International Journal of Language & Literature

The Notion of Being Other in Caryl Phillips’s Foreigners: Three English Lives, Salman Rushdie’s Shame, and Colum Mccann’s Transatlantic
Thamer Amer Jubouri Al-Ogaili

Abstract
This article focuses on the issue of otherness in Caryl Phillips’s Foreigners: Three English Lives, Salman Rushdie’s Shame, and Colum Mccann’s Transatlantic. The study will mainly concentrate on racism portrayed in these novels. The study’s textual analysis will follow a close reading of the novels’ racial issues, including identity and racial segregation, and the colonial interaction between the whites and the blacks. The novels serve as a panoramic embodiment of colonial clashed between the blacks and the whites during colonial times. Colonial suppression tackled in the novels will be scrutinized as a way of marginalizing the blacks at the hands of their white maters. This marginalization brings about a sense of otherness experienced by the blacks. When the blacks are marginalized, they spontaneously feel that they are suppressed and colonized. The feeling will be discussed as the sense of otherness per se. My study will further argue otherness as a main cause of changing the blacks’ identity.

Full Text: PDF      DOI: 10.15640/ijll.v4n1a21