Identity in and out of Time: Narratives of Temporal Displacement in Contemporary Migrant Fiction

Abstract

This 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.