The “Third Space” of the Border Subject in Transit in Brian Friel’s Philadelphia Here I Come!

• Hatice Eşberk ^[1]
  1. [1] Middle East Technical University

     Middle East Technical University

     Turquía

     
• Localización: De fronteres i arts escèniques / coord. por Núria Santamaria, Francesc Foguet i Boreu, 2015, ISBN 978-84-943779-0-7, págs. 109-116
• Idioma: inglés
• Enlaces
  • Texto Completo Libro
• Resumen

  • The concept of «border» has become an institution that exercises its power through legitimisation. Questions and theorisations around this issue are still evolving and disclosing themselves within various disciplines: from geography to psychology. Moreover, the terms «border» or «borderlands» have also been expanded «to include nearly every psychic or geographic space about which one can thematise problems of boundary or limit» (Michaelsen and Johnson 1977). Emerging from this is the problem of the subject who is under the control and dominance of the border. In this sense, the idea of the «border subject» results from the realm of authoritarian discourse. In the relationship between the border subject and the border, the subject cannot feel homely in Freudian terms, and has to create their own «borderless world» which is elusive, ambiguous and plural. In order to understand this borderless world, it is necessary to analyse the space that the border subject creates for itself. In Philadelphia Here I Come! (1964), Brian Friel puts the borderless world of the border subject on stage. The son of S.B. O’Donnell, Gar, tries to cross the border of Ballybeg and to live in Philadelphia. The two worlds of Gar O’Donnell, Private Gar and Public Gar, are represented simultaneously and can be analysed in terms of the notion of the border subject in transit. By the inclusion of the world of the Private Gar, Friel creates an ambivalent world of a character that is both oppressed and silenced and that resembles what Homi Bhabha calls the «third space».

    This third space is constructed between the coloniser and the colonised, the old and the new culture, and allows for the exploration of the notion of in-betweenness emerges (Roche 2006, 157). This paper thus aims to investigate this unknown realm of the border subject that creates a «third space»