A Postcolonial Reading of Double Consciousness: Internal and External Displacement in Post-2003 Iraqi Novel

Abstract

Abstract: The concept of double consciousness, coined by William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1903), has a figurative, rather than the medical, aspect dedicated for African Americans as a result of their feeling of duality. This study focuses on questioning its relevance to the postcolonial context in post-2003 Iraqi novels. The targeted individuals with this concept are reflected in a diasporic setting including internal and external displacement in the selected translated texts of The Tobacco Keeper (2011) by Ali Bader, The Book of Collateral Damage (2019) and The Baghdad Eucharist (2017) by Sinan Antoon. The concept is examined on Iraqi displaced characters of different minorities and identities. The hypothesis of the study arises from the similar posture of African-Americans with the situation of Iraqi asylum seekers and certain minorities inside their homeland Iraq and in host lands all over the world nowadays. The distancing among their native people is more serious than the people abroad.As a conclusion, the selected Iraqi novels mirror the concept of double consciousness in a way that highlight a very wide range of settings within certain postcolonial issues. The novels entail the survival of Iraqi (internal and external) migrants with the unresolved sense of double consciousness of those problematic characters.