The Reconstruction of Habitus under Conditions of Cultural Dislocation in Alyan's the Arsonist's City

Abstract

In this article I discuss how the processes of rupturing and reconstructing the notion of habitus take place within cultural dislocation in Hala Alyan's work titled The Arsonist's City (2021). The study draws on Pierre Bourdieu's sociological trinity of habitus, capital, and field, as well as Karim Dajani's psychoanalytical concept of cultural dislocation and epistemic rupture, to examine how the Nasr family's scattering from Beirut to the American diaspora disrupts inherited cultural dispositions and creates new, hybrid forms of belonging. The author proposes that the dislocation in the novel is not a one-off accident or catastrophe, but is a structural characteristic that alters the notions of identity over several generations. Idris's professional assimilation, Mazna's linguistic and artistic displacement, and the second generation's inherited rupture all point to an emergent hysteresis of the habitus when the social field that gave birth to it vanishes. The novel also shows how memory, storytelling, and the emotionality of ancestral space offer some kind of partial reconstruction. It makes a valuable contribution to postcolonial and diasporic literary studies by highlighting the relation between the sociological structure and the psychocultural fragmentation in Palestinian diasporic fiction.

Keywords: habitus, cultural dislocation, diaspora, Hala Alyan, Bourdieu, Dajani, Palestinian literature, reconstruction, postcolonial

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22025689