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Title Ecological Preference and Antagonistic Acculturation: An Eco-Critical/-Cultural Study of Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire

Author(s) Kinza Afraz Abbasi

Abstract The research investigates Kamila Shamsie’s HF through the lenses of Ecocriticism and Acculturation. The novel recounts the life of two families from expatriate Pakistani Muslim community living in Britain. The text under observation represents the cultural push and pull which the characters face while living in different cultural and ecological surroundings. The main argument rests on the assumption that the culture and environment, simultaneously, exert a kind of pressure over the characters in the novel that makes them react to these forces of push and pull according to their own experiences as Muslim immigrant. The study concludes that ecology that surrounds the characters becomes a source of relief; on the contrary, due to acculturative stress, they begin to develop internal resistance towards host culture and to some extent towards their native culture as well. To support the main argument of this critical study, the researcher has selected the theory presented by Stephen Kaplan and Rachel Kaplan in their work The Experience of Nature: A Psychological Perspective along with Hirano Kenichiro’s description of cultural contact in his work “Acculturation for Resistance”. This project engages Kaplan and Kaplan’s idea of Ecological Preference to determine the push factor, and Kenichiro’s concept of Antagonistic Acculturation to explore the pull factor for the analysis of the selected text. The current study, adopting textual analysis as a research method, is likely to be a significant contribution to the production of knowledge in the area of Eco-critical/-cultural studies.

Type Thesis/Dissertation MS

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Department English

Language English

Publication Date 2019-12-10

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