Islam as a Rhythmic Reality: Identity, Emotions and Urban Space in Leila Aboulela's Short Fiction.

Abstract

This paper seeks to examine the relation between identity, emotions and urban space in the fiction of the Sudanese-Scottish writer Leila Aboulela. Focus is placed on the short stories “Souvenirs,” “The Boy from the Kebab Shop,” and “The Museum,” published in her collection Coloured Lights (2001). This paper will first of all analyse how the dislocation of the characters is used to tackle issues of the mystification of both the East and the West, alienation, and fear. Secondly, it will interrogate the mutual construction and consumption of the East and the West by concentrating on the social and spatial contrasts offered in the representation of the Sudanese city of Khartoum and the Scottish city of Aberdeen. Thirdly, it will revise how individual and collective bodies and identities are constructed through the work of emotions in the framework of the contact between individuals from an Eastern background in this particular Scottish setting.