Transcultural Migration in the Novels of Hédi Bouraoui: A New Ulysses

Elizabeth Sabiston
Year of Publication: 2020
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In Transcultural Migration in the Novels of Hédi Bouraoui: A New Ulysses, Elizabeth Sabiston analyses the dominant theme of transcultural migration, or immigration, in Hédi Bouraoui’s fiction. His protagonists reflect his passion for endless travel, and are Ulysses-figures for the postmodern age. Their travels enable them to explore the “Otherness of the Other,” to understand and “migrate” into them.
Bouraoui’s World Literature is rooted in the traversées of his characters across a number of clearly differentiated regions, which nonetheless share a common humanity. The ancient migrations of Ulysses, fuelled by violence and war, are paralleled to the modern displacements of entire cultures and even nations. Bouraoui’s works bridge cultures past and present, but they also require the invention of language to convey a postmodern world in flux.