Saudi Cultural Missions Theses & Dissertations
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Item Restricted Identity in and out of Time: Narratives of Temporal Displacement in Contemporary Migrant Fiction(The George Washington University, 2024) Alshammari, Raad; Daiya, KavitaThis dissertation explores the role of time in contemporary migrant fiction, investigating the question of how representations of migrant temporality shape fictional narratives of displacement and deepen our understanding of “the age of migration.” Situated at the intersection of temporal turns in both migration studies and literary studies and informed by theories of postcolonial temporality, the dissertation analyzes six different works of postcolonial migrant fiction by major writers of multi-ethnic American and British multicultural literature. The analyzed texts all emphasize the temporal dimensions of migrant mobility, featuring a consciousness of temporal displacement that operates across both thematic and formal dimensions of the narrative. The dissertation seeks to illuminate how these texts negotiate the intricate relationship between displacement and temporality while articulating migrant experiences and identities in contemporary contexts. It argues that time plays a pivotal role in the literary production of meaning around individual and collective migrant identities, functioning across political, cultural, and aesthetic dimensions. Central to the dissertation’s argument is the idea that migrant movement in these works extends beyond a purely spatial journey. It represents a temporal movement that transgresses and redraws the temporal boundaries of both the self and the world as constructed by cultural, national, and global forms of hegemony. By emphasizing this temporalized understanding of mobility, the dissertation underscores a sense of agency and subjectivity that challenges the framing of migrant experiences within geographical narratives of time. It demonstrates how migrant temporalities enable a “cognitive remapping” of a world that is no longer anchored in fixed ideological teleologies but is instead shaped by the global interconnectedness of economies, cultures, and populations. In this context, the dissertation highlights the importance of recognizing the “in-betweenness” of migrant subjectivity as a form of temporal in-betweenness—one that not only captures the nuances of the migrant experience but also reflects the broader condition of global humanity. Here, the dissertation underlines the role of migrant literature as a distinctive space where the de- spatialized, in-between temporality of the migrant subject becomes tangible and representational.17 0Item Restricted Human Trafficking in Conflict Zones: The Exploitation of Vulnerable Populations(University of Sussex, 2024) Althobaiti, Rawan; Sinclair-House, NicholasThis research investigates human trafficking in conflict zones, where vulnerable populations such as women, children, refugees, and internally displaced persons (IDPs) are severely exploited amidst the chaos and breakdown of law and order. The study explores how rebel groups and organized crime networks capitalize on these conditions, engaging in forced labour, sexual exploitation, and child soldier recruitment, often to fund their operations. By examining case studies in Syria, Yemen, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and Libya, it illustrates how trafficking dynamics differ based on local factors such as resource-driven conflicts and displacement crises. The research also evaluates international frameworks, including the Palermo Protocol, while identifying gaps in both national and global responses. Ultimately, the findings emphasize the urgent need for stronger legal frameworks, enhanced global cooperation, and targeted interventions to address the root causes poverty, displacement, and weak governance that perpetuate human trafficking in conflict zones.27 0Item Restricted NAVIGATING THE UNIVERSAL: THE POLITICS OF NARRATING DISPLACEMENT IN 20TH-21ST CENTURY BRITISH AND ANGLOPHONE NOVELS(Saudi Digital Library, 2023-11-30) Almuthaybiri, Abdulaziz; Greer, ErinThis dissertation revives the long debated philosophical question of universalism, analyzing its significance to displacement narratives in select Anglophone novels published in the 20th and 21st centuries. Scholars like Edward Said and Frantz Fanon have argued about the impact of universalism on racial and cultural differences in postcolonial contexts. This dissertation extends this debate while uncovering the power discourses of universalism through the study of three novels by renowned literary figures whose literary productions center around displacement: Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners, and Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Afterlives. With explication of each novel, it contends that their form and content strongly reflect their engagement with the question of universalism. The dissertation structure navigates backwards in time, beginning with Exit West’s universalized narrative of the 21st century refugee crisis and moving, with each novel, to narratives set roughly 50-60 years prior to the previous one. Chapter one deciphers the neocolonial discourses embedded within universal narratives of the refugee crisis. It argues that, in Exit West, such neocolonial discourses attempt to “humanize” the refugees but end up reinforcing not only the “othering” of the Muslim World - as places governed by despots, inhabited by religious fanatics, violent, intolerant, passive, misogynistic, and lustful individuals - but also support the evasion of Western responsibility that has caused massive suffering and displacement in the Middle East and elsewhere. Universalizing the refugee experience serves Western power, in other words. The second chapter turns to The Lonely Londoners’ depiction of the Caribbean migration surge to London after the British Nationality Act of 1948, the period of the Windrush Generation. This chapter uncovers the power discourses that can manifest in the critique of universalism. It argues the novel’s subjective mode, and its construction of a worldview centered on its male migrant central cast, provides a powerful critique of universal narratives at the core of racial hierarchy. But it also argues that the novel’s critique is bounded by its implicit patriarchal assumptions. Therefore, I direct attention to the way in which the novel’s limited gender politics emerge from its attempt to not only critically represent racism in postwar Britain, but to do so in a way that challenges universalizing logic at work in both racist and some antiracist discourses. The third chapter deals with Afterlives’ subversive narrative of imperial displacement during the 19th and 20th German colonial rule of East Africa. This chapter analyzes Afterlives’ approach as an alternative to Exit West’s universalism and The Lonely Londoners’ anti-universalism. I argue that the novel circumvents power discourses of universalism by decentralizing the German authoritative historiography and interrogating the hierarchies in the local community and in the Schutztruppe. In other words, it offers a model of how to resolve some of the problems of both universalisms, as seen in Exit West, and possible forms of its critique, as seen in The Lonely Londoners. In conclusion, I reflect on the novel as a genre, connecting this dissertation to literary historical questions about the relationship between novels and imperialism.73 0