Thesis (Ph.D.) - Cairo University - Faculty of Arts - Department of English

This thesis highlights the construction and malleability of the gendered self across borders through examining three novels, namely, Assia Djebar{u2019}s Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade (1985), Kiran Desai{u2019}s The Inheritance of Loss (2006), and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie{u2019}s Americanah (2013). These novels are read from a transnational perspective since themes such as migration, mobility, displacement, and colonization cut across. The novels explore the effect of colonization and mobility on the characters who are struggling to reach a new synthesis on the cultural level. The authors explore transitions and movement between cultures and they seek to pinpoint the fluidity and malleability of identity by locating characters in different spaces and multiple regions. This thesis will discuss how patterns of mobility affect cultural orientations, identity, and gender roles. Although the characters take different {u2018}routes{u2019}, some of them are seeking {u2018}roots{u2019} and voicing, in several ways, a wish to belong and anchor. Border crossing, whether figuratively or literally, and mobility affect the characters very differently and it is possible to argue that it has stark effects on their identity reformation. Mobility and journeying might be liberating and might, in many instances, become a chance to recreate oneself; however, it may also lead to the loss of oneself. This thesis argues that mobility and the movement between cultures affect the gendered selves and identity in different ways

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