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      Multilingualism, Trauma, and Liminality in The Bullet Collection: Contact Zones, Checkpoints, and Liminal Points

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      Arab Studies Quarterly
      Pluto Journals
      code-switching, multilingualism, Lebanese civil war, trauma, nostalgia, Patricia Sarrafian Ward
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            Abstract

            Informed by theories of code-switching, memory, and trauma, my reading of Lebanese American Patricia Sarrafian Ward's diasporic novel The Bullet Collection (2003) centers on its multilingual usages to demonstrate how language play makes visible states of liminality or in-betweenness: between Lebanon and the US, the past and the present, the present and the future, childhood and adulthood, and trauma and recovery. I argue that this liminality, laid bare by a creative interpretation of the (mis)- and (dis)uses of multilingualism, is a concept that ties trauma, nostalgia, and homeness together and is fleshed out in three psychodynamic spaces: social contact zones, checkpoints, and liminal points. I zero in on code-switched materials, both overt and covert, to reveal how they are deeply, if often inconspicuously, connected to expressing traumas and (re)negotiating identities. By adopting this approach, I contribute, first, to the field of literary linguistics, relatively under-explored in connection with Arab American and Anglophone Arab fiction, and, second, chart a new pathway towards decolonizing trauma studies by examining its relationships with multilingualism, war, and nostalgia.

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            Author and article information

            Journal
            10.2307/j50005550
            arabstudquar
            Arab Studies Quarterly
            Pluto Journals
            0271-3519
            2043-6920
            1 January 2021
            : 43
            : 1 ( doiID: 10.13169/arabstudquar.43.issue-1 )
            : 5-25
            Article
            arabstudquar.43.1.0005
            10.13169/arabstudquar.43.1.0005
            1359c7b7-bd01-4fa4-9b57-30f373a84d5a
            © 2021 The Center for Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies

            All content is freely available without charge to users or their institutions. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles in this journal without asking prior permission of the publisher or the author. Articles published in the journal are distributed under a http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

            History
            Custom metadata
            eng

            Social & Behavioral Sciences
            multilingualism,Lebanese civil war,trauma,nostalgia,Patricia Sarrafian Ward,code-switching

            References

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