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The Extinction Race: Techniques Of The Human In Proust, Via Houellebecq, James Dutton Jun 2022

The Extinction Race: Techniques Of The Human In Proust, Via Houellebecq, James Dutton

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article, “The Extinction Race: Techniques of the Human in Proust, via Houellebecq James Dutton “reads” identity and race from the point of view of technics. Namely, he does so through the work of two nominally “Eurocentric” authors, Marcel Proust and Michel Houellebecq, observing how familial and racial resemblance is a living inscription of “lost time.” This inscription comes about through the technical means available to and constitutive of the categories which bind them. Thus, instead of furthering unfinishable racial distinctions which only serve to support discourses of racism, this article follows assertions made in the novels of …


Extending The Frontiers Of The Detective Novel In Adaora Ulasi’S The Man From Sagamu, Onyeka Odoh Jun 2022

Extending The Frontiers Of The Detective Novel In Adaora Ulasi’S The Man From Sagamu, Onyeka Odoh

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Part of the beauty of detective literature is the mental engagement and psychological contest it stages between the author and the readers, as well as its fascinating probe into the nature and dynamism of crime. However, of greater import are the formulaic structural elements that define the genre—a crime, the detection of the crime, an omniscient detective who intelligently investigates the crime, and a justified resolution of all. Though the structure of Adaora Ulasi’s The Man from Sagamu does not exactly fit into the above model, it is still a detective novel. Therefore, this essay aims to propose a new …


Precarity In The Times Of Partition: Personal Vs Communal Love In Khushwant Singh’S Train To Pakistan And Saadat Hasan Manto’S “Gurmukh Singh Ki Wasiyat”, Ayesha Perveen Jun 2022

Precarity In The Times Of Partition: Personal Vs Communal Love In Khushwant Singh’S Train To Pakistan And Saadat Hasan Manto’S “Gurmukh Singh Ki Wasiyat”, Ayesha Perveen

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The paper studies how various shades of love respond to precarity in anarchic times by comparing the narrative representation of the aftermath of the Partition of the British colonized Subcontinent into independent countries of India and Pakistan in 1947 with particular focus on Sikh-Muslim relationships in Punjab as presented in Khushwant Singh’s novel Train to Pakistan and Saadat Hasan Manto’s short story “Gurmukh Singh ki Wasiyat.” Employing Judith Butler’s concept of precarity, the paper analyzes how both the writers sketch precarity in partition times ensuing in post-Partition communal violence and effacement of love. The selection of the texts is significant …


Returning To East Africa Via India: On M. G. Vassanji’S And Home Was Kariakoo, Shizen Ozawa Feb 2022

Returning To East Africa Via India: On M. G. Vassanji’S And Home Was Kariakoo, Shizen Ozawa

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article “Returning to East Africa via India,” Shizen Ozawa examines how M. G. Vassanji further develops his diasporic aesthetics in his latest travel book/ memoir And Home Was Kariakoo: A Memoir of East Africa (2014) from two perspectives. First, the essay explores some possible influences of his earlier travelogue A Place Within: Rediscovering India (2008). It seems partly because of his deepening relationship with his land of ancestral origin that in And, Vassanji emphasizes the cross-continental connections between East Africa and India more strongly than in his earlier works. Especially, he characterizes the very presence of …


Tituba, “Dark Eve” In The Origins Of The American Myth: The Subject Of History And Writing About Salem, Junghyun Hwang Feb 2022

Tituba, “Dark Eve” In The Origins Of The American Myth: The Subject Of History And Writing About Salem, Junghyun Hwang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Recasting the Salem witchcraft trials in light of Walter Benjamin’s theses on historiography, this paper revisits the question of history by examining ways in which Tituba is dis/con-figured as the subject of American history in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem. Both stories of persecution revolve around the figure of Tituba, a slave from the Caribbean to whom the beginning of the witch trials is attributed, as the nodal point of different modes of representing the Salem history. The telos in Miller’s drama coincides with the subject-formation of Proctor as the legitimate …


