Displaced civilizations: Memory, belonging, and cultural survival in migrant narratives from the Middle East and Africa

The paper is a critical examination of the literary figuration of displacement as an ontological civilizational disjunction in contemporary African and Middle Eastern diasporic literature. Going beyond prevailing paradigms of hybridity and identity negotiation, the paper contends that exile in these texts is not just spatial or psychological dislocation, but also the collapse of ancestral epistemologies, cosmologies, and long-term cultural continuities. Drawing on an interdisciplinary theoretical framework that brings together postcolonial theory, trauma studies, and discourse on memory, the article suggests the concept of displaced civilizations to explain how migrant texts function as aesthetic archives of endangered cultural worlds. Through close comparative readings of a selection of the novels of Tayeb Salih, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Leila Aboulela, Dinaw Mengestu, Rawi Hage, and Hisham Matar, this study examines the central roles played by memory, language, religion, and storytelling as complex strategies of resistance, self-survival, and cultural reconstruction. Ultimately, it positions literature as a crucial site wherein civilizational memory is not only mourned but actually reimagined and remade in the context of rupture and exile.