Narrative Space, Place, and Belonging in Contemporary World Literature: A Literary-Cultural Analysis
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.65310/6awgc438Keywords:
Belonging, Indonesian Literature, Narrative Space, Place, World Literature.Abstract
This study examines how contemporary world literature transforms geographic locations into narrative environments and how spatial configurations shape mobility, belonging, memory, and institutional recognition. A comparative literary-cultural design was applied to ten novels published or circulated in English between 2000 and 2021, comprising seven transnational works and three Indonesian novels: Beauty Is a Wound, The Question of Red, and The Sea Speaks His Name. Spatial episodes were systematically analyzed through four domains: narrative environment, mobility and bordering, home and affective attachment, and memory-place relations. The findings demonstrate that literary space operates not as a neutral setting but as a relational structure that regulates movement, access, safety, recognition, and historical visibility. Migrant, diasporic, and refugee narratives represent belonging as provisional and multi-scalar, while the Indonesian corpus foregrounds internal exile, political violence, disappearance, ecological memory, and historically layered places. Across the corpus, domestic, urban, border, workplace, detention, island, and maritime environments become contested spaces whose meanings emerge through interactions among mobility, institutional power, affective attachment, and memory. The comparison further demonstrates that translation relocates local spatial histories into world-literary circuits without eliminating their cultural specificity. The study proposes relational spatiality as a comparative model connecting narrative form, place, memory, mobility, and belonging across contemporary world literature.
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