Expatriate Experience and the Fictional World of Diaspora

Abstract

Abstract-- Expatriate Writing, diaspora writing or immigrant writing is yet to be established as an independent genre of study. It came into origin as a result of “marginalization” or “hyphenated” existence of such immigrants and expatriates that narrated their traumatic experiences of multiple racial discrimination, ethnicity, nostalgia, alienation and like in their writings. In post-colonial literatures, “the expatriate sensibility” is already accepted as a legitimate literary term like “Europeanization”. This study analyses the feasibility of formulating a literary critical theory, exclusively to study and interpret writings showing expatriate sensibility and having the potential of growing into a distinct genre of studies. Although Expatriation presents descriptions of multiculturalism and marginalized territory in spatial terms, it does not belong to any geographical, political and social boundaries. Hence, Expatriate Studies can be seen as a specific literary discourse or given the distinction of a literary genre much like a work that is called a Feminist or a Marxist due to its specific literary theory.