This article explores the legacies of Virginia Woolf’s modernist lens in Zadie Smith’s latest novel, NW through a joint queer and postcolonial reading. Although critics have so far pointed out the connections between Smith’s fiction and modernist and postmodernist precursors, this article examines the unexplored relationship between NW and Mrs Dalloway. It argues that Woolf’s novel provides NW with a model of queer modernist dissidence that NW enacts in the equally frustrated relationship between two of its main characters, Leah and Natalie, whose dissatisfaction with the binaries of heteronormative patriarchy are intertwined with issues of class and ethnicity. Yet the article also proposes that what remains at the heart of Smith’s enterprise is the frustrated connection between queer sensibilities, which belies larger issues of British national identity and of diasporic subjects’ forging a sense of belonging and place in the postcolonial nation.
Cet article analyse les œuvres de Rabih Alameddine consacrées à la diaspora libanaise aux États Unis, en particulier The Hakawati (2008), I, the Divine (2001), et KOOLAIDS: The Art of War (1998). Il montre comment le roman The Hakawati , en replaçant la question taboue de l’homosexualité dans l’histoire de l’islam, va à l’encontre de sa répression dans les sociétés modernes de culture islamique. L’article amorce également une critique de l’homonationalité américaine dans I, the Divine , et examine les procédés de « queering » de l’histoire, des lieux et des textes sacrés dans KOOLAIDS , dont le récit entremêle la guerre civile au Liban et la crise du SIDA aux États-Unis. En « druzifiant », c’est-à-dire en suturant diverses traditions narratives et religieuses, Alameddine démontre la nature foncièrement hybride de la sensibilité diasporique.
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