Embodying Intersectional Narratives
Mobility, Postnationality and Marginalised Masculinity in Jamal Mahjoub’s 'Travelling with Djinns'
Abstract
A remarkable body of instructive scholarship exists today on the subversive responses of postcolonial travel narratives to colonialist travel writing, branching into a trend of transcultural “mobile” stories foregrounding Europe(anness) as inescapably hybrid/transcultural/trans-local, thus rupturing the normative culturo-racial depiction of Europe as “White.” A critical silence however remains on how these postcolonial travel/mobile writings project the challenges of cultural citizenship involving male migrants framed in marginalised masculinity in Europe. Engaging Jamal Mahjoub’s Travelling with Djinns, I argue that some contemporary post/African novels unpack new ways of presenting postcolonial mobility by focusing on the challenges of subjectivity and sexual profiling in Europe, especially bordering on marginalised masculinity. This particularly unveils the weakness of Afropolitanism, a critical view that tends to present an unproblematic and straightforward idea of the European integration and citizenship of migrant/diasporic Africans, thus shedding further light on postcolonial African mobility and the politics of European (non-)belonging.
Keywords:
Colonialist travel writing, postcolonial travel/mobile writing, Afropolitanism, postnational(ism)/transnational(ism), marginalised masculinity. https://dx.doi.org/10.56279/ummaj.v11i2.5
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2024 Creative Commons
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
