Mapping Mediterranean Borderscapes in Victoria Thompson’s Losing Alexandria: A Memoir
Keywords:
borders, borderscapes, memoir, Alexandria, migration, Victoria ThompsonAbstract
This article explores the role of cultural, ethnic, and other borders and borderscapes in the memoir Losing Alexandria (1998), by the Alexandria-born Australian writer, actor, interpreter, and psychotherapist Victoria Thompson (see Thompson 2024a). As a story of a distant North African childhood that has continued to play a role in its migrant narrator’s life, the text is a particularly interesting exploration of the various forms of border-crossings it displays. It is suggested that Thompson’s memoir of her family and its life in multicultural and multilingual Alexandria in Egypt until the 1950s and their migration to Australia can be approached in the context of what border theorists such as Brambilla (2015a; 2015b) and Rajaram and Grundy-Warr (2007) call borderscapes, sites of different encounters that extend beyond the actual border and have particular effects on identity construction. Through an analysis of the memoir’s diverse border-crossings, the article shows various borderscapes where identities are reconstructed in terms of space and time. Spatial identities are primarily linked with the bordering processes as experienced in Alexandria and throughout the migrations. The temporal border-crossings are present in the memoir’s excavations of family and community memory and also in its exploration of history, mythology, and border beings and their role in the narrator’s present. Through its focus on a borderscape between cultures and histories, the memoir emphasizes cultural plurality and polyphony, and challenges attempts at bordering that insist on the fixedness of identity.References
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