Homelessness, Displacement and Identity: Open City and Home

Abstract

Abstract This thesis sets out to explore the themes of homelessness, displacement and identity in two contemporary novels: Marilynne Robinson’s Home (2008) and Teju Cole’s Open City (2011). My method involves comparing how temporality (time), space/place and its effects on subjectivity work as means to enhance an understanding of a “homeless” or hybrid condition that is evident both in the immensity of a globalised, cosmopolitan setting as well as in the more intimate, provincial and domestic life. The homeless condition I am setting out to explore is not the tragic fate of the exiled, the refugee, expatriate or émigré (although all of these fates are represented in Open City). It is not the transcendental homelessness that Georg Lukacs describes. Rather, it is a homelessness that is the result of a mobility increasing rapidly in its scope. I begin by exploring the ways in which the spaces and places inhabited in the two novels, namely New York City and Brussels in Open City and the domestic sphere of Home, both allow and inhibit the characters’ mobility, before moving on to a discussion of how time and memory serve as individual and collective constructions of reality. Finally, I discuss the varying and contrasting portrayals of a hybrid condition in the two novels, and its implications on the characters’ subjectivity. By using Homi Bhabha’s concept of hybridity, unhomeliness and in-between-ness, and Doreen Massey’s For Space (2005) as frameworks, I posit that although the two post-modern novels diverge both temporally and spatially, they coincide in that they both describe a displacement that is not absolute- it may or may not end.