This thesis explores how the hybrid form of photo-fiction suits migrants’ experiences. Taking Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project (2008) and W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants (1996) as my case...Show moreThis thesis explores how the hybrid form of photo-fiction suits migrants’ experiences. Taking Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project (2008) and W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants (1996) as my case studies, I focus on themes of history, memory, and identity. I analyze how the tensions between photographs and prose complicate our understanding of the way traumatic historical events shape the present, the unjust historical treatment that migrants endure, the mobilization and materialization of memories, the constructed nature of migrant identities, and the way exile becomes a desired state of being in the world. Through comparative close readings of Hemon and Sebald’s novels I explore how both authors challenge the conventional notion that photography’s telos is bearing witness to historical truths and how their novels also call for a reconsideration of the relationship between memory and photography. I seek to show that the hybrid photo-fiction form, which emphasizes blurriness and dualities inherent in acts of memory and in constructions of self-histories and identities, illuminates how migrants meaningfully engage with the world. Sebald and Hemon’s novels move us between two aesthetics, engage us with two modes of storytelling, and in doing so highlight the positive nature of hybridity and the beauty in rootlessness and rupture.Show less
Although trees are not the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of the Israel/Palestine conflict, the aim of this thesis is to demonstrate that specific trees play a significant and active...Show moreAlthough trees are not the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of the Israel/Palestine conflict, the aim of this thesis is to demonstrate that specific trees play a significant and active role in the conflict and in the construction of Israeli and Palestinian collective memories and identities. Beyond providing mere metaphoric expressions of Israeli and Palestinian rootedness, trees give material form to claims to the contested land of Israel/Palestine. Thus, the Israel/Palestine conflict is not merely a struggle over land, but also a struggle conducted and articulated through the land and through trees more specifically, as both Israelis and Palestinians invest memory in “their” trees, the pine tree and the olive tree respectively.Show less
