Tearing between the Cultures and Turning from Somebody to Nobody in the Hybridized Space of Immigration in Mohsin Hamid’s Moth Smoke

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 Assistant Professor of English Language and Literature, Department of English Language, Faculty of Humanities, Khatam University, Tehran, Iran

2 MA in English Language and Literature, Department of English Language, Faculty of Humanities, Khatam University, Tehran, Iran.

Abstract

In the immigration studies, the diasporic female experiences are not indicatively considered as the prevailing experiences of immigrant men who are claimed to stand for all immigrants. Thus, it is challenging to examine female migration experiences and the consequences that are ignored. This article explores the ignored parts of female migration experiences as subalterns and focuses on the process of assimilation in the host country following theories of Gayatri Spivak’s post-colonialism. In the age of migration the female characters of the former colonies are being culturally hybridized when they get in touch with the Western factors. That hybridity and their ambivalent attitude between the cultures, they are becoming the mimic women that has not only affected them and led them to identity crisis but also contributed to the dangling of them between cultures lost and confused. This article will carefully examine the consequences of assimilation of the female character, Mumtaz, in Mohsin Hamid’s Moth Smoke in the hybridized atmosphere. Moth Smoke is the debut novel by British Pakistani novelist, Mohsin Hamid, which provides the context for the clash of cultures in its portrait of a country violently divided against itself. Sometimes, assimilation with host cultures are to the extent that the female immigrant becomes baffled and confounded. With shattered identity, she is neither a modern Westernized woman nor an Eastern glorified mother and wife.

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Critical Literary Studies
Volume 7, Issue 1 - Serial Number 13
October 2024
Pages 135-149

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History

  • Receive Date: 24 November 2023
  • Revise Date: 27 June 2024
  • Accept Date: 02 October 2024

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