Nomadic Subjectivity, Statelessness, and Exile in Algerian Anglophone Literature: A Braidottian Reading of Djaffar Chetouane’s Donkey Heart Monkey Mind

Abstract

At a time when statelessness, forced displacement, and fractured belonging are reshaping the ethical perspectives of English literary studies, this study positions Djaffar Chetouane’s Donkey Heart Monkey Mind as a major intervention in Algerian Anglophone literature, exile writing, and the genre of migration narrative. The aim of the study is to fill the void of critical engagement with the novel and to extend Rosi Braidotti's theory of nomadic subjectivity by providing an original interpretation of it as the novel's thematic and formal structure in North African Anglophone literary criticism. In the methodological approach, it brings together a qualitative close reading with a posthuman relational ethics and a nomadic subjectivity, a nomadic writing, and a nomadic embodiment, inspired by the theories of B. Braidotti. The analysis emphasizes the statelessness that is transformed by trauma, multilingualism, fragmentation and broken time, not so much a lack of a stable national identity as a self-constituted statelessness.. It contends that Donkey Heart Monkey Mind reconceives exile not as absolute loss but as an unfinished mode of becoming, thereby contributing to current debates on Algerian Anglophone literature and opening a distinctive critical pathway for future research on statelessness, migration narratives, and transnational literary subjectivity.