The Issue of Cultural Identity in Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s Novel “One Eye Red”

Abstract

This article attempts to articulate the concept of cultural identity in psychology, philosophy and literature studies. According to this research, “the starting point” of the personal and ethnical identity crisis in the protagonist’s life is his mother’s death. His unwillingness to “break the tether of his mother”, division of the immediate circle into different ethnic groups, fits of anger and desperation, self-harm say that the protagonist is suffering the personal and cultural identity crisis. The protagonist’s cultural identity is presented in this novel as a semiotically complicated, dynamic and axiologically multivalued combination of “us” and “them”, where the construct’s characteristics supersede the substantial ones. Refs 34.