Cultural hybridity and religio-feminist identity crises
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Date
2017
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UMT Lahore
Abstract
This study stylistically analyzes Amra Pajalic’s novel The Good Daughter, published in 2009, to explore its themes of religio-feminist identity crises in the wake of cultural hybridity. The novel focuses on identity problematics of its protagonist Sabhia, the Australian-born teenager daughter of a Muslim family that originally hailed from Bosnia, as she finds herself wedged between demands for cultural conservatism from her mother and grandfather, and a radically westernized stance about cultural freedom that otherwise dominates her environment. The study is constituted of a qualitative interpretative analysis and its theoretical framework fundamentally draws on Sara Mills’ views on Feminist Stylistics and Michael Halliday’s Social Semiotics. In accordance with Mills’ model of analysis, the research dissects the language of the novel’s characters to unravel cultural issues of religio-feminist identities, on the one hand, at the micro levels of phrase, clause, and sentence, while on the other, a study of characters’ usage of pronouns is integrated into the more innovative and contentious macro level, as advocated by Mills, of discourse that designates communication through social patterns larger than specific conversational turns. Moreover, the study adapts Mills’ theory to align it with Wright and Hope’s model for the analysis of noun phrases and Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar for syntactic and discourse analyses. The position taken up in this study suggests that, given the specific context of the heroine’s upbringing, it may be difficult, to a certain extent, to justify the criticism levelled by her guardians against her adoption of Australian cultural identity. The analysis probes the protagonist’s divided mind as the story progresses through phases in which sometimes she reflects the Islamic identity favoured by her ancestors without any apparent external motivation from her mother or grandfather, while at other times the persistent pressure on her to cultivate a Bosnian religio-cultural identity only makes her more resolutely rebellious, and how the denouement involves a soliloquy in which she forcefully registers a gesture of repentance over not identifying herself with her family. This research would be an addition to the existing body of literary criticism that draws simultaneously on frameworks provided by theories of feminism, and issues of religio-cultural identities studied through the lens of linguistics.