Identity Formation and Cultural Translation in “Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits” by Laila Lalami

Seminar paper from the year 2020 in the subject Literature - Africa, Sultan Moulay Sliman University, language: English, abstract: Probing the concept of identity formation and mobility in Laila Lalami's "Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits" (2005), this paper immerses in the question of cultural translation of mobile identities in relation to alterity and border crossing. It first begins by shedding light on the cultural and geographical borders which identity speaks from and is defined by, for without there being a lucid insight into how the feeling of belonging and how the cultural history and heritage amount to the construction of identity in the homeland, and without such kind of insight into how the formation of identity takes place culturally and socially, cultural translation would still be an ambiguous collocation in the field of Postcolonial Studies and throughout this article as well. Also, it expounds how mobility bears upon the cultural translation of identity and what kind of changes it brings about in the middle of the past and future anxiety, the self and the other, and modernity and tradition. Finally, the paper delves implicitly into some conditions of untranslatability and translatability such as ambivalence and blasphemy respectively.