Unveiling the Transcultural: The Question of Identity in Suneeta Peres da Costa’s Saudade

Abstract

In this age of unparalleled mobility and migration, identity has become a concept which requires reconsideration and at times even re-configuration. This is mainly because the key concepts that used to delineate it like home, nation and history are no longer approached in their classical versions. Specifically, with the inception of border crossing networks and the radical change in the meaning of migration, transcultural identity emerges, carrying with it a multiplicity of liberatory, anti-essentialist and counter-hegemonic discourses and proposing a new approach to all of the identificatory foundational terms, including home, culture, religion and language. This is in fact best typified in the migration literature contrived by contemporary South Asian diasporic authors, of which the Goan-Australian Suneeta Peres da Costa is a significant prototype. As such, this paper is predicated on a close reading of Peres da Costa’s latest novel Saudade (2018) in an endeavor to demystify the intricacies of transcultural identity in its narrative discourse.

Keywords:

• Transcultural identity
• transcultural continuum
• decolonization
• decentering
• border crossing
• heteroglossia
• dialogization
• dialecticization

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Khaoula Chakour

Khaoula Chakour is a PhD student–researcher in the doctoral program Interactions in Literature, Culture and Society in Sultan Moulay Slimane University, Beni Mellal, Morocco. Her fields of research include migration literatures, diaspora studies, identity theories and cultural theory.