Distance between Cultures & The Fear of the Unknown

Thea Phillips

C&I Winter 2024 Final Project

Introduction

What circumstances allow two cultures to become and remain divided? The texts Home Fire, The Secret River, and The Sovereignty and Goodness of God each explore the separation between two cultures. The three texts explore a similar divide, through the interactions between their characters in three different centuries, in order to demonstrate the causes and consequences of the divides between cultures.

Kamila Shamsie’s 2014 novel Home Fire is a retelling of Sophocles’ Antigone through present-day British Muslim characters. Kate Grenville’s 2005 novel The Secret River explores European colonization of the Australian Aboriginal people’s land in the 19th century. The Sovereignty and Goodness of God is colonial American woman Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative about her time spent as a captive of Native Americans in 1676.

Please minimize the zoom in your browser to around 70% to yield the intended view of the map. To see an overview of the locations of this project, drag the world map from side to side before proceeding to view the four main locations marked by waypoints. To begin, locate the menu of waypoint pages in between the map and this introduction page. Click on the first title at the top of the waypoint menu, “London: News Coverage of British Muslims.” Proceed in the order as listed from the top to the bottom of the waypoint menu.

All sources from in-text citations throughout this project are cited below.
 

Works Cited

Ahmed, Rehana. “Towards an Ethics of Reading Muslims: Encountering Difference in Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire.” Textual Practice, vol. 35, no. 7, July 2021, pp. 1145–61.

Grenville, Kate. The Secret River. Canongate Books, 2018.

Herrero, Dolores. “Crossing The Secret River: From Victim to Perpetrator, or the Silent / Dark Side of the Australian Settlement.” Atlantis (0210-6124), vol. 36, no. 1, June 2014, pp. 87–105.

Herrmann, Rachel B. “‘Their Filthy Trash’: Taste, Eating, and Work in Mary Rowlandson’s Captivity Narrative.” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, vol. 12, no. 1–2, May 2015, pp. 45–70.

Rowlandson, Mary. The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, 1682.

Shamsie, Kamila. Home Fire: A Novel. Penguin Publishing Group, 2018.

Zoui, Mahfoud ALI, and Mohamed Manaa. “British Muslims in the Post-9/11 Era: The Challenge of Visibility and Media Misrepresentation.” Al-Tawasul, vol. 28, no. 1, Mar. 2022, pp. 272–83.

Images

https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BN-ME226_3UKMUS_M_20160119161205.jpg

https://media.istockphoto.com/id/1089727926/photo/pakistan-and-united-kingdom-two-flags-together-realations-textile-cloth-fabric-texture.jpg?s=612x612&w=0&k=20&c=qyP8mzYuJzT6fHgERf7dre9k7ShPlkUB6sXgyc1I3lE=

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/21/View_of_Sydney_1810.jpg

https://digital-classroom.nma.gov.au/sites/default/files/2023-04/1800s_1861_RoberstonLandActs_1-1200w.jpg

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/aa/The_King_Philip_War.jpg/1280px-The_King_Philip_War.jpg

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/1770_MaryRowlandson_Captivity.png