Migration and Diaspora Studies, "Home Fire" with Ekin Bodur
Channel: SOAS University of London
Date: 26/05/2021

This lecture centres upon Kamila Shamsie’s 2017 novel Home Fire to rethink the concepts of adaptation and resistance in diasporic literature. Home Fire is a contemporary retelling of Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone (c. 442 BCE) from the perspective of British Muslims in a post 9/11 world and in relation to UK’s anti-terror laws, especially “denaturalization”. The novel questions what it means to be a British national, whether citizenship is a right or a privilege, and how race becomes a definitive factor in the determination of this question. In her novel, Shamsie scrutinizes the epistemic violence that silences British Muslim narratives in the debate, and the novel itself becomes a means for epistemic resistance to such violence. In this lecture, we will also talk about what it means to adapt a classical tragedy to make sense of people’s affects, moods, dispositions, and politics in the diaspora. Adaptation, as distinctive from appropriation, is a concept that questions the primacy or privilege of an originary text and offers to read the new text’s relation to its pre-text in innovative ways. In that sense, we will discuss how adaptation of canonical texts might (or might not) open up new horizons for resistance. 

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