Crime, Violence and Identity Conflicts in Karen Campbell’s Shadowplay (2010) and Ahmed Mourad’s The Blue Elephant (2012): (Re) defining the Self and the Other

Abstract

Although the colonial experience and the socio-economic and political conditions in 21st-century Scotland and Egypt are different, there is a shared concern with a radical political-cultural change in the two countries. For example, while Scotland seeks devolution in 1997 and takes a referendum for independence from the British Empire in 2014, Egypt witnessed successive waves of revolutions (2010-2014) to end autocratic political and religious regimes. This paper focuses on the concepts of the self and the other as political-colonial constructs in the Scottish novelist Karen Campbell’s Shadowplay (2010) and the Egyptian novelist Ahmed Mourad’s The Blue Elephant (2012). It argues that the selected novels articulate a particular awareness of the political-national conflicts in contemporary Scotland and Egypt, with the aim both to commemorate individual freedom and to figure out new notions of identity and authority.