Cette thèse étudie le thème du mariage interculturel et des identités hybrides de personnages dans The Pickup (2001) de Nadine Gordimer, The Translator (1999) de Leila Aboulela et A Mighty Collision of Two Worlds (2002) de Safi Abdi. L’étude cherche à explorer comment les identités culturelles des protagonistes changent lorsqu’ils se marient avec une personne d’une culture différente des leurs et qu’ils rencontrent de nouvelles traditions et de nouvelles croyances. La théorie de l’hybridité développée par Homi Bhabha et par d’autres théoriciens de l’hybridité peut être un outil pertinent pour analyser l’identité des personnages. Bhabha soutient que ceux qui traversent les cultures vivent dans un “in-between space” ou un “third space,” fluctuant entre leur culture d’origine et leur culture d’accueil. Cependant, les conclusions de l’étude montrent que ces personnages de fiction présentent des cas qui n’ont pas été explorés par les théoriciens de l’hybridité. On s’aperçoit d’autre part, que plusieurs facteurs de nature culturelle, religieuse, personnelle ou sociale influencent les protagonistes dans les romans : soit ils leur identité hybride s’affirme, soit ils conservent la façon de vivre de leur pays d’origine. On remarque aussi que les mariages interculturels et l’identité hybride sont liés entre eux. Le mariage interculturel peut être à la fois la manifestation de l’hybridité, et dans ce cas il est perçu comme une affirmation du vécu hybride servant du même coup de moyen d’aller vers l’hybridité. Contrairement à ce à quoi on pourrait s’attendre, on observe que parfois les relations interculturelles entraînent une réaction anti-hybride / This dissertation studies the subject of cross-cultural marriage and hybrid identities of characters in Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup (2001), Leila Aboulela’s The Translator (1999), and Safi Abdi’s A Mighty Collision of two Worlds (2002). The study seeks to find out how the cultural identities of the protagonists in the novels change when they marry across cultures and face new traditions and beliefs. Hybridity theory, which is developed by Homi Bhabha and other hybridity theorists, can be a relevant tool for analysis of the characters’ identities. Bhabha contends that those who cross cultures live in an “in-between space” or “third space” in which they oscillate between their native culture and the host culture. However, results show that fictional characters present cases which have not been explored by hybridity theorists. In addition, it is stressed that various factors of a cultural, religious, personal, and social nature affect the protagonists in the novels to either develop a hybrid identity or maintain their native way of life. It is also found that cross-cultural marriage and hybridity are correlated. The former can be both a manifestation of hybridity, where the protagonists’ cross-cultural marriage is seen as an assertion of their hybrid experience, and as a means to hybridity. Contrary to expectations, it is observed that cross-cultural relationships lead to an anti-hybrid reaction

This thesis uses affect theory and studies of emotion to analyse literary representations of the everyday in fictional and non-fictional writing about Muslim migrant women in the UK from 1906 to 2012. Postcolonial literary studies tend to value exceptional events over mundane life, which causes possible issues of exoticism and a danger of homogenising distinct experiences. This thesis offers a theorisation of migration that foregrounds everyday experience through an engagement with theories of objects, bodies and space, as well as emotional experiences that are specific to migrant subjectivity. It analyses two groups of texts: early twentieth century travel writing by Atiya Fyzee, Shahbano Begum Maimoona Sultan and Zeyneb Hanoum, and contemporary literary texts by Yeshim Ternar, Farhana Sheikh, Monica Ali, Leila Aboulela, Elif Shafak and Fadia Faqir. The thesis is structured thematically into three sections, each section containing two chapters, one about travel writing and another about contemporary texts. In the first section, in order to examine how the texts negotiate foreignness in daily life, I consider hospitality theory, which describes how social power relations are based on roles of host and guest. In the second section, I argue that melancholia is an emotional experience endemic to migrancy. The texts demonstrate how this emotion is manifest communally as well as individually, which also shows the political potential of emotion. In the third section, I investigate how emotional processes of migration are described spatially in the texts. The findings of this research show that emotional knowledge is a major concern for migrant writers as a way of engaging with and critiquing the social and political climates of each text. This is produced through narrations about feeling in general and specific emotions, such as irritation or anxiety. Emotional experience is illustrated in conjunction with identities that are both fluid and intersectional, where gender and class converge with ethnicity and religion. The texts also show specifically affective styles of writing that concentrate on focalising women's intimate experiences through, for example, diary entries, bildungsroman or psychological realism. While the differing contexts reflect the particularities of each experience, there are sufficient similarities of narrative content and style to suggest that affective experience is a major concern for this body of literature. Overall, this thesis demonstrates the productive uses of affect theory as a critical stance for analysing postcolonial literature.