Trans-Atlantic Interrogation: Fabienne Pasquet’S La Deuxième Mort De Toussaint Louverture, Mariana F. Past Mar 2021

Trans-Atlantic Interrogation: Fabienne Pasquet’S La Deuxième Mort De Toussaint Louverture, Mariana F. Past

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In “Trans-Atlantic Interrogation: Fabienne Pasquet’s La deuxième mort de Toussaint Louverture,” Mariana Past situates the Haitian-Swiss novelist’s understudied narrative within the context of Caribbean letters and the Haitian literary tradition, then discusses the broader, intertextual implications of Toussaint Louverture’s “second” death for Haiti and the trans-Atlantic world. To what end does Pasquet deploy the aged ghost of a Haitian revolutionary icon being invoked by German Romantic writer Heinrich von Kleist in the Fort de Joux castle-cum-prison within France’s remote, mountainous Jura region? What is at stake when the diasporic writer reincarnates a legendary German poet as protagonist, placing him …


Speculative Epistemologies Of Resistance In Hombres De Maíz And Bandarshah, Haifa S. Alfaisal Mar 2021

Speculative Epistemologies Of Resistance In Hombres De Maíz And Bandarshah, Haifa S. Alfaisal

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his two-part “The literary history of world-systems” Matthew Eatough utilizes world systems theory to examine literary studies. He makes use of Baucom’s “speculative epistemologies” to explore the connection between the global economy speculative financial instruments and the rise of the novel in 18th century. But Eatough is interested in tracing the history of literary studies and world systems theory. In this paper, I use speculative epistemologies to indicate ways of knowing that are speculated in fiction. My starting point is the decolonial critique of world system theory, which I use to formulate border reading; a reading strategy that is …


Hanay Geiogamah’S Body Indian And Foghorn As “Plays With A Purpose”, Danica Čerče Mar 2021

Hanay Geiogamah’S Body Indian And Foghorn As “Plays With A Purpose”, Danica Čerče

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, “Hanay Geiogamah’s Body Indian and Foghorn as ‘Plays with a Purpose,’” written against the backdrop of critical whiteness studies, Danica Čerče discusses how Geiogamah’s theatrical rhetoric intervenes in the assumptions about whiteness as a static, privilege-granting category and system of dominance. By focusing on various techniques and strategies mobilized to define and affirm Native Americans’ authentic rather than imposed identities, the article shows that humor is one of the prime textual devices in Geiogamah’s plays to renegotiate what Walter Mignolo calls “the racist structure of power.”


China Question Of Western Postcolonial Translation Theory, Zhijie Wu, Yuping Wang Dec 2020

China Question Of Western Postcolonial Translation Theory, Zhijie Wu, Yuping Wang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

“China Question of Western Postcolonial Translation Theory” deals with how western postcolonial translation theory is read, interpreted and applied in China, as well as how the reception in China influences revision and development of the theory. Western postcolonial translation theory, though frequently quoted and highly influential in China, is sometimes incapable of effectively explaining Chinese translation practice and convincing Chinese readers. Based on the analysis of the encounter between postcolonial translation theory and China, three suggestions are proposed to revise translation theory so as to build a “greener,” healthier hetero-generative ecology of languages and cultures.


“The Poem Is What Lies Between A Between”: Mahmoud Darwish And The Prosody Of Displacement, Ayelet Even-Nur Apr 2020

“The Poem Is What Lies Between A Between”: Mahmoud Darwish And The Prosody Of Displacement, Ayelet Even-Nur

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish grew up in Israel as an internal refugee living under Israeli military rule, legally classified as a “present-absentee alien.” This article focuses on his 1995 volume of poetry, Limādhā tarakta al-ḥiṣān waḥīdan? (Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone?), to study the manner in which Darwish’s cultivation of the musical and aural aspects of poetry serves as a means of poetically attending to the effects of dispossession and displacement. Through a discussion of the poems in the collection’s fourth section, Ghurfa l’il kalām maʿ al-nafs (A Room to Talk to Oneself …


