Noise and the Other in Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind

  • Ana Maria Manzanas Calvo Universidad de Salamanca
DOI: https://doi.org/10.28914/Atlantis-2024-46.1.07

Abstract

This article engages with noise studies to foreground their importance in the perception and the creation of the Other in Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind. The essay draws from Michel Serres’s The Parasite and Marie Thompson’s Beyond Unwanted Sound to contend that the pair sound/noise structures the characters’ response to difference and alterity. While initially pitting sound vs noise and English vs Spanish, the article shows how those pairs are impossible to maintain as the novel moves from the Other as noise to the self as noise. Although initially associated to the externality and vulnerability attributed to a Spanish-speaking woman stranded by the side of the road, noise becomes center stage, a parasitic presence that restructures reality and creates a void in signification. The analysis leads to the conclusion that the errantry of noise dismantles protocols of ordering and labeling and creates new configurations of power. There is no longer self vs Other, inside vs outside, belonging vs non-belonging as noise spreads vulnerability and relationality.

Author Biography

Ana Maria Manzanas Calvo, Universidad de Salamanca
Ana Ma Manzanas Calvo is Professor of American Literature and Culture at the Universidad de Salamanca, Spain. Her publications include Hospitality in American Literature and Culture: Spaces, Bodies, Borders (Routledge 2017); Occupying Space in American Literature and Culture: Social Movements, Occupation, and Empowerment (Routledge 2014), Cities, Borders, and Spaces in Intercultural American Literature and Film (Routledge 2011), and Intercultural Mediations: Mimesis and Hybridity in American Literatures (LIT Verlag 2003), all of them coauthored with J. Benito. She has co-edited collections of essays, such as Literature and Ethnicity in the Cultural Borderlands (Rodopi 2002), and Border Transits: Literature and Culture across the Line (Rodopi 2007). Her articles have appeared in journals such as South Atlantic Quarterly, Journal of Modern Literature or Canadian Literature. With J. Benito she is general editor of the Brill Series “Critical Approaches to Ethnic American Literature.”

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Published
2024-06-28
Issue
Vol. 46 No. 1 (2024)
Section
Articles

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