Political contexts of different epochs heavily influence the specificity of national, traditional, religious, and family festivities. Dramatic transformations of the festivity culture, which encompasses stable cultural-historical values and traditions as well as reveals the world perception of the society and family as its smallest social structure, were brought about in Latvia by the change of political power in 1940, they continued during the period of World War II and the Soviet era due to the impact of colonial policy implemented on the territory of Latvia. The aim of the paper is to study transformations of celebrating Christmas in childhood memory narratives by Latvian (Latgalian) writer Diāna Skaidrīte Varslavāne (b. 1932), which, permeated by WWII events and colonial trauma, reveal both individual/family history and the collective past. Despite propagated atheism and targeted actions for elimination of religion during the Soviet era, Varslavāne’s protagonist not only retains her religious beliefs, but continues celebrating religious holidays (including Christmas) privately. Christmas (the last family holiday) and Easter (the time her parents tragically die) in her autobiographical prose become a borderline between the time “now”—full of psychological, emotional and physical pains—and radically opposite “then”—spent with her family and full of hopes and expectations. Due to the loss of the life fundamentals (parents, home), the heroine is striving to maintain her “self,” her religiosity and spirituality, as it is only through them that she can hold a “conversation” with her tragically deceased parents and ensure the preservation of the ancestors’ values and identity. At conducting the research cultural-historical, biographical, comparative methods and content analysis were employed.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant depicts the picturesque landscape composed of rural scenery and ruins, but beneath the surface of natural scenery lies a serious discussion about national memory. The rural scenery and historical ruins suggest an interaction between the picturesque and Edmund Burke’s aesthetics of the beautiful and the sublime. However, the bird’s-eye view creates a distance between the viewer and the landscape. Such a way of seeing foregrounds the tension between nature and human factors, making political discourse naturalized. Even so, the ruins reject the picturesque way of seeing due to their relationship with past memories. As the “lieux de mémoire,” the abandoned monastery serves as a memory medium that restores the national memory. Thus, the national identity can be enhanced by the commemoration. There are two kinds of national memory embodied in the landscape. On the one hand, the depiction of rural scenery shows an attachment to the myth of “rural England.” Yet the novel questions the harmony of the rural community by introducing georgics into pastoral writing. On the other hand, the Roman ruins embody the imperial memory in Britain, and the imperial discourse is challenged when the “barbarians” reverse the imperial gaze. By unearthing the national memory embedded in the landscape, Ishiguro reconstructs the national identity and makes “Britishness” tolerant and diverse.

This paper puts flesh on the bones of questions concerning identity deformation of Nigerian immigrants in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s collection of short stories The Thing Around Your Neck (2009). Adichie tries to understand the drastic effects of immigration on those who are living on the crossroads of cultures. Indeed, African contemporary literature is preoccupied with immigration and identity that are among the most important formative experiences of our era. Therefore, using Adichie’s short stories as a guide and a focal point, the paper attempts to analyze and examine the cultural mixture that shapes the identity of postcolonial African immigrants in the USA. The study attempts also to offer an inside insight into the complex and often sad reality of modern-day Nigerian immigrants, and how they are transformed into fragmented hybrid individuals torn between two worlds in their struggle for belongingness. Frantz Fanon’s theory of inferiority complex, Homi Bhabha’s concepts of hybridity and mimicry, Stuart Hall’s cultural theories and others are quite significant to show how postcolonial immigrant subjects define themselves according to the American cultural values giving way to a hybrid form of identity through a process of mimicry and self-alienation and inferiorization. The paper concludes that immigration causes characters’ metamorphosis and depersonalization. It is like an initiation into a limbo territory where immigrants are adrift.

