This volume aims to address kinship in the context of global mobility, while studying the effects of technological developments throughout the 20th century on how individuals and communities engage in real or imagined relationships. Using literary representations as a spectrum to examine kinship practices, Lamia Tayeb explores how transnational mobility, bi-culturalism and cosmopolitanism honed, to some extent, the relevant authors' concerns with the family and wider kinship relations: in these literatures, kinship and the family lose their familiar, taken-for-granted aspect, and yet are still conceived as 'essential' spheres of relatedness for uprooted individuals and communities. Tayeb here studies writings by Hanif Kureishi, Zadie Smith, Monica Ali, Jhumpa Lahiri, Khaled Housseini and Nadia Hashimi, working to understand how transnational kinship dynamics operate when moved beyond the traditional notions of the blood relationship, relationship to place and identification with community. Chapter 1. Introduction: Transnational Kinship, Technology and the Global Novel.- Chapter 2. Kinship Transformed: Global Technologies and the Unfettering of Family Ties.- Chapter 3. Born into a Muddle of Relationships: Hanif Kureishi's
The Buddha of Suburbia and Zadie Smith's
White Teeth.- Chapter 4. Between National Diaspora: Monica Ali's and Jhumpa Lahiri's Transnational Wives and Families.- Chapter 5. 'Navigating' the Planetary Field of Kinship and Family: Khaled Hosseini and Nadia Hashimi.- Chapter 6. Conclusion: Towards a Planetary Field of Kinship and Relation.
Lamia Tayeb is Assistant Professor of English at the Higher Institute of Human Sciences of Tunis (UTM), Tunisia. She is the author of
The Transformation of Political Identity from Commonwealth through Postcolonial Literature: The Cases of Nadine Gordimer, Michael Ondaatje and David Malouf (2006).