Queering Identity Politics In Shimon Adaf’S Aviva-No, Yael Segalovitz Apr 2020

Queering Identity Politics In Shimon Adaf’S Aviva-No, Yael Segalovitz

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article offers a queer reading of Shimon Adaf’s volume of poetry, Aviva-No (2009), analyzing it in conjunction with his recent collection of essays on identity formation, Ani aherim (I am others) (2018). Adaf’s oeuvre has been primarily studied through the lens of ethnicity and race. This article demonstrates that gender plays a key role in his body of work. Aviva-No, which is a lamentation for the poet’s sister, destabilizes the boundaries between the mourning brother and the absent sister. This ontological deconstruction stimulates in Aviva-No a broader undoing of gender as an embodied identity. The volume is replete …


"A Generation Of Wonderful Jews Will Grow From The Land": The Desire For Nativeness In Hebrew Israeli Poetry, Hamutal Tsamir Apr 2020

"A Generation Of Wonderful Jews Will Grow From The Land": The Desire For Nativeness In Hebrew Israeli Poetry, Hamutal Tsamir

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article examines the ways in which the desire for nativeness is constructed in Israeli Hebrew poetry through several historical episodes: H. N. Bialik’s poem 1896 poem “In the Field”; the poets as pioneers/immigrants in the 1920s, in contrast to the “nativist” poet Esther Raab; and the “nativist” poets of the 1950s (Statehood Generation), focusing on Moshe Dor. The desire to be native—to belong to the land in a way that is natural, self-evident, and therefore absolute and unquestionable— is one of the constitutive desires of nationalism in general, and of Zionism in particular. In Bialik’s poem, written during the …


Performing The Global: The Mediated Mobility Of Virtual Cosmopolitans, Hye Jean Chung Feb 2020

Performing The Global: The Mediated Mobility Of Virtual Cosmopolitans, Hye Jean Chung

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article examines how contemporary media art and popular culture, vernacular cultural practices, and digital technologies express and actualize aspirations for global mobility. This task is propelled by the need to question the limited scope of how we envision globalization. Here I explore how people use forms of visual media to “perform the global” through mediated experiences of mobility. I propose the concept of “virtual cosmopolitans” to describe those who participate in the experience of global citizenship through their use of photography, film, and digital media. Although they do not have access to conventional forms of cosmopolitan mobility, these virtual …


Making The Global Visible: Charting The Uneven Development Of Global Monsters In Bong Joon-Ho’S Okja And Nacho Vigalondo’S Colossal, Ju Young Jin Feb 2020

Making The Global Visible: Charting The Uneven Development Of Global Monsters In Bong Joon-Ho’S Okja And Nacho Vigalondo’S Colossal, Ju Young Jin

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her essay, “Making the Global Visible: Charting the Uneven Development of Global Monsters in Bong Joon-Ho’s Okja and Nacho Vigalondo’s Colossal,” Ju Young Jin examines the entanglement of the global and the monstrous in two recent films that position Korea on the cusp between Cold War politics and global capitalism: Bong Joon-Ho’s Okja and Nacho Vigalondo’s Colossal. The Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-Ho and Spanish filmmaker Nacho Vigalondo offer viewers films that challenge conventional notions of monster by fusing it with a coming-of-age plot of the female protagonist that takes place on a global scale, which contests the …


Monstrous Accumulation: Topographies Of Fear In An Era Of Globalization, Robert T. Tally Jr. Feb 2020

Monstrous Accumulation: Topographies Of Fear In An Era Of Globalization, Robert T. Tally Jr.

