Place And Migrant’s Identity: The Exploration Of Complex Relations In Gimme The Money By Iva Pekarkova
Place And Migrant’s Identity: The Exploration Of Complex Relations In Gimme The Money By Iva Pekarkova

Author(s): Alina Ielisieieva
Subject(s): Migration Studies, Politics and Identity, Identity of Collectives
Published by: Transnational Press London
Keywords: identity; sense of place; sense of belonging;
Summary/Abstract: Place and identity are inextricably bound to one another. Although the concept of a place is widely explored within such disciplines as geography or landscape architecture, which understand it as a set of human and physical characteristics of a location, literary scholars pay their attention to the emotional significance of a place which as the result of the interaction between a person and a geographical location lies in the core of such terms as “sense of place” and “sense of belonging”. In migrant literature this relation gains even a wider significance because it shows that among other things migrant identity is a product of physical environment, which very often is the most crucial factor in its formation. In Gimme the Money Iva Pekarkova not only unfolds a reciprocal nature of the interaction between the leading character of the novel, a Czech immigrant who moves to the USA to find a better life, and New York, but also shows how the search for a place in new circumstances brings her to the discovery of a new self. The paper will offer the analysis of complex relations between the heroine and the urban environment and explain why in migrant literature the influence of place on the human identity is particularly visible.

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