Planetarian Discourse and the Pendulum of Identity in Contemporary Fiction. Al-Sanea’s Girls of Riyadh and Mukherjee’s Miss New India

Abstract

The present work intends to read the contemporary Arab and Indian literary works in an era of global circulations. The literary scripts of Rajaa Al-Sanea’s Girls of Riyadh and Mukherjee’s Miss New India appear to attest for a globalized reality articulated through the formal and thematic expressions of the texts. Under the fact of transnational motions fostering a crosscultural encounter between the Orient and the Occident, the cultural identity of the main characters is questioned, leading to examine their self-construction from a Planetarian perspective. The concept is theoretically constructed from Gayatri Spivak’s notion of Planetarity, which primarily aims at altering the ‘classical’ literary reading standards, and opts for constructing novel perspectives that converge with the global realities. The present work discusses that the images of the self and the other foster the cultural imagination of the literary characters, where the cognitive reception of direct and indirect images of the self and the other lead to the construction of a transcultural identity. Accordingly, the discussions contribute into a reading that promotes for the use of cognitivism as a literary and cultural approach to understand identity construction in the era of globalization. Moreover, it adds to the transcultural readings through announcing that the construction of a transcultural identity in the global era is assisted by cultural imagination.