"Home Fire" Diasporic Literature Between Adaptation and Resistance

Ekin Bodur, Kings College, University of Cambridge

This lecture centres upon Kamila Shamsie’s 2017 novel Home Fire to rethink the concepts of adaptation and resistance in diasporic literature. Home Fire is a contemporary retelling of Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone (c. 442 BCE) from the perspective of British Muslims in a post 9/11 world and in relation to UK’s anti-terror laws, especially “denaturalization”. The novel questions what it means to be a British national, whether citizenship is a right or a privilege, and how race becomes a definitive factor in the determination of this question. In her novel, Shamsie scrutinizes the epistemic violence that silences British Muslim narratives in the debate, and the novel itself becomes a means for epistemic resistance to such violence. In this lecture, we will also talk about what it means to adapt a classical tragedy to make sense of people’s affects, moods, dispositions, and politics in the diaspora. Adaptation, as distinctive from appropriation, is a concept that questions the primacy or privilege of an originary text and offers to read the new text’s relation to its pre-text in innovative ways. In that sense, we will discuss how adaptation of canonical texts might (or might not) open up new horizons for resistance.

Ekin Bodur is a PhD candidate in English at King’s College, Cambridge University. Before becoming a graduate student at Cambridge, she completed a PhD degree in English at Boğaziçi University, Turkey. She wrote her first dissertation project on the emergence of the political subject in the interpretations of Sophocles’ Antigone as reflected in Hegelian and post-Hegelian philosophical, psychoanalytical and feminist theory. Her current research focuses on adaptations of Antigone in relation to histories of political conflict in Turkey, Ireland, and the UK.

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