Borders and Cultural Identification in Leila Aboulela’s Novel the Translator

Abstract

This paper examines the reversed aspects of borders as constructed and constructing discourses in Leila Aboulela’s the Translator while tracing the configurations of Stuart Hall’s concept of ‘cultural identification’ and numerous ‘border’ experiences as pinpointed by Johan Schimanski and Stephen Wolfe. The paper demonstrates that practicing cultural identification depends on experiencing borders. It unravels the recurring alterations of postcolonial subjectivity to demonstrate both the invalidity of cultural identity in addressing the postcolonial subject and the necessity of cultural identification as a continuous transforming process of subjectivity. By focusing on symbolic borders, the paper goes throughout Aboulela’s novel of The Translator to map how these borders are manifested and deployed within the experiences of exile, displacement, and ambivalence. Since the novel dramatizes the postcolonial era, the paper brings to view Bill Ashcroft’s concept of ‘the transnation’ to underpin the certainty of openness, complexity, potentiality, and multiplicity, which constitute, not only ‘the transnation’, but also Hall’s cultural identification and Schimanski and Wolfe’s theory of borders.