The Agency of the Nonhuman in Contemporary Anglophone Female Narratives: Leila Aboulela’s Bird Summons and Laila Sabreen’s You Truly Assumed

Mounir Tawfik Abdelrahman, Asmaa

doi:10.21608/tanwir.2024.397796

The Agency of the Nonhuman in Contemporary Anglophone Female Narratives: Leila Aboulela’s Bird Summons and Laila Sabreen’s You Truly Assumed

Document Type : Original Article

Author

Asmaa Mounir Tawfik Abdelrahman

Faculty of Languages, MSA University

10.21608/tanwir.2024.397796

Abstract

Posthumanism decenters the placement of humans as the central beings in the world, and it envisions a future in which there is a blurring of boundaries between humans, machines, and animals. To explore an inclusive relationship between humans and animals on the one hand, and humans and technology on the other, this paper examines Leila Aboulela’s Bird Summons and Laila Sabreen’s You Truly Assumed to arrive at an understanding of identity and ethics in relation to animals and cyberspace by Anglophone British and American novelists. In Bird Summons, the focus is on the representation of a posthuman animal which possesses intelligence, agency, and speech; the talking bird helps the female characters in their spiritual journey through which they become able to re-evaluate the balance between faith and femininity, love, and sacrifice. In You Truly Assumed, cyberspace is utilized by the female characters as a tool to navigate the complexities of their identities and to amplify the voices and experiences of Muslim American girls. Though posthumanism claims to distinguish the human realm from the non-human or “other-than-human”, this study argues that although post-humanistic elements are included in the two novels by Aboulela and Sabreen, they are still utilized for human-centred purposes.

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