Violence and identity conflicts in two contemporary scottish and Egyptian novels

Although the colonial experience and the socio-economic and political conditions in twenty-first 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 achieved devolution in 1997, and held a referendum for independence 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 celebrate individual freedom and to figure out new notions of identity and authority.