Themes of Power and Identity in Rawi Hage’s Novels, Cockroach and Carnival

Abstract

Lebanese immigrant literature in the North American cities have always dealt with the concerns and the challenges of the Arab and the Lebanese immigrants in the west. Rawi Hage, a Lebanese-Canadian novelist, tackled the themes of power and identity in two of his novels, Cockroach (2008) and Carnival (2012), the core of this study. The analysis of both literary texts comes from the perspective of how the identity of migrants is being constructed in multicultural communities that are built in many cases on the policies practiced by a dominant culture. The method used to examine these texts is literary analysis that focuses on finding images from both novels to support the social theory that revolves around the dynamics of identity construction within multicultural communities.