Re-visiting Othering as Death Politics: A Study of Nayomi Munaweera’s Island of a Thousand Mirrors

Abstract

The female body is politically connected to honor and shame that turns it into a site of numerous conflicts and violence. As a Migrants, female body is an easy, visible Other, seeming to fall neatly into the us-versus-them framework of nationalism. My argument is premised on the strategies of ‘othering’ as a politics of violence designed to push female body towards suicide in order to gain honor or identity and leaves it as unrecognizable and unnamed. The traumatic experiences of othering put the female body potentially in a state of crisis in that extreme level that ability to resist further distort it. Drawing on Kristeva’s concept of Abjection and Giorgio Agamben’s idea of “bare life”, I will discuss the ways in which ‘othering’ as a violence inflicted on woman’s body not only erase her individuality but leaves her as dirty and disgusted body. This study aims to highlight different aspects of necro-political ways of ‘abjection” and “bare body’ articulated in the Munaweera’s Island of Thousand Mirrors through the vocabulary, incidents and landscape to present an alternative avenue of investigation of dehumanization of woman’s body. The focus of my study is to see othering as a violence to take place within the confines of micro social interaction and operates at multiple levels, within individuals, families, communities, and society as a whole.