, such as reflections, experiences and perceptions – fundamental phenomena of human existence, problems of living and acting, of experience and imagination. Such phenomena are centrally concerned with aspects of change, due to the temporal constitution of human existence. A powerful device for representing and processing such phenomena is the operation of narration, defined as a change of state predicated on a person or a situation. In that sense change and dealing with change pervasively underlie the contents of lyric poems. This explorative study seeks to demonstrate the variability and diversity of narrative as a prime device in poetry, typically employed in an obfuscating or compressive manner, as what one might call “covert narrativity”. To explore the diversity of covert narrativity, examples are taken from the wide range of contemporary German and English poetry: Paul Celan’s “Corona”, Simon Armitage’s “The Making of the English Landscape”, and Glyn Maxwell’s “The Byelaws”.

This article contrasts three different ways of understanding contemporary British communal life: interpretive accounts based on quantitative political science which stress division and rising ethnocentrism; an account drawing on Arendtian political theory, which again stresses division and loneliness; and accounts developed from three very different contemporary novels: Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall (2018); Barney Farmer’s Drunken Baker (2018); Bernard Cornwell’s, Warlord (2020). Each explores the current bleak state of the UK in different ways.