This paper discusses Bowles’ philosophical accounts of the psychological destruction of the unwary American pilgrims who seek a new life in North Africa. In his novel Let It Come Down (1952), he demonstrates innovative traits for dealing with the macabre and the cruel oriental landscape by presenting it as being responsible for the disintegration of his American heroes. The paper takes Bowles’ character, Nelson Dyar from Let It Come Down, and analyzes it in terms of disintegrated identities in the orient of the Post-American war era. Indeed, Dyar, an American bank clerk, descends into the sordid underworld of Tangiers’ dope inferno. By escaping from the monotony of his dead-end job in the States, Dyar—promised a job within a travel agency in Tangiers—hopes for a relocation which delivers him from the sense of dejection he had been suffering. Arriving in Tangiers, Dyar starts posing those recurrent questions of whether or not Tangiers is the right place to relocate and allow him to find meaning to his existence. By the end of the novel, Dyar, the representative of the modern West, has hammered his companion’s head by a nail; he has finally destroyed the oriental other. The paper will show how the novel resists this and instead we cannot finally judge if Dyar is happy or unhappy since we are left only with the chilling weather and the endless rain.

By involving unnatural elements into the political satire, Ian McEwan’s The Cockroach offers an uncanny experience of expressing trenchant criticism against Brexit. This article, in the conceptual system of unnatural narratology, first of all, attempts to examine the unnatural events by focusing on the human-cockroach transformation and the Reversalism. Secondly, it explores the unnatural acts of characters including the cabinet’s metamorphosis, Jane Fish’s mastery of politics and people’s frenetic support. Thirdly, it tries to reveal the unnatural mind emerging in the protagonist, impossibly mixed with three original minds: a cockroach’s mind, collective spirit and original human mind. Coupling unnatural techniques with political satire, McEwan depicts an anti-mimetic, anti-reality and nightmarish scenario originated from the metamorphosis, readily provoking a mockery of the turmoil and division that Brexit has given birth to. The unnaturalness not only generates defamiliarizing effects which directly challenges readers’ cognition, but also amplifies McEwan’s strong criticism against Brexit, propelling readers to reconsider Britain’s decision.

The article deals with a representation of the Chornobyl accident in non-fiction prose by the Ukrainian and American authors from the perspectives of ecocriticism. The literary devices of ecocritical discourse such as the frame of idyll, paratextual forms, the key metaphors are defined and analyzed in a documentary narrative Chornobyl (1987) by Yuriy Shcherbak and a non-fiction story Chernobyl: The Final Warning (1988, second ed. 2020) by Robert Peter Gale and Thomas Hauser. A depiction of environmental problems, relations between man and nature, the elements of ecological consciousness etc. are studied in the documentary works about the Chornobyl tragedy, which were written by the Ukrainian and American authors shortly after the accident. Their texts represent the axiology of two different social systems—socialism and capitalism. It was also proved that the development of ecological consciousness and a liberation from colonial dependence are interrelated processes. A methodological basis of the research were the works from the field of ecocriticism (H. Fromm, D. Haraway, P.D. Murphy and other scholars). We came to the conclusion that in texts by Shcherbak and Gale, a key metaphor of ecological problems is an image of the final warning. The authors reveal its essence with the help of an idyllic worldview in a context of pastoral landscapes. In both texts the importance of understanding the interdependency between man and nature for the sake of avoiding further catastrophes was proved.

In our current socio-political scenario, our perception of the world is influenced by the narratives of facts we consume, mainly from mass media. These narratives constitute a powerful tool in order to manipulate the public’s vision of reality. Drawing upon mass communication theories, more specifically, Walter Lippmann’s theory of stereotypes and the phenomenon of the “filter bubble,” I will provide insight on how this manipulation of existing stereotypes is conducted by an authoritarian political system in George Orwell’s masterpiece 1984 (1949), and by mass media in a democratic state in the American TV miniseries The Loudest Voice in the Room (2019), in an attempt to control the public’s views on diverse political and social issues that are crucial to maintain the status quo. With this analysis, I will conclude that both works aim to raise awareness among citizens of the importance of developing critical thinking skills and questioning our existing stereotypes, as well as of maintaining our independence of thought.

