Readaptation Narratives in 'Sojourner Literature' : The Dis- and Re-Orientation of Returning Home

This Palgrave Pivot makes a case for ‘sojourner literature’, a new literary genre within transnational literature, parallel to ‘immigrant literature’, and its subgenre ‘readaptation narratives’.

This Palgrave Pivot makes a case for ‘sojourner literature’, a new literary genre within transnational literature, parallel to ‘immigrant literature’, and its subgenre ‘readaptation narratives’. Sojourners are a privileged group of migrants who travel freely and by choice, and yet they struggle with the experience of returning home. Through contextualization, readaptation narratives open psychological concepts like grief, ambiguous loss, identity shifts, and coping styles, while the psychology deepens the reading of the narrative form and its exposition of in-betweenness. The novels explored are A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, Americanah, Dear Pakistan, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and two Icelandic novels that have not been translated into English, Að heiman [Away from Home] and Mávahlátur [Seagulls Laughter]. The analysis reveals two new metaphors that help ground the meaning of dis-/re-orientation in the context of readaptation and suggests that the existing readaptation framework requires expansion to better deal with the complexity of the phenomenon.