IJLLC | Interrogating Identity in Benaziza’s <i>The Splendid Life of a Frequent Traveller</i>

Indexing and Abstracting

Interrogating Identity in Benaziza’s The Splendid Life of a Frequent Traveller

Rachid Toumi

International Journal of Language, Literature and Culture (IJLLC), Vol-5,Issue-1, January - February 2025, Pages 9-14, 10.22161/ijllc.5.1.2

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Article Info: Received: 24 Dec 2024, Received in revised form: 22 Jan 2025, Accepted: 30 Jan 2025, Available online: 05 Feb 2025

Abstract:

This paper examines the theme of identity in Lahsen Benaziza’s debut novel, titled The Splendid Life of a Frequent Traveller. It uses postcolonialism as a reading strategy to focus on the novel’s dramatization of the legacy of the colonialist encounter and the impact of discrimination on subjectivity-formation in a historical context still burdened by the colonial past. It explores the compelling ways in which this piece of postcolonial writing reconstructs personal identity and achieves narrative authority in a hybrid text narrated from the point of view of the marginalized Other. In its appreciation of the novel’s filtration of cultural narrative through the medium of expatriation, the paper refers to the works of Ernest Hemingway, James Baldwin, and Tayeb Salih to bring into view how Lahsen Benaziza shares with these classic writers the artistic sensibility that uses exilic space as a paradigm for personal experience and as a laboratory for intellectual action.

Keywords:

Identity, Race, the Other, Representation, Discrimination, Hybridity, Colonialism, Postcolonialism, the East, the West, Subjectivity, Trauma, Narrative, Innocence, Alienation, Expatriation, Writing.

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