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The predominance of the horror genre, broadly conceived, in recent years attests to the profound sense of anxiety and dread permeating late capitalist societies. As the processes and effects of globalization become more viscerally experienced, they are also often rendered invisible or unknowable, and individuals and groups find themselves subject to an immense array of forces beyond their control. The contemporary scene is crowded with monsters, from alien invaders to the zombie apocalypse, set against the backdrop of darkly fantastic landscapes and dystopian visions. Drawing upon a variety of Marxist cultural theory, Robert T. Tally Jr. explores the topographies of …


Migrant Necropolitics At The Table: "Civilized Cannibalism" In Mahi Binebine's Cannibales, Taïeb Berrada Feb 2020

Migrant Necropolitics At The Table: "Civilized Cannibalism" In Mahi Binebine's Cannibales, Taïeb Berrada

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In Cannibales, the Maghrebi Francophone author Mahi Binebine revisits the encounter between the so-called “cannibals” and the European colonizer in the context of illegal immigration where bodies become commodities exchangeable for social improvements creating a different form of cannibalism. It is no longer the usual dichotomy between the civilized and the savage that is at work but rather a “civilized” European imperialist who feeds himself on a migrant’s flesh. This article argues that this representation works as a “colonial fragment” from the past but contextualized in today’s globalization. Binebine’s morbid depiction of an ambivalent postcolonial cannibalistic encounter translates as …


Revisiting "Home" In Ghanaian Poetry: Awoonor, Anyidoho And Adzei, Gabriel Edzordzi Agbozo Feb 2020

Revisiting "Home" In Ghanaian Poetry: Awoonor, Anyidoho And Adzei, Gabriel Edzordzi Agbozo

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The idea of “home” is a significant occurrence in postcolonial literature, as it connects to other ideas as identity, nationhood, and culture. This paper discusses “home” in Ghanaian poetry focusing on three well-regarded poets: Kofi Awoonor, Kofi Anyidoho, and Mawuli Adzei. These poets come from the Ewe ethnic group, and engage with the Pan-African project in both their scholarly and creative expressions. Drawing on John Berger, Sara Dessen, and Ewe thought on the afterlife, this paper suggests two major types of “home” in the works of these three poets: the physical, and the metaphysical. Physical “home” refer to the Wheta …


Domestic Trauma And Imperial Pessimism: The Crisis At Home In Charles Dickens’S Dombey And Son, Katherine E. Ostdiek Sep 2019

Domestic Trauma And Imperial Pessimism: The Crisis At Home In Charles Dickens’S Dombey And Son, Katherine E. Ostdiek

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In “Domestic Trauma and Imperial Pessimism: The Crisis At Home in Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son,” Katherine Ostdiek discusses Dickens’s representation of violence, grief, and recovery within the Victorian home as a pre-Freudian example of trauma. This comparison not only demonstrates the importance of trauma studies in the nineteenth-century, but more importantly, it thematically focuses empathy for the traumatized on the home. In this novel, Dickens dismisses topics related to the financial and social crises of mid-century Britain in favor of domestic themes that emphasize an idealized structure of the Victorian family. Through her use of trauma theory and …


Suffering And Climate Change Narratives, Simon C. Estok Sep 2019

Suffering And Climate Change Narratives, Simon C. Estok

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Suffering and Climate Change Narratives" Simon C. Estok begins with a brief survey of definitional issues involved with the term “suffering” and argues that there has been a relative lack of theoretical attention to suffering in climate change narratives, whether literary or within mainstream media. Estok shows that suffering, far from being singular, is a multivalent concept that is gendered, classed, raced, and, perhaps above all, pliable. It has social functions. One of the primary reasons for the failure of climate change narratives to effect real changes, Estok argues, is that they often carry the functions of …


Salam Neighbor: Syrian Refugees Through The Camera Lens, Lava Asaad Sep 2019

Salam Neighbor: Syrian Refugees Through The Camera Lens, Lava Asaad

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This paper examines the documentary Salam Neighbor (2015), which celebrates the will of Syrian refugee women who are displaced in Jordan. The collective experience of the refugees portrayed in the documentary solicits a reaction from the Western viewer. To counteract the images of refugees in the media, documentaries can be a good alternative for mass media, which has been perpetuating a binary of the West and the Rest. The argument tackles the issue of this new representation of refugees in documentaries within a postcolonial paradigm of how we represent or speak to/with the Other in our technological age, as well …


Recovering The Archive And Finding Forgiveness In Park’S The Truth Commissioner, Aleksandra Hajduczek Sep 2019

