The Advanced Marginality of the Ghetto Dwellers: Stigmatized Territory in Caryl Phillips's The Lost Child

• Main Authors: Nilforoshan, Bahareh, Sadjadi, Bakhtiar
• Format: text
• Published: Archīum Ateneo 2024
• Subjects: ghetto; identity; neighborhood taint; periphery; precariat; urbanity
• Online Access: https://archium.ateneo.edu/kk/vol1/iss39/4; https://archium.ateneo.edu/context/kk/article/1983/viewcontent/KK_2039_2C_202022_204_20Regular_20section_20__20Nilforoshan_20and_20Sadjadi.pdf
• Institution: Ateneo De Manila University

Reading contemporary fiction through diverse disciplines appears to be a crucial part of recent narrative studies. The sociological approach to reading literary works provides a tenable framework for the analysis of fiction. Caryl Phillips’s The Lost Child demonstrates the characters’ obsession with their sense of belonging and identity through finding new facets in the post-war metropolis and through delving into the past and the present to find the lost children of the Empire, their identity, and roots. The present paper endeavors to explore the novel’s characters Monica, Tommy, and Ben through Loïc Wacquant’s conceptions of advanced marginality, territorial stigma, and the ghetto and maximizes the diversified perspectives offered by sociology in Phillips’s fiction. This exploration further delineates the true and indisputable link between fiction and sociology while emphasizing the real context of the novel under consideration. The article, through focusing on Wacquant’s notion of the ghetto, investigates the overshadows of the social life and identity of the people living in stigmatized territories. The study of Phillip’s novel thus demonstrates the crucial role of literature in promoting social justice in a reflexive manner through literature and sociology simultaneously, as well as in establishing contemporary fiction as a reliable discourse in social and critical sciences.