Speaker
Description
Focusing on narrative polyphony, this paper analyzes how Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire (2017) rewrites the Antigone tragedy to move beyond the binary logic that often frames contemporary debates on migration and identity in contemporary London. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s concepts of polyphony and dialogism, I demonstrate how Shamsie’s multivoiced novel overturns agonistic interpretations of Sophocles’ Antigone. Rather than overemphasizing a struggle between two competing voices. Home Fire multiplies conflict through a convergence of diverse voices which cannot be neatly assigned to political positions. In reading Home Fire alongside Sophocles’ Antigone, I also draw on the work of classical scholars like Edith Hall and Simon Critchley to develop a bifurcated hermeneutic that listens to competing voices in the classical and contemporary tragedies at hand. Focusing on differences between Sophocles’ two-part chorus and Shamsie’s digital media chorus, I argue that the novel shifts from a binary tension into an open-ended polyphony. While commending this move towards plurality, I also highlight how the novel’s tragic structure decouples polyphony from egalitarian ideals, since the interplay of diverse voices fails to secure repatriation or political inclusion for Home Fire’s Muslim characters. This analysis reveals a crucial tension: even as Home Fire's multivoiced structure challenges dualistic thinking, it also demonstrates that polyphony does not automatically lead to political agency for marginalized citizens. Because this unresolved tension promotes continuing engagement with complexity, I suggest that Home Fire offers polyphony as a remedy not for the citizenship debate but for the more persistent crisis of discursive polarization.
| Keywords | Antigone, citizenship, Home Fire, narrative polyphony, polarization |
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| annelisek.hein@gmail.com |