Women are considered to be the vessel for retaining the family’s honor. They are tortured and killed to ensure that the honor is retained. Through this paper I would like to highlight the various issues pertaining to this concept of “honor killing,” which is many a times disguised as “honor suicide” by the family involved in this heinous work. Literature as a platform for evoking mass awareness will again help in popularizing this issue by a detailed study of texts like Burned Alive by Souad, Betrayed by Latifa Ali and Richard Shears, and In The Name of Honor by Mukhtar Mai. That honor killing is not just a statistical data but entails a much grave ethos with it will be highlighted in this paper. Another important aspect of this paper is to draw attention to these autobiographies for raising social consciousness among the masses, including the role played by patriarchy and the extent to which Islam is actually responsible for it, if at all. A detailed peek into the genesis and palliative means of honor killing will also be undertaken.

This paper critically engages in exploring the normalising mechanisms of heteronormativity and the impending homophobia that recurs in Himanjali Sankar’s Talking of Muskaan (2014). Sex, sexuality and gender have always been a subject of much debate. Homosexuality, as a possible form of sexuality, has never been accepted; rather, individuals who indulged in such “nefarious” acts were ostracised, shamed, and even killed. The dominant heteronormative culture and assertion of heterosexuality in spaces—both geographic and social—exclude as well as negate the presence of alternative sexualities. From being a sin to a pathological abnormality, homosexuality or any other queer expression remain under the watchful eyes of society. As a result, queer individuals reside in the extreme edge of marginalisation cobwebbed with fear, panic, anxiety, identity crisis and self-alienation. However, with recent critical approaches and advancements in the field of gender, sexuality and study of identity, the fluidity of our being has gained new insights and paved new doors for further discussion. Worthy of being mentioned, Judith Butler’s notion of gender performativity and Michel Foucault’s linking of sexuality to power and knowledge notably revolutionised the field of Gender and Sexuality Studies. Following Butler and Foucault, the paper will study the construction of the homophobic discourse and the psychological effects of normalising heterosexuality and gender roles. Apart from this, the paper examines how bullying and shame serve as passive yet penetrating weapons of the heterosexual society towards non-conforming individuals. Therefore, the paper endeavours to shed light on the survival strategies, as evident in the novel, while offering critical insights into the plight of queer individuals in India today.

This essay examines the conceptualization of pacificism in William Shakespeare’s oeuvre through Mahmoud Darwish’s lens. The Arab Palestinian Bard shares Shakespeare’s condemnation of war and glorification of humanistic values of peace and toleration. In many of his poems, Darwish shows admiration and identification with Shakespeare as a humanist poet, belonging to the Arab culture. Darwish’s appropriation of Shakespeare includes several references to Shakespeare as an icon of peace and a “comrade,” in Loomba’s and Orkin’s terminology. Even though Shakespeare’s position to pacificism is controversial among modern scholars, Darwish views the British Bard as a pacifist and anti-war icon. This study bridges the gap left in modern scholarship, which either focuses on analyzing Darwish’s poetry from a postcolonial vantage or refers to Shakespeare in Darwish’s poetry in passing, overlooking the Darwishian perception of Shakespeare’s pacificism. For Darwish, Shakespeare is a symbol of peace and a means of coexistence. Darwish’s employment of Shakespeare, on one hand, varies between direct appropriations, as manifested in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (1600), Romeo and Juliet (1597), and Hamlet (1603), and, on the other, implicit appropriations, as revealed in Shakespeare’s 3 Henry VI (1595) and Troilus and Cressida (1601–02). Darwish revisits Shakespeare’s oeuvre to philosophize on peace, war, and love.

This paper examines Jawad Al-Assadi’s and Zaid Khalil Mustapha’s representation of the generational clash in perceiving the future of the Arab world. In Forget Hamlet (2000) and Hamlet Ba‛da Ḥyn [Hamlet a While After, my translation] (2018) both playwrights show how Arab youth revolt against old governments that keep limiting their visions of a democratic state. The blind Laertes in Al-Assadi’s play represents the spirit of revolution in his words and condemnation of Saddam’s Iraq. In Mustapha’s play, Ophelia is a young actress who represents the voice of a young Arab woman who keeps accentuating the importance of change. This paper shows the Arab youth’s journey of self-assertion in the MENA region and their struggle against the old government that radically represents the opposite of their value system.