علی زارع زاده

This article examines how identity, nostalgia, and belonging impact Nicolas Urfe in John Fowles’s The Magus (1965). Drawing upon Homi Bhabha’s “Hybridity”, Stuart Hall’s “Cultural Identity”, and William Safran’s “Myth of Homeland”, the objective of this article is to recognize the futility underlying Nicolas’s relentless endeavors to establish a sense of belonging and reconcile with his inner turmoil and inherent desire in order to reveal the origins of his internal conflicts, such as anxiety, restlessness, and rootlessness. The significance of this article lies in its endeavor to analyze the diasporic experience on an individual ground that does not align with the typical paradigms of Nicolas’s relocation. This article also explores whether Nicolas feels a sense of belonging to a particular place that he can consider as home. We try to respond to two fundamental questions, namely what influences exist behind the adoption or rejection of a new self-identity by Nicolas in Fowles’s The Magus?, and does Nicolas with multi-layered identity associate with both native land and hostland, namely England and Greece, respectively in Fowles’s The Magus? In order to fill the existing gap, we explore how Nicolas’s identity oscillates between pre-immigration and post-immigration spaces, namely England and Greece, respectively.

In God Help the Child (2015), the overarching argument of this article is that Sweetness is incapable of conveying a meaningful reflection of her “true self”. Her frailty to love and respect herself makes her vulnerable to exchange the same emotions with Bride. The objective of this paper is to scrutinize the impact of colorism and color-blindness on the lives of African-American women. We try to respond to two fundamental questions, namely how can “looking-glass-self” theory be applied on the maternal bond between Sweetness and Bride? and second, what is the impact of intersectionality or matrix of the social domination on the lives of Sweetness and Bride in God Help the Child (2015)? Drawing upon Collins’s Black Feminist and Winnicott’s Psychoanalytic theories, we try to examine multi-faceted aspects of racism, including reverse racism, structural racism, intersectionality, matrix of the social domination, and common stereotypical images attributed to Black women with a holistic approach. Although socio-cultural White ideology is dominant to Bride’s Blackness, Bride rescues herself from the hatred of her own world by furnishing a kind of domination over other women and companies by her physical beauty and success in expanding cosmetics business. She turns her dark skin color into a marvelous asset in the guise of the White clothing.