Recovering The Archive And Finding Forgiveness In Park’S The Truth Commissioner, Aleksandra Hajduczek

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article “Recovering the Archive and Finding Forgiveness in Park’s The Truth Commissioner,” the author utilizes Jacque Derrida's theories about the function of archivization and the “impossible madness” of pure forgiveness to examine how these issues are addressed in post peace process Troubles fiction, focusing specifically on David Park's 2008 novel The Truth Commissioner. Park's text provides a particularly relevant example of the tension that Derrida outlines between the need for an unconditional, pure, and "hyperbolic" forgiveness and the conditional, judicial forgiveness that he associates with the truth recovery process.


Overlapping Scriptworlds: Chinese Literature As A Global Assemblage, Wai-Chew Sim Jul 2019

Overlapping Scriptworlds: Chinese Literature As A Global Assemblage, Wai-Chew Sim

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article “Overlappinig Scriptworlds: Chinese Literature as a Global Assemblage,” Wai-Chew Sim offers a globalist vision or understanding of Chinese literary studies/Sinophone studies. Deploying the notion of scriptworld (Damrosch), he examines how the Chinese, English, and Malay-language scriptworlds interact in the Southeast Asian context. He traces the rhizomatic connections between Joo Ming Chia’s Exile or Pursuit, a Singapore Sinophone text that explores multiple belongings, and two novels: M. L. Mohamed’s Confrontation (originally published as Batas Langit), and T.H. Kwee’s The Rose of Cikembang (originally published as Bunga Roos dari Cikembang). Tracing the sinophonicity of the latter …


Chase Riboud’S Hottentot Venus (2003) And The Neo-Victorian: The Problematization Of South-Africa And The Vulnerability And Resistance Of The Black Other, Maria Isabel Romero Ruiz Mar 2019

Chase Riboud’S Hottentot Venus (2003) And The Neo-Victorian: The Problematization Of South-Africa And The Vulnerability And Resistance Of The Black Other, Maria Isabel Romero Ruiz

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article touches upon issues of captivity, suppression, misrepresentations and exclusion of black people from a historical and cultural point of view through the analysis of Chase-Riboud’s neo-Victorian novel Hottentot Venus (2003). It also focuses on the implications and consequences for contemporary South Africa of situations of slavery and exploitation of African descended peoples. Notions of identity and moral and legal inclusion of black women into past and contemporary societies and communities will be also discussed from the point of view of postcolonial and gender and sexuality studies. The complexities of blackness and the violation of human rights as a …


Revisiting 'Seventeen–Year Literature' (1949-1966) In China From A Neocolonial Perspective, Tian Zhang Dec 2018

Revisiting 'Seventeen–Year Literature' (1949-1966) In China From A Neocolonial Perspective, Tian Zhang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Revisiting Seventeen–Year Literature' (1949-1966) in China from a Neo­colonial Perspective" Tian Zhang surveys the "Seventeen-Year Literature" (1949-1966) from a neocolo­nial perspective. It reviews the internal and external factors of anxiety faced by Chinese during the period of seventeen years since the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949. The sev­enteen years witnessed a stress on and flourishing of the proletarian socialist literature of the people, by the people and for the people. The seventeen-year literature, on its way to smashing the old system, represents the trend of Chinese literature of the time and the extension …


The Colonized Masculinity And Cultural Politics Of Seediq Bale, Chin-Ju Lin Dec 2018

The Colonized Masculinity And Cultural Politics Of Seediq Bale, Chin-Ju Lin

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, “The Colonized Masculinity and Cultural Politics of Seediq Bale,” Chin-ju Lin discusses a Taiwanese blockbuster movie, a postcolonial historiography and a form of life-writing, which delineates the last Indigenous insurrection against Japanese colonialism. This article explores the cultural representations in Seediq Bale. Fighting back as a colonized man for pride and dignity is portrayed as means to restore their masculine identity. The headhunting tradition is remembered, romanticized, praised highly as heroic and even strengthened in an inaccurate way to promote individualistic masculinity and to forge a new national identity in postcolonial Taiwan. Nevertheless, the stereotypical …


Hardship And Healing Through The Lens Of Cultural Translation In Peter Hessler’S Travel Memoir River Town, Shang Wu Dec 2018

Hardship And Healing Through The Lens Of Cultural Translation In Peter Hessler’S Travel Memoir River Town, Shang Wu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The article “Hardship and Healing through the Lens of Cultural Translation in Peter Hessler’s Travel Memoir River Town” looks into the autobiographical dimension of Hessler’s account of his two-year stay as a Peace Corps teacher in Fuling, a remote town in southwestern China. Taking the two senses of cultural translation, one in anthropology and one in cultural studies, as two descriptive aspects, it illustrates the hardship Hessler confronted and his healing strategies. Faced with etiquette and language issues as well as the power relation between China and America and its consequent stereotypes in cross-cultural encounters, Hessler gazed back to …


Changez/Cengiz's Changing Beliefs In The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Valerie Kennedy Dec 2018

Changez/Cengiz's Changing Beliefs In The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Valerie Kennedy

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, “Changez/Cengiz's Changing Beliefs in The Reluctant Fundamentalist” Valerie Kennedy analyzes the interrelation of individual subjectivity and global capitalism and the conflict between two belief systems in Mohsin Hamid’s novel. These are, first, a neoliberal system that sees individuals as rationally self-interested, mobile, economic units, and, second, a system based on a humanist definition of individuals as defined by nation, family, and tradition. Changez, the novel’s protagonist, initially endorses the first, but later rejects it for the second, due to his growing awareness of the impact on Pakistan of American geopolitics after 9/11. The essay also examines …


The Subversion Of East And West In Orhan Pamuk’S Novel, The White Castle, Adile Aslan Almond Jun 2018

The Subversion Of East And West In Orhan Pamuk’S Novel, The White Castle, Adile Aslan Almond

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "The subversion of East and West in Orhan Pamuk's novel, The White Castle" Adile Aslan seeks to show how Orhan Pamuk plays with the theme of East versus West in his third novel The White Castle (1985), with the aim of de-essentializing both concepts. In 1928, Perso-Arabic script, in use for centuries as the main writing system in the Ottoman Empire, was replaced with Latin alphabet (accompanied by an intensive Turkification of the Ottoman language in the coming years) as a part of a larger modernization-Westernization project in the new nation state, a move which effectively …


Other-Languagedness In Stories By R.K. Narayan, Saadat Hassan Manto, And Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Biljana Djorić Francuski Mar 2018

Other-Languagedness In Stories By R.K. Narayan, Saadat Hassan Manto, And Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Biljana Djorić Francuski

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Other-languagedness in Stories by R.K. Narayan, Saadat Hassan Manto, and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala" Biljana Djorić Francuski examines, within a comparative framework, the concepts of otherness and other-languagedness as expressed in three short stories by authors from separate but interconnected cultures: an Indian English writer, Rasipuram Krishnaswamy Narayan; a Pakistani writer, Saadat Hassan Manto; and a writer of European origins who lived in and wrote about India, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. The author analyzes, within the context of the (post)colonial discourse, the instances of misunderstanding resulting from binary oppositions between the interlocutors, due to their mutual otherness.


Transnational Uses Of Mafia Imagery In Zadie Smith’S White Teeth, Andrea Ciribuco Dec 2017

Transnational Uses Of Mafia Imagery In Zadie Smith’S White Teeth, Andrea Ciribuco

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Transnational Uses of Mafia Imagery in Zadie Smith's White Teeth" Andrea Ciribuco discusses the literary representation of multiculturalism in Zadie Smith's first novel, White Teeth (2000). The novel focuses on multicultural encounters in Great Britain in the second half of the twentieth century. This article focuses on one site for these encounters: the character of Millat Iqbal, who joins a gang of teenagers and subsequently a radical Islamic group in his problematic search for identity and belonging. This search is characterized by Millat's tendency to define himself by reference to well-known pop-cultural Mafia figures, whom he …