NOSTALGIA AND THE AILING BODY IN NADEEM ASLAM’S MAPS FOR LOST LOVERS
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Abstract
Focusing on a small immigrant community in contemporary England, Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers (2004) narrates the pain and loneliness of cultural isolation and (self-)ghettoization in a cosmopolitanised reality. In that context, Aslam explores nostalgia as a common aspect of the experience of migration, supplying the minutest details of a mingled sense of loss and longing, which translates into physical pain and traps the community in a system of values and expectations that belong in another world. Relying on twenty-first-century cosmopolitan theory and studies of the body, both physical and social, this article wishes to analyse the ailing body as a consequence of falling prey to nostalgia. By examining both the suffering maternal body and body social, it intends to demonstrate how nostalgia can impede adaptation and stand in the way of cosmopolitanism.
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References
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