«Choked by a kind of brightness»: Travelling Transculturally into Aboulela's Narrative of Faith

Abstract

Sudanese-British Leila Aboulela places religious faith and Islam right at the centre of her fiction, thus posing a double challenge of Otherness to a largely secularized and largely Islamophobic Western audience. In its effort at culturally translating religious and cultural foreignness without domesticating it, her narrative enacts a powerfully transcultural aesthetic experience. Something Old, Something New is the sample text chosen to substantiate discussion