Seeking the Self - Encountering the Other offers new insights into diasporic experiences, encounters and representations. This collection of texts examines diaspora narratives and the ways in which different encounters with the other are represented, as well as how these encounters might be read and interpreted in ethical terms. The anthology explores questions of ethics in narratives of displacement or belonging, nationalist narratives of exclusion and borderline narratives, constructed on the foundation provided by encounters with the cultural, sexual, gendered and ethnic other. The contributors' aim is to explore questions of responsibility and ethics in the study of diaspora, migration, and alterity from a wide range of perspectives. Following a Levinasian one, if the other is always ultimately transcendental and ungraspable through language, we are required to consider ethics every time we write, read or interpret an encounter with the other.
About the Author: Tuomas Huttunen is a Research Fellow at the Department of English at the University of Turku, Finland. His research focuses on the ethics of representation. Huttunen is currently completing his doctoral thesis on the writings of Amitav Ghosh, and has published several articles on Ghosh, V.S. Naipaul and M.G. Vassanji. Kaisa Ilmonen currently works as co-ordinator of the Centre of Excellence in University Education at the School of Art Studies at the University of Turku, Finland, and is working on her PhD dissertation on Caribbean female identity in Michelle Cliff's fiction at the Department of Comparative Literature at the same university. She has published widely on the topic and is the co-editor (with Lasse Kekki) of the first queer literature studies anthology in Finland, Pervot Pidot (2004). Janne Korkka is a Fesearch Fellow at the Department of English at the University of Turku in Finland. He is completing his doctoral thesis on the Canadian author Rudy Wiebe, focusing on representations of place and discourses of alterity. His published work is mainly on Wiebe and other Western Canadian authors. Elina Valovirta is writing her doctoral thesis on feminist reader theory in Anglophone Caribbean women's writing at the Department of English, University of Turku in Finland. Her research interests include postcolonial fiction, feminist theories of affectivity and ethics, sexuality and feminist pedagogy. She has published articles on Caribbean writing in refereed journals in Finland and internationally.