Narrating the Migration Experience. How can the use of young adult migrant narratives and authentic experience in the EFL classroom increase both knowledge and understanding regarding society, history and adolescent migrant identity?

Abstract

This thesis explores how Said’s idea of Orientalism; how the Self mirrors the Other and recognizes otherness, and how these terms and processes influence and interfere with the establishment of personal identity. However, considerable examples in YA migration narrative demonstrate how Orientalism and othering are outdated and archaic mechanisms of identification, although they still intervene with contemporary YA (migrant) identity. Since our modern, multicultural world embraces diversity and distinctiveness, the idea of Self and Other needs to be reconsidered. Hence, the challenges the protagonists of four YA migration novels, We Need New Names(2014) by NoViolet Bulawayo, Sumitra’s Story(1996) by Rukshana Smith, Little Bee(2010) by Chris Cleave, and What is the What(2008) by Dave Eggers, experience as they attempt to reconstruct their identity in a host society distanced from their familiar cultural categorizations of identity, are analysed. Their narratives are used to demonstrate how YA EFL learners might benefit from reading YA (migrant) literature in order to increase historical and/or social understanding, and to form personal identity in a complex world. The four represent contemporary narratives of YA migrants’ struggle to settle with fixed terms of identity. The protagonists experience a bewilderment of identity, floating in-between past and present existence, where their former life and identity interferes with their attempt to establish a personal Self in a host society. Thus, Bhabha’s idea of hybridity and a hybrid space, where cultures and identities interact, is suitable to hermeneutic involvement with these novels after Sais’s ground-breaking theories of Self and Other. Said’s idea of Orientalism and Bhabha’s hybridity and hybrid space of interaction to young adolescents’ experience of in-betweenness, bear upon its educational purpose in the EFL classroom: How the illustrations of a fluid identity in-between childhood and maturity, and simultaneously, how deconstructing the binary opposites of Self and Other and the possibility of reconstructing identity in a third space, facilitate the YA’s understanding of a reconstructed and self-empowering